Buck 110 vs the Impostor

Interesting info on the 450... Just dug one out of my junque drawer and it looks to have blue on the insides. It's never been used so no wear. I find it interesting yours wore the rubber off. Cool report... :thumbup:

Oh,,, and the blade on this 450 isn't anything like the blade in yours. Not well versed on the 450 so I guess several variations.
 
Latest report -
The Buck 110 is by far the best knife for cutting the stems off of Brussels sprouts - I had a bunch of them. I had never given much thought to Brussels sprout knives before. The Buck 450 does not have a long enough non-serrated length. I learned that for sprouts you want a good two-inches without serrations. The Lansky seems to get thick faster than the Buck (see pictures above, I am sure there is a technical term for this but I do not know it). The added thickness hurts the Lansky with tomatoes and with sprouts.

Once again the Lansky and Buck 110 were equals on chopping onions.

Dicing celery was won by a surprise entry - my souvenir-grade Alaskan ulu, brought home by my mom. The rocking action of the ulu makes it perfect for dicing celery. So a stupid souvenir ulu is the king of dicing. It is also the boss mincing cilantro. Some day I will make a proper ulu, probably from a discarded circular saw blade. Unless Buck starts offering them.
 
Here's another report, unfortunately incomplete. A standard butcher's cleaver, used as a big knife (not an ax), does a good job of cutting off the stalk of an ear of corn. The cleaver's critical advantage, I think, is its convex edge. This uses the shoulder of the edge to force the already-divided parts of the stalk further apart so that the yet-uncut fibers are under tension, which makes them easier to cut by the actual blade edge.

This is kind of the inverse of the typical Buck hollow grind. Next cornfest we have (probably next weekend) I'll try the Buck 110 on some corn stalks and see how easily it cuts in comparison. My hunch — OK, this is Science, so let's dignify it as "my hypothesis to be falsified" — is that the shape of a hollow grind will be more likely to bind in cutting the stalk, compared to the cleaver. (Now in fairness to Buck, its hollow-ground blades are meant for cutting meat, not corn stalks....)

Stay tuned...
 
AreBeeBee said:
Here's another report, unfortunately incomplete. A standard butcher's cleaver, used as a big knife (not an ax), does a good job of cutting off the stalk of an ear of corn. The cleaver's critical advantage, I think, is its convex edge. This uses the shoulder of the edge to force the already-divided parts of the stalk further apart so that the yet-uncut fibers are under tension, which makes them easier to cut by the actual blade edge.

This is kind of the inverse of the typical Buck hollow grind. Next cornfest we have (probably next weekend) I'll try the Buck 110 on some corn stalks and see how easily it cuts in comparison. My hunch — OK, this is Science, so let's dignify it as "my hypothesis to be falsified" — is that the shape of a hollow grind will be more likely to bind in cutting the stalk, compared to the cleaver. (Now in fairness to Buck, its hollow-ground blades are meant for cutting meat, not corn stalks....)

Stay tuned...
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Nod.

My experience has been that a flat/convex grind does better at meat than a hollow grind does at slicing vegetables/wood, if that makes any sense.

Yes, I prefer a hollow grind for meat but I hate then for, say potatoes and apples or wood. I don't hate flat/convex blades for meat.

Offering the 110/112 and the 500 series in flat grinds would be just awesome.
 
pinnah said:
Nod.

My experience has been that a flat/convex grind does better at meat than a hollow grind does at slicing vegetables/wood, if that makes any sense.

Yes, I prefer a hollow grind for meat but I hate then for, say potatoes and apples or wood. I don't hate flat/convex blades for meat.
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I agree there's an asymmetry in effectiveness. Flat and convex adapt more easily to other kinds of cutting than does the hollow grind, which in practice is more specialized.

My hunch is that the hollow grind of the Buck 110/112 etc. is largely a historical artifact coming from standard hunting knives of the 1950s and 60s, which often had hollow grinds. (As did the KaBars, which were presumably familiar to those with service experience.) And I guessing here, but by now it appears Buck sees a hollow grind as part of its products' identity.

pinnah said:
Offering the 110/112 and the 500 series in flat grinds would be just awesome.
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Even more true if you added a drop point to the flat grind. I'd go out and buy at least one more of each model if they offered that. Actually, I'd even get new ones if either change were introduced. As for drop points, I have two in the 500 series (500 and 501) and while I like the color scheme and love the drop points, I prefer the fatter grip of the 112 and 110.

Corn not yet bought for the weekend, but it's only Thursday. Test chop will be carried out as soon as corn arrives.
 
I was in the process of moving my 500 closer to flat when it pocket ejected. I got a 442 blade much closer to flat before trading the knife. Not yet good enough on the stones to reprofile all the way to the edge. Still not as a good as a true flat or convex grind but much improved for veggies and wood.


Buck 500 by Pinnah, on Flickr
 
(Is that your 500 in its original state or the reworked version? It appears stock to me, but maybe the blade shoulder is thinner than it looks.)

