Big Knives, Big Fun Part One

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Nov 13, 2001
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Big Knives, Big Fun

Thanks to the auspices of an unnamed member of BFC, I recently got my grubby mitts on several honkin' big knives to play with. They ranged from reasonable camp-sized knives to blades that would give Freddy Kruger the willies :eek:. Needless to say I was thrilled. I was also humbled that somebody would send a complete stranger a box of knives worth ... well, let's just call it a decent mortgage payment and leave it at that. All just so I could beat the crap out of them and tell y'all about it. That's just cool.

When the box arrived, the bubble wrap revealed a Becker BK7, a Becker BK9, a Newt Livesay RTAK, a Busse Battle Mistress E and a Busse Basic 7. These would be paired up with my Swamp Rat Camp Tramp (7") and Fehrman Final Judgement (9") for insert ring announcer voice The Ultimate Big Blade Showdown – a bare-knuckle brawl that would leave only one knife standing, dazed and bleeding, amid chunks of scarred metal, twisted screws and barely identifiable bits of micarta.

Ahem. Not really.

I live in Kansas, so there's not much chance to skin a moose, fight hand to hand with nothing but a knife or build a wilderness redoubt, even should I be so inclined. I also don't have the disposable income to shove a knife blade into a woodchipper, debone a ‘69 Buick or play Zorro with 50-gallon drums. My knives get used in more mundane ways around the house and yard.

In fact, the last time I really got to play with my knives was when Jack (my 8-year old) and I decided to do some down-home recycling and turned our Christmas tree into a debris shelter. Just after Christmas, we'd dragged the tree outside, stripped the 9' Spruce of its limbs and used it as the ridgepole. The front supports and ribs were made from some unidentified springy wood that had been choking our Ginko tree. We covered the skeleton with the Spruce branches and some dead leaves to finish off the shelter. It was a lot of fun, and he had a fort that was the envy of the neighborhood. But now it was time for it to come down.

Let me add a disclaimer here. I am not a materials scientist. I am not much of an outdoorsman. I have never been placed in a survival situation or had to cut my way out of the jungle. So I don't have the background to objectively evaluate these knives against their intended uses. I just played with these knives in the back yard and wrote up what I thought about them. So if I write something you don't agree with or if your experience has been different than mine, don't get your weenie in a knot. Just post a note about what you think. This is a discussion board, after all.

Round One, the Big Choppers: BK9, RTAK, Fehrman & Battle Mistress
I put a fresh edge on all the knives so they were reasonably comparable. None of them had the factory edge and had been sharpened numerous times from what I could tell. The Beckers and the Battle Mistress just needed a lengthy touchup on a 700 grit ceramic rod to get them shaving sharp. The RTAK took some more work. I ended up putting a 25 degree bevel on it with the EdgePro Apex, slightly thinner than what had been there before. When I was finished all of them would shave with little or no effort.

So despite the cold and rainy snow, Jack and I headed out to the back yard to whack away. We hauled out the big choppers to see what we could see. We started with the support poles, which were some kind of thin-skinned, springy, yellowish wood. These pieces were slightly bigger around than a nickel at the top, thickening to quarter-size at the bottom. Then we moved on to the 6-7" Spruce ridgepole itself.

First up was the Becker BK9. The sheath is Cordura over Kydex and reasonably well made, though the knife doesn't lock into place. There's some rattle room, but it's not too bad. As has become common, there's a pouch on the front of the sheath to hold extra gear or a survival kit. The knife itself is surprisingly light for its size, with just a hair over 9" of useable blade length and a wide, clip-point Bowie style blade. There's no choil, so you can't choke up on it the way you can with the other knives. The thick, hand-filling scales are held on with three Allen screws. Fit and finish are pretty good, especially considering the price.

I'd waved the knife around a couple of times during the past two of weeks and one thing I didn't like was the knobby flares at the end of the handle that dug into the heel of my hand. Oddly enough, they didn't bother me in actual use. The knife is light and whippy in the hand and chopped through the nickel-sized branches with three or four solid hits.

