Building A Better Knife Test

(Please, no drama here. I want this to be a constructive thread.)

Excellent thread. Pointed directly at knife use. How did it devolve into personal attacks? kurodrago, personal insults are unacceptable. db and possum, personal arguments are inappropriate. Take it offline and don't derail the thread.
 
I presume you do NOT mean destructive testing.

Do you want to test knives or their steels?
How the steel cuts and stays sharp?
Or
How comfortable a knife is to use for an extended period of time? ergonomics
How will you isolate the variables?

A.G.Russell, Kershaw, Benchmade, and Buck sells the same model knives in different steels. Same with same. This way you eliminate the variable of ergonomics and evaluate steel.
Cut a manila rope 40 times, and your hand becomes tired.
Where is the method?
Yes, you can examine the blade edge for degeneration.
Can you convert that into useable information?

I have no idea how you can evaluate the ergonomics of a knife and not being personal preference.
I wear a medium glove, and really like a three finger grip, so a 3 1/4" stockman is excellent for me.
Someone wearing an extra large glove who likes a four finger grip, the same knife will be un-useable!

Testing is not an easy subject.

What I would be interested in is your subjective experiances using certain knives for similar tasks.
Cliff in his site has some interesting catogories of tests: whittling, fuzz sticks, batoning, digging, slicing hard vegtables, peeling soft fruit.
But not to dress on this a 'scientific method'
(Please, I am in no way discussing Cliff's methods)

You as a skilled user, will come away with a subjective method of how the knife performs.
This could be very useful.
 
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Some great suggestions so far.

Most reviews are subjective, and they are indispensable in any decision to buy a knife. They give you opinions on everything about a knife. For example how comfy (the reviewer thinks) the handle is after cutting for an hour is very important, and worthwhile.

For edge retention testing, manilla rope seems to be the "gold" standard. Two types of tests have been most common - cutting manilla rope to induce wear, then testing sharpness by sutting thread, or cutting manilla rope as uniformly as possible on a scale, and looking at the scale to see force of cut.

With the thread test you have to design the test, then assume that the work/force (speed of slice) to cut the thread is directly relatable to the work/force/slice to cut the rope.

With the scale method you have to develop the skill to cut the rope uniformly, and you have to have a scale.

Photos of the edges progressing with the cutting would be a cool as part of the test, or in and of itself.

If slicing is in the test, you should take some measures that make it repeatable from cut to cut.

I'd like to get an electronic scale and play around some - what has struck me as being a good way to test would be to have the scale measure the impulse of the cut (force and time). Though it strikes me as a good basis for comparison, I haven't looked at it much theoretically.

Try not to have preconceptions about the results, and make conclusions carefully.

Chopping and destructive tests are probably going to be harder if you want results repeatable and comparable from test to test, unless you don't care if they are!
 
Sometimes the test itself is what's being reviewed:

Buy a bushcraft knife, take it into the woods camping with you. Use it for as wide a variety of common woodcraft tasks as you can think of, take pictures, report on how you held the knife, what it was best at.

Now someone else buying a new knife will have a template for their own evaluation of their knife. The knives and even all the tasks don't have to be comparable, but you will have given a new guy an idea of what to look for and how to do that.
 
Some things in a test is/has to be subjective, such as ergos, looks, etc. However, I think a good test is going to have to have some kind of cutting experiment that means something to most people & can be done & measured for any knife (& be able to be quantified as meaning something). I'm not sure what the cutting medium should be, but I'm not talking about how well it can go through brick, a steel pipe, or something like that. Probably something along the lines of a certain type & thickness of rope &/or certain type/thickness of cardboard. Things that most people will use their knives on.

From my point of view, any of the various "knife tests" are good for "some" people, I think it would be good to make this one good for most people (Again, what you're cutting & using the knife for).

Maybe batoning a knife is something people want to know, but I think it's a small group & it's for a certain type of knife. I also think the standards of testing should be different if it's a FB or a folder. Lets face it, most of us use our FBs for different or higher stress tasks than our folders (Most of us do, not all of us, of course).

Good luck with what you decide to do & how you test. I agree with a previous poster, that initially, you might get quite a bit of flak (Not sure why you should, but it just sounds like you will).
 
Ignore the FLAK..

Great idea for a thread..

Test the knife along it's intended design...

If it's a chopper---chop what most of us would chop(Not concrete blocks) and report how it did.(was it better than expected-worse-or about as expected--and compare it to others of the same basic design)

Real world tests(how it "feels",how long it stays sharp.what you like,what you would change,etc)

Looking forward to your future posts
 
Honestly I think a little Noss-style testing is useful. But frankly I don't really watch much of his videos past what happens when he batons through wood with a 3 lb. hammer. For me, I can quite conceivably imagine a survival type situation where I might be forced to baton with a rock. I think if Noss tightened things up at least just a bit, e.g., built a support system for the 2X4 rather than clamping it in a vise and frequently making adjustments which sometimes include pounding the lever of the vise with his mallet :D, this could be more informative.

