now onto the sweet spot for maximum chopping efficiency...it was quite obvious and very easy to consistently hit the sweet spot with the junglas and the lite machete. however, with the patrol machete where i thought was where the sweet spot wasn't always the case.
depending on the chopping angle and thickness of the wood, it felt and reacted very differently when i hit the target with the highlighted areas. it went from biting very deep, to quite a few glancing blows, to sending shocks down to my hand when i missed the proper sweet spot entirely (which was very easy to do compared to my other choppers). the patrol machete reminds me about my gransfors bruks axe - get it right and it bites very deep, but miss the small target and it's almost wasted energy. the junglas & the bk-9 were more "consistent choppers" - by that i mean their sweet spots are much larger and almost every swing resulted in the maximum amount of wood being chopped.
another thing is the thickness and overall weight of the patrol machete. for a jungle/dense vegetation work i'd rather opt for a true (thin & light weight) machete that's more conducive for repeated swings and the proper machete pinch grip. for lighter materials being cut, i found myself using more energy stopping the blade from swinging further after cutting the thin branches/leaves/weed, etc. so i can reposition it for the next cut. with a true machete, all i need is a subtle flick of the wrist back and forth to accomplish the same task.
moving onto the handles...like the machax, the patrol machete's handle has that downward slope of the handle relative to the spine of the knife which keeps the wrist straight as much as possible while chopping which reduces wrist strain during extended use. it also reduces the hot spot that usually occurs near the bottom of the palm on the choppers/knives that have straight handles. if you look closely, the junglas (and the esee-5, esee-6, and spyderco bushcraft) have that downward slope as well.
that downward handle slope reminds me of my angled keyboard...i'm a programmer so i make my living writing thousands of lines of code a year so i've gotten so keen on making everything as easy on my wrists as possible that i actually have two mice (one on each side of my keyboard) to ease the strain. little ergonomic details like that is why i think becker knives along with esee and spyderco are among the top knives out there...super steels are useless without the ergonomics backing it up...sometimes the smallest details counts the most!
moving onto the camillus vs. ka-bar handles...the camillus scales i find has a more squarish shoulder (compared to the ka-bar version) which i like on a knife this thin (compared to the bk-2). one of my few gripes with the bk-9 was that the grip wasn't filling enough in my hand compared to the bk-2 to be comfortable. a more squarish shoulder and thick liners underneath the bk-9's scales would improve it's ergonomics for me and prevented me from selling it but that's for another thread.
edge-holding...switchblade61 sent the patrol machete to me nice and sharp, it definitely cut printer paper cleanly, so i didn't touch it up prior to field testing. however, after i got back from the hike it was quite dull...dull enough that it couldn't even cut paper. we do have some pretty hard woods here but all i did was chop with it and no batoning at all. i'm pretty sure my bk-9's edge held a lot longer than that in far more abuse so i'm happy that becker knives are now made by ka-bar/with tooj's heat treat instead of camillus (albeit it's just one sample here).
sharpening...the recurve poses another issue for me. the circled areas contacts the stones whereas the area highlighted by the red rectangle doesn't at all. this is true for most of the patrol machete's edge (this is a dmt 8"x3" diamond stone for the curious). this is not an issue at all with most knives that have "straight" edges.
i find that a stone that's not wider than 1" works the best to navigate the recurves. an edge pro works as well (not pictured).
a spyderco sharpmaker works as well but due to the recurve i'd probably focus on sharpening 50% of the blade at a time to prevent screwing up the bevel (i'd establish the bevel with an edge pro first to make it easy on myself instead of freehanding it with stones).
in summary, i'd most likely pass on the patrol machete even if it ever comes back to regular production. the handle and overall ergonomics is nice but the weight/thickness is tiring to use where a true machete is used for. as for being a chopper, i find that a bk-9 (or other choppers) with it's straight edge has a much bigger sweet spot for chopping and much easier to maintain. i'd like to see a bk-9 with a downward-sloping handle though to reduce that hot spot...the good news is that the better chopper in my opinion (bk-9) is in production whereas the patrol machete isn't.
once again, i'd like to say thank you very much moose for this passaround!