What did bother me was the eagle-beak pommel, which after a couple of whacks really started to bang into my little finger. Yow, that could get very painful in extended use. It really began to bother me when we'd moved on to the Spruce ridgepole.

The handle material feels like some sort of hard plastic. I know there's a name for the wonder polymer that the slabs are made of, but they feel like hard plastic and twisted easily in my hands on hard chops. When my hands became a little numb from the cold, it was really tough to keep the knife under control when chopping.

The knife bit nicely into the Spruce and didn't seem to be overly angle sensitive. Some big knives will bounce right off seasoned wood if the angle of attack is too shallow. Not a problem here. The chips flew fast and furious. The blade can be flexed somewhat when it's wedged deeply in wood, but not enough that I felt at all uncomfortable, though I probably wouldn't stand on it. All in all, this is a hell of a knife for the money.

Next was the Livesay RTAK. I'd really been looking forward to playing with this one. I've always thought it was a cool design, and I have a lot of respect for Jeff Randall's experience.

This is a big f'ing knife at 17" OAL with just a hair under 10" of useable blade length and a long clip point. It is nicely balanced in the center of the ricasso, just forward of the end of the handle slabs. There is no choil, per se, but the ricasso has a slight curve to it that serves the same purpose, so it's reasonably easy to use the knife choked up. The RTAK is thinner than the Beckers, Busses and Fehrmans. It's sort of a hybrid big knife and machete designed primarily for tropical work, where I'm sure it excels.

The sheath is a rectangle of green Kydex molded around the blade shape. The fit is snug, but not "locked." There's a little wiggle room.

The green micarta handle slabs are held on by brass pins. Fit and finish are utilitarian but excellent. Most of the edges on the handle slabs are nicely blended (with one notable exception, which will be explained in a minute). The handle just doesn't fit my hand, however. It is too wide and thin, and there is a pronounced bump on the underside that falls just under my middle finger. The exception to the blending of the micarta comes at the end of the slabs where they are squared off near the pommel, leaving a sharp point that dug into the heel of my hand. All of which made the RTAK very uncomfortable to use for any length of time. The web between my thumb and fingers still feels bruised by the thin handle, and the heel of my hand is sore from the point on the end. Someone with larger hands or someone wearing gloves might not have these problems. In spite of the bad fit, the handle did not slip or twist during any of the chopping, even when my hands were numb from the cold.

The RTAK did fine on the nickel-sized branches, whacking through them in three or four chops, but didn't fare as well on the thick Spruce pole. Despite its heft, the RTAK didn't chop as deeply or as easily as the other knives. It was a lot more work to take chips and chunks out of the Spruce log, possibly because the blade is less wedge shaped than the other knives.

The 1095 blade would flex more than any of the others when I wedged it into the wood, but not so much that it would be a concern. 1095 is a tough steel that is very easy to sharpen in the field, which I'm sure is why it was chosen. In light limbing, the RTAK did extremely well on green wood. I wish the pampas grass were back up -- cutting that back every year is just about the nastiest thing you can do to a knife.. I'm sure the thin-bladed RTAK would annihilate it.

So, if I were headed to a location with green or lush vegetation and needed a do-all knife, the RTAK would be a great choice. But not, perhaps, for northern forests or places where heavy chopping was the order of the day.

Continued in next message
 
Switching to the Fehrman Final Judgement was a relief after the RTAK. The Fehrman's handle fits my hands perfectly. I've really come to like this knife a lot. The green micarta handle is not too wide and is hand-fillingly thick. For me, it provides an excellent grip and control. All of the corners and edges have been beveled and lightly blended, so there are no sharp edges or pokey points to dig into your hands. One really nifty touch is the layers of rubber or resiprene sandwiched between the handle slabs and the tang. They provide some shock absorption when chopping, making the Fehrman very comfortable to use, even for long periods.

I'm not wild about Fehrman's leather sheath. I prefer Kydex or the Cordura/Kydex combo sheaths that come with the Busse, Swamp Rat and Becker knifes. I like to hear a positive click when the knife locks into place. I'm sure the Fehrman sheath is fine with its simple snap closure, but I'd feel more secure with a different sheath. I may have to order one from Eagle or Survival Sheaths.