I really don't know why Buck has turned its corporate back on grinds other than hollow, but the pattern seems clear. The Hood-inspired designs are, I think, their only departure from hollow grind blades, but even those seem to become walled off in a category all their own and will probably disappear in 10 years' time or less (unless sales are much stronger than I think they are).

Given that the Buck 110 design is "open" from a patent point of view, I'm surprised that no copycat has brought to market a drop-point, flat-grind version of the 110. The Schrade OTs (3-, 5-, 51-, etc.) sort of do this, but that line sticks to the milled delrin scales and makes no attempt to copy the look and feel of the 110. The Uncle Henrys have the wood+metal scales, but the blades are all 110-style clip points and have hollow grinds as well.

Mystery.
 
edison said:
Is the imposter any lighter than the 110?
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A great question and I should have thought of it. Unfortunately I only have a shipping scale which has reads from 0-60 pounds and is not precise enough and a reloading scale which maxes out at 1500 grains and cannot weigh them.

The impostor feels lighter to my uncalibrated hands.

I did the next best thing and measured a couple of thicknesses - the Buck is 0.609" to 0.611" thick over the bolsters and the impostor is 0.542" to 0.544". The Buck blade measures 0.120" thick (just behind the nail notch) and the impostor measures 0.112". The Buck has a false edge on the clipped part of the blade (reducing weight a tiny bit) and the impostor's blade is effectively fatter because the hollow ground part is not as extensive.

And the Buck has brass bolsters while the impostor has stainless steel bolsters - stainless steel is 6-12 percent lighter than brass.
 
Well the Buck 110 got it's first sharpening today and the impostor got its second.

I learned that the "trademark" side of the Buck blade is 17 degrees and the non-trademark side was 20 degrees. I spent some time and made them both 17. Sharpening the 17 degree side was easy and I think that it would have been a quick touch up job except for changing the angle. It is shaving sharp again.

The impostor came with an apex that wandered and edge angles that varied. So I had sharpened it out of the box to about 25 degrees. I resharpened it today as it had become dull making "St. Louis" ribs and cutting down a bunch of pencil sized saplings and weeds.

The Lansky will not shave much hair, but the difference in edge angles. 17 versus 25 degrees, makes comparisons a bit unfair. OTOH the 110 kept its factory edge longer while suffering the same use and at a sharper angle. We will press on.
 
The very first thing I did after sharpening both knives was bone a chicken, (more details in the "Buck Knives with Food" thread). Both the Buck 110 and the impostor did well.
 
AreBeeBee said:
(Is that your 500 in its original state or the reworked version? It appears stock to me, but maybe the blade shoulder is thinner than it looks.)
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AreBeeBee, I didn't "go too nuts" on this blade. The shoulder of the grind on the original blade forms a perfectly flat horizontal line when viewed from the side. You will note that in its modified state, the shoulder is now curved, somewhat following the lines of the edge, but not quite. I thinned this out more towards the tip, hence a deeper drop in the shoulder line. Not able to be seen here is that the "shoulder" is now more like a slumped shoulder, since it is no longer flat.
 
pinnah said:
AreBeeBee, I didn't "go too nuts" on this blade. The shoulder of the grind on the original blade forms a perfectly flat horizontal line when viewed from the side. You will note that in its modified state, the shoulder is now curved, somewhat following the lines of the edge, but not quite. I thinned this out more towards the tip, hence a deeper drop in the shoulder line. Not able to be seen here is that the "shoulder" is now more like a slumped shoulder, since it is no longer flat.
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OK, I see what you did. What fooled me is that the nail nick has the same shape, but is shallower (and shorter) thanks to lowering the shoulder, which now extends below the nick.

And looking down on a stock blade (mine) from above the spine, I see the blade retains its full thickness and doesn't begin to narrow until the last 5/8" — where the hollow grind comes up and intersects the spine. Yours must start tapering toward the point much earlier.

What did you use to work on the blade?
 
Update - the rust stain on the Lansky has grown a bit, and the Lansky dulls faster than the Buck 110. I was considering changing the blade angle of the Lansky to 20 degrees, so comparisons with the Buck are more consistent (remember the Buck is sharpened at 20 degrees and the Lansky is 25). But I'm sure at 20 degrees the Lansky will dull even faster.
 
Update - The Lansky needs to be sharpened more often than the Buck, but it takes a decent edge. Recall that it came with a horrific edge. The rust spot has not grown.

These knives are now selling for as much or more than the 110 on some online sites! They are still like $ 12 on other sites.

Like I said, I got this knife "free" for buying a raffle ticket, it irritates me that they copied the 110, and I bought a 110 just to atone for the sin of getting this free copy. But its an OK knife and I will probably give it to a niece or nephew when I'm done testing it. If Lansky wanted to design a cheap Chinese knife they should have done something different, and they should have sharpened it before they shipped it.
 
Almost every company has copied the Buck 110 at one time or another. Schrade sold millions and millions of LB7s and 7OTs and they served admirably. My first decent knife was an LB7 because Bucks sold for about 30 dollars more in Canada.
 
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