RokJok
Gold Member
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2000
- Messages
- 4,254
To a large degree this is simply an extension of earlier tests I've posted to the Reviews forum, since the results serve to reinforce expected results from various blade geometries. I spent a couple of hours Sunday testing and illustrating edge geometry for a friend with whom I attended a local gun show. After the show we took the blades into his basement to test their wood cutting and chopping characteristics. These are the subjective observations that came out of that session for us.
The knives we used were a Fallkniven A1 in VG10 stainless, Cold Steel SRK in Carbon V steel, Cold Steel large Twistmaster clip point in Carbon V steel, a Victorinox SAK with 3" large blade in stainless, and three Busse knives: a Busse Basic 5 & Basic 7 in M-INFI, and a Battle Mistress -E in INFI. Extraneous tools used were a cheapo pruning saw (Japanese pull-stroke coarse-toothed and deep-gulleted blade configuration), a short Stanley toolbox crosscut saw (standard western push-stroke fine-toothed config), a 16 oz claw hammer, and an Estwing camping hatchet that was about 12" total length. The hatchet was hollow ground from the hammering face down to the chopping edge, which was somewhat dull & blunted although not chipped.
The condition of the blade edges were:
- A1 = not shaving sharp but decent, what I'd call a "working edge"
- SRK = very sharp, fresh from a session on the Sharpmaker
- Twistmaster = NIB, which was very sharp
- SAK = very sharp, likewise unused since a Sharpmaker session
- Busse Basic 5 = compromised edge, somewhat dulled. Rolled along some sections of the blade.
- Basic 7 = not quite NIB, had seen some duty chopping apple branches since NIB, but still decently sharp
- BM-E = not shaving sharp, another "working edge" that had seen some use, but still remained reasonably sharp since its last sharpening
In earlier tests, the wood I worked with was green soft branches ranging from toothpick size to about four inches in diameter that I cut off of large bushes (~20 ft tall) along the fenceline. Chopping and whittling on that soft fresh wood allowed decent baselining for various blade thicknesses, geometries, and sizes. This Sunday we had some different stuff to work with and we were specifically testing for performance variance across differing blade geometries. We used a 1/2" thick x about 1-1/2" wide piece of dimension lumber that looked to be some kind of pine by the grain pattern for testing whittling/carving/cutting abilities of the blades. The wood was quite soft and of very low density. The other wood there to work with was approximately 2.5" thick sections of pine (maybe fir by the look of the bark) branch that had lain beside the furnace in his basement drying out for about three years. Consequently the chunks were very dry and hard; extremely well cured by the warmth.
We first tested the various blades' carving/whittling/cutting abilities on the very soft dimension lumber. We ran two rounds to produce both thin shavings and very coarse chunks. This approximated making fine delicate shavings for catching a spark in firestarting and rapid hogging off as much wood at a stroke as the blade would produce as if creating shelter poles in a hurry.
Next we laid the dried out pine branch that had been by his furnace on the workbench and took to chopping on it with the various blades. After working with considerably larger green wood (4" vs 2.5"), this dried wood shocked me with its resistance to blows. Whereas the soft green wood I was used to working with might take a dozen or so BM-E blows to sever the branch, this dried piece of pine took many many blows from each of the blades and we still only got a bit past half-way through it. As the cutting test above illustrated the influence of blade geometry on that aspect of working the soft wood, this work illustrated the influence of the condition of the wood on the efficiency & speed that can (or cannot) be achieved in chopping the wood.
After trying to cut through the notched section of the branch with the Stanley toolbox saw and making extremely slow headway, we used the pruning saw to cut the branch into a 4" long section and about a 14" long section. These we used to test the splitting ability of a couple of the blades by using the claw hammer to whack their spine like a splitting wedge through the wood. Both blades so readily split the 4" section that it rendered no particularly meaningful results. They both split it cleanly before the blade was hammered even about half-way into the shorter section.
This morning I sharpened the Busse Basic 5 on my Spyderco Sharpmaker to restore the edge, then did a bit of retesting of it on a section of the dried branch I'd brought home for the purpose (i.e. same testing medium pre- and post-sharpening of the blade). It split the branch as well sharp as when it was dull. This is not surprising since the outer edges of