The blade on the Fehrman is interesting. I don't know whether it's a tanto or not. I'd call it a modified tanto, but that's open to debate. The Fehrman is different from the others in that the blade width actually tapers slightly (about 1/16") from the sweet spot – the widest part of the blade just before it sweeps up to the tip – back to the choil. That puts more weight forward without increasing overall weight. Unlike the Battle Mistress, which has a straight spine that drops at the handle, the Final Judgement actually describes an arc from tip to pommel, making for less handle drop.

There is almost no distal taper on the Fehrman. The spine about the same width until you get right over the sweet spot, then it tapers to the tip. A thinner tip makes it easier to do fine, delicate work, but at the expense of some strength. Although all of these knives have tip-strength to spare, the Fehrman is far and away the strongest, as far as I can tell. The only way to really know would be to break them all, and I'm not about to do that. But I did (accidentally) test the theory a while back.

The tip is what the Fehrman folks call a 3-D contour grind, which to me looks like the edge bevel doesn't go all the way up to the tip itself, leaving the tip slightly undercut and very, very thick. It almost looks like it's hooded. It makes for a very strong tip, but not a very sharp, pointy one. It is indeed strong. While playing with the Fehrman and a 2x4, I missed on a full power, reverse grip stab and drove the knife into my garage floor. It went about 1/8" into the concrete and took out a nickel-size gouge. Talk about your "Oh, Sh*t" moments! Anyway, there was just a little rolling that was quickly repaired with a ceramic rod used as a file. Five minutes of stropping restored everything to shaving sharp. I was seriously impressed.

The Final Judgement was a lot of fun to use on the small branches and the Spruce. It chopped easily through the nickel and quarter sized branches with just a whack or two and really dug into the log, flinging chips with abandon. I know there are those who feel that this type of big knife is way too thick, and there's probably some truth to that. I would like to see the edges on all of these knives thinned out. However, having used the Final Judgement for everything from chopping through six-inch logs to slicing see-through-thin slices of summer sausage, I'm less convinced by the argument than I was.

I should have mentioned that I have a prototype knife. The actual production Fehrmans now have a thinner edge and slightly thinner tip.

During the chopping there was no twisting or torquing in my hand and my grip stayed secure the whole time. The blade wouldn't flex, at least not with the pressure I was able to put on it. I have no doubt that you could whack this knife into a tree and stand on it without bending it. I think Brian Jones said he had done just that to make a quick shooting platform. Cool.

The knife is balanced at the forward edge of the choil, so it's blade-heavy for chopping. But the choil is paired up with a ridged thumb rest on the spine for choking up and doing more delicate work like whittling (or slicing beef stick).

The Busse Battle Mistress E came with the old style fitted Kydex sheath rather than the newer Cordura/Kydex combo. I have to admit, I prefer the new style, though the older version is nice and tight and locks the knife solidly into place. It's also a lot thinner than the new style, if that's a consideration for you.

The Busse's drop-point blade is about the same length and width as the Fehrman, but with a much more gentle sweep up to the tip. The drop-point style is more generally useable than the tanto style, in my opinion, but at the sacrifice of a more pronounced sweet spot for chopping.

This knife had been reprofiled, so it didn't have the Busse asymmetrical edge. Fit and finish were generally excellent, but here is where I have to part company with the Busse devotees. As much as I want to love this knife, I hate the handles. The textured "Nukarta" is nice and grippy, but the slabs are just too damn thin for my hands. The handle on the Battle Mistress is longer, wider (from bottom to top) and thinner (side to side) than any of the other knives I played with. There is a pronounced hump on the top of the handle that bulges against the center of my palm, making my grip feel less secure. With that said, the Busse didn't twist or torque in use and never slipped. It just wasn't comfortable. Like the RTAK, it left the web between my fingers and thumb feel bruised. Could be that it was designed for use with gloves, I don't know. I deliberately did not wear gloves when using the knives to see how they felt. In use the knife worked well, but just wasn't comfortable for extended use.