Two knives from Chris Reeve, under-hardened in my ignorant opinion, failed a, yes very unscientific, "test" of batoning with a 3 lb metal hammer, but MOST others didn't. I've watched a lot of Noss's videos and have seen many really awful hits while he did this on almost all the knives he's tested. I'm sorry but that's enough for me to be very nervous about even batoning with wood through wood with my CRK Mountaineer II. There have been a few posts about proper batoning technique but when it comes down to it I would prefer to have a knife that I can confidently baton (with wood through wood) even using a sorrowfully sloppy technique. To me it's useful to at least get a vague sense of how a knife might perform during very rough, extreme batoning through wood. Is it a completely practical test, perhaps not, but it definitely isn't all that extreme compared to chopping and batoning through concrete and steel.
 
Good point. I think I like to see some stress tests which may destroy knife. I will not do this myself with knives from my collection. But it is nice to know limits of the tool you may use as emergency tool in survival situaton. Knife is not as good as an ax, as a shovel, as a saw, as a scredriver, as a drill, as a prybar. But in emergency situation it has a beauty to be all of them in one bottle, may be not as good but at least some.

Batoning is good test, I also heard about using knife as an anchor during gravel slide on the side of them hill (survival situation where BM Elishevitz Nimravus stand up to the expectations)... Something like this.

Thanks, Vassili.

P.S. And the way CRK act as well as CRK representative response make my not too look at CRK knives from that point (as well as I restore my respect to Busse - it was damaged by my own edge retention testing before...)
 
me2 said:
For edge retention, I've used cardboard and aluminum cans. Both have given consistent (and surprising) results, and I've never been able to get repeatable results from rope cutting, except the 1" hanging test, which isnt for edge holding anyway.
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I must have missed these threads! I'd be interested in hearing more about the rope cutting failures. I am interested in bad news as much as good, I try to learn from it all.

I'm interested in edge retention and repeatability. I don't care *at all* for lock strength, etc. I don't mind if people include that, but I'm all about the edge, baby!!! I guess if I had some money, I'd send a ton of knives out to a CATRA machine and get my questions answered.

For example, I would love to take a knife in O1, and make several copies of it, and harden them from 57 - 62 HRC. Get the angles the same, run them all through a bunch of tests, then decrease the angles by 5 degrees, and repeat. Take them from, say, 20 deg inclusive, to 5 deg inclusive.

Then try with other steels....

How much time you got, Vivi??? :D If I win the powerball, I just might do this!
 
theonew said:
For me, I can quite conceivably imagine a survival type situation where I might be forced to baton with a rock.
Click to expand...

Now Theo, you know from hanging out with us wilderness types that if you get to the desperate point of batoning with a rock, just use the rock to baton your head to finish yourself off and put you out of your misery...:eek:

(just kidding) :D
 
Brian Jones said:
Now Theo, you know from hanging out with us wilderness types that if you get to the desperate point of batoning with a rock, just use the rock to baton your head to finish yourself off and put you out of your misery...:eek:

(just kidding) :D
Click to expand...


LOL :D That's definitely in my play-book and my work as a computer consultant has almost pushed me to that point a few times :D
 
Esav Benyamin said:
db and possum, personal arguments are inappropriate.
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You're right Esav. I should police my own behavior so I don't waste the moderator's time. Apologies. Guess I'm just getting a little perplexed with this forum lately. It seems when anyone posts anything beyond "I cut some stuff. It worked good.", there's a host of guys ready to pounce and tear it down.

db said:
Unlike your posts? I already gave him my idea on testing in my first post you quoted, how about you do the same.
Click to expand...

Though I didn't get much constructive from your post, you're right that I should do more too. So I'll give some of my perspective on it, and hope you'll follow suit. Sound fair?

When I see a knife reviewed, I like to hear about both the good and the bad. Or, not necessarily even bad stuff; just where certain compromises mean there are other blades that would do better. (Warning! This means you may have to use the knife for some things it wasn't really designed for, which draws flak.) It's useful because sometimes a knife will surprise us, doing admirably at a task we didn't expect it to. And even if it performs less than ideally, it's great to be reminded of just why we'd choose a different blade for that task, and shown just how big the difference can be. I'd want to see them compared against another widely popular blade as a baseline, or compared against either very low end or very high end knives (or both), to put the results into perspective.

While it's great to know that a knife can get a certain task done, without a frame of reference questions will remain. For example, a while back a maker shared some personal testing of a knife he just finished. He seemed to think the knife did pretty well. But from the info he gave, I was tempted to repeat his tests using a cheap Chinese knife. I could have produced the same results. Now, maybe his knife really was tough, but without a lot of details we'd never know it.