Chopping power was excellent, cutting through the nickel to quarter sized branches in three or four chops and digging deep into the Spruce log, merrily making chips. The balance is slightly more blade-forward than the Fehrman. The blade flex was about the same as the Final Judgement – there was none.

Edge damage, coating damage, rust & miscellany
None of the knives suffered any real rolling or chipping, but only the Final Judgement was still shaving sharp at the end of the afternoon. We were out in a light rain for a couple of hours and the Becker, Busse and RTAK had some rust spots on the exposed edge. The powder coat on the Fehrman suffered the most smearing, but it was also the newest of the knives, so the damage was more obvious than on the others which had been used hard in the past.

The Becker and RTAK needed steeling on the 700 grit ceramic to bring them back to initial sharpness. The Fehrman and Busse just needed to be stropped with CrO2 paste. INFI takes a toothier edge than the Fehrman's CPM 3V. (I'd originally written S3V, which is the stainless version. The actual steel is CPM 3V with Fehrman's proprietary three day heat treat. This stuff is strong) Both shave with little effort, thought the INFI tugs a little more. The Final Judgement is a little tougher to sharpen because of the steep angle of the belly to tip sweep. You have to do it in two stages, one set of passes for the edge up to the curve and another set for the tip to belly portion.

Before I forget, all of the knives have exposed tangs that got damn cold while we were out there. A serious consideration if you're using any one of them in cold or snowy situations. Numb hands and a big knife – not a good combination.

A note to Busse and Fehrman owners – DON'T use lighter fluid to remove sticky pine sap. I wanted to get the sap off the knives so put a little Zippo fluid on a paper towel and on the Final Judgement so I could wipe the blade down. The powder coat became soft and a little warm to the touch and felt smeary when wiped. There was no permanent removal of the coating, but I wouldn't do it again. I'm glad I started with my knife rather than one of the borrowed ones. I don't know if the lighter fluid would affect the Busse coating in the same way, but I suspect they're pretty close in composition.

Conclusions and the final word from Jack
If you can't tell, the Fehrman Final Judgement is a hell of a knife and my favorite of the ones I played with. It is also mine, so I'm probably a little biased. To see if my conclusions were the result of objective testing or subjective bias, I had Jack try them all out. He has no idea which ones are mine and which ones aren't. After a quick lecture on knife safety and keeping his limbs clear of the path of the knife, he started beating on just about everything within reach. What the hell. He's eight, so this was a pretty big adventure.

Obviously his chopping technique left something to be desired :D. But I kept a close eye on which knife he was using and asked what he thought about each one. He dropped the RTAK pretty quickly. It was just too big for him. He did great with the Becker, really digging into the Spruce log, but the balance was off for him. He liked the Busse and said it was the coolest looking knife we had that day. He also was able to chop reasonably well with it though he had some trouble keeping it under control. He loved the Final Judgement and hung onto it the longest, really ripping into the Spruce and chopping through the smaller branches just about as well as I did.

So there ya have it. I think Jack has the final word here. The Fehrman and Busse are very close, with the Final Judgement being the comfort king. The Becker BK9 is a hell of a knife for the money and is probably fine for 90 percent of anything any of us would ever do with a knife this size. The RTAK is more specialized and would excel at jungle work (which it was designed for) but is less effective as a general use knife.

Stay tuned for Round Two: Mid-Size Utilities.

Chad
 
Photos to come (including the Christmas Tree shelter :cool: ) tomorrow if Wichita digs out from under the snow and I make it in to work.

Take care,
Chad
 
Chad once again excellent review,Tell Jack good job and thank you.
When I did my test with the Battle Mistress and the Final Judgement I got the same results.....You just gotta love that Fehrman:D
 
Another great review Chad. Thank you. I held an RTAK one time and found the same problem for me with the handle, a little to big and that swell underneath. Too bad because I really like the design. I really need to try a Fehrman sometime. They sound good.
 
For what it's worth, I use lighter fluid to clean sap off my Busse Steelheart all the time with no problems.
 
Thanks Chad. I have to admit I'm shocked about the lighter fluid. I'll have to take another look at Fehrman knives.

And a quick correction ... you mention the Fehrman uses CPM S3V. The "S" denotes stainless, and 3V is most certainly not stainless -- I think you mean CPM-3V.


Joe
 
Originally posted by Joe Talmadge
Thanks Chad. I have to admit I'm shocked about the lighter fluid. I'll have to take another look at Fehrman knives.

And a quick correction ... you mention the Fehrman uses CPM S3V. The "S" denotes stainless, and 3V is most certainly not stainless -- I think you mean CPM-3V.


Joe

Ah, you're exactly right about the steel. Fehrman used to call it F3V to denote 3V with their proprietary heat treat. I think they're just calling it CPM-3V now. Thanks for the catch.

As for the lighter fluid, I'm not sure what to make of my experience. The coating didn't suffer any and certainly didn't come off, but it did become slightly soft and warm, like there was some sort of chemical reaction going on. I'm not eager to repeat the experiment just to see if I can strip the coating off my knife :p but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Definitely check out the Fehrman knives. The more I play with big knives the more convinced I become that handle comfort is as important as blade style, steel, etc. if not more important. It's the user interface, after all. A light saber with a crappy handle would still be tough to use well.

Take care,
Chad
 
Handle comparison of the biggies. L to R: Becker, Fehrman, Busse, RTAK.
 

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Tip comparison of the biggies. L to R: Fehrman, Busse, Becker, RTAK.
 

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Definitely agree. One of the reasons I don't have more big knives is that I find very few that have handles I like. Out of the above, I've always found Busse's handles too thin, although I'd been thinking of wrapping one with tape to thicken it to taste. Livesay's RTAK handle doesn't fit me, and the Camillus version is even worse -- if I were the paranoid type, I'd think Jeff and Camillus specifically went about designing a handle that would irritate me :) I find the BKT handles a little inelegant as well, but for all of $60 or $70, I don't mind sanding them down a little, considering the performance for the price. Haven't handled a Fehrman yet.

Anyway, hands are different, and mine seem to be particularly finicky in finding handles they like.

Joe
 
The Christmas tree fort :cool:. Despite its appearance, the thing kept standing for two months through torrential downpours, snow and 40-mph winds. Not that I would have wanted to sleep in it during any of that :p .
 

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The whacking begins! Busse Battle Mistress with the 6-7" diameter spruce ridgepole.
 

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And finally, here's Jack with the Final Judgement. Please excuse the state of my lawn :rolleyes:. It'll be dug up and sodded come spring, so it looks pretty bad now.
 

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Nice review, Chad! Large chopping blades have always held a special place in my heart :) despite the fact that here in LA, there's no great need for them :D . I have a Becker and a Busse and my conclusions are very similar to yours (regarding handles). Becker handles are slick, but the pinky hook does keep the knife from getting away from you. Maybe I grip a little too tightly while chopping but I didn't experience the abuse on my pinky. I had the same problem with torquing, and I had to concentrate on smooth strokes to keep the blade from twisting. The Busse is more resistant to twisting but I have to agree that thicker scales would be nice. I handled an RTAK at Knife Expo '03 and it sure is big, but I think I've been desensitized by my friend's 20" khukri! :D
 
Joe Talmadge :

I've always found Busse's handles too thin ...

Indeed, it would be nice to see thicker grips as an option. There are many ways to thicken the grip, but there are always problems with durability, cleaning and such, a pure thicker Micarta grip would be nice.

Chad :

... the 1095 blade would flex more than any of the others when I wedged it into the wood

The RTAK is significanly thinner than the other blades assuming Randall's model is the same as Livesays who had a version that was ~3/16 and one that was ~0.2. The Ontario RTAK version is also significantly softer than the other blades.

-Cliff
 
Nice review by Chad Ward.

I missed this when it was a new thread... and so am lobbing it back up in case others might be interested in the Fehrman knives.

Thanks Chad.
 
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