Which brings us to another thing. We need enough details so the tests can be repeated in person. This seems to bring folks out of the woodwork decrying pseudo science. I guess taking note of details makes it look like you're trying to be too scientific. But, let's say you baton it through some wood without damage. Great. I've split some woods that could be easily done with a soup can lid. I've also encountered some that would challenge the best blade. Which kind are we talking about? Etc.

Edges-
Lots of folks are interested in edge holding from extended cutting of various materials. Which is all well and good. I'm personally more interested in knowing how thin I can take the edge without it crumbling under harder cutting. And what grit level various materials will respond best to. And how much damage I can expect when it accidentally contacts something it shouldn't. (Again, this is another hot button topic. I can't in good faith request others to share something I tread lightly on myself, but it would still be good to know.) What good is an edge that will last sufficiently long on twine/rope, but folds over the first time I try whittling some hard-as-bone Osage Orange? (as happened recently) Or cuts open heavy paper seed sacks with applomb, but needs serious sharpening anyway to remove a chip after it accidentally bumps the side of the seed wagon? (as also happened recently) These are just examples- run with the concept.

I think this is where I'd love to see controlled comparisons paired with anecdotal/qualitative comparisons. You can show me how knife A repeatedly takes X pounds of force to cut through something, while the thicker edge of knife B takes Y more. And then apply that to real world use. For example, my arm gets tired after 20 minutes of heavy whittling whittling with knife B, so I switch to the thinner one and can keep going comfortably for much longer.

My interests in handle ergonomics can take many forms. Which one still feels comfortable after extended use? Which one is more secure for sudden short-term dynamic use? Is there a nice blend of the two?

I don't think it would hurt to revisit the basics of blade shape. A while back someone posted a picture of like a dozen of their outdoor knives. All were drop points. What makes one profile shape handier for certain tasks? What is it giving up compared to another? Etc.

I have a feeling Vivi is more interested in smaller knives & folders, but if there's big chopping knives involved, I have a number of other questions regarding edges, durability, and one that I rarely see addressed in detail- dynamic balance.

'Suppose I've rambled enough for now. Don't know if this will be helpful or not, but I'm givin' it a shot.

-the possum
 
The way that this forum is titled and described is: "Knife Reviews & Testing The place to come for actual first hand information on specific knives and how they perform. Your own personal Consumer Reports of Knives." From that description we shouldn't review general aspects of knives like alloys, sharpening angles, and design families; we should only be comparing knives as complete packages. That is sort of the Consumer Reports buyers guide mentality.

I never liked that targeting of the forum. When Consumer Reports compares cars it needs to do it as a complete package. A car is a complex system full of precisely machined interlocking parts. It doesn't make a lot of sense to determine how much torque it takes to shear off a lug nut as a measure of a cars utility or quality. On the other hand a knife is a simple device (one of the first devices in human history). We can understand and evaluate characteristics of the blade shape and materials in contrast to handle ergonomics and materials. If you run tests and isolate the performance of the blade alloy, shape, grind geometry, sharpening angle, sharpening finish, blade polish... I can start to make some generalizations about how other knives will behave. I can start to look for a knife with my favored blade shape, a grind geometry similar to the one you looked at, and my favorite pistol grip fighting knife handle.

You are free to apply your focus where ever you like. My only suggestion is to take advantage of your own personal interests and experience. If you do a lot of wood carving and have used many different knives for that purpose it would be shame if you didn't critique knives for their wood carving effectiveness. There was a time when the owner of a local knife shop would give me knives to test manufacturer claims about how well they worked as throwing knives. People may want to know that a stick tanged knife can't survive being thrown and is too light to be effective. I think you should give us the maximum advantage of what you personally bring to the table and pick a focus that interests you. There are thousands of generic testers out there and only one of you.
 
For ergonomics continuously cutting large amount of cardboard is a good test, w/o sharpening of course. At least from my experience it gave me very good idea which knife had more ergonomic handle, where were the hot spots on the handle and such.
 
I allways like reviews where different knives are compared.


Specific tests: cutting different types of string and rope, zip ties, an old garden hose, leather, demin jeans, putting a point on a hardwood stake, sharpening pencils, digging a hole in a board with the point. Maybe cutting some copper wire too.


I like reviews where the knife gets carried and the clip, or sheath is included in the review.


Cardboard is good for edge retention, but you are going to need an whole lot of it for comparitive tests.




Frank
 
Too many knife tests focus on edge retention and steel type. Others focus on breaking the knife or hard use bordering on abuse. I would like to see tests that evaluate the knife in real world uses such as prolonged cutting of cardboard, rope, vegetation etc. How they work in the field or in the kitchen or on the jobsite. How easily do they resharpen in the field? How do they handle with repeated opening and closing, how is the lockup under continued use?

I read your review and thought it was well done Vivi you've covered quite a bit of what i like to read in a knife review.
 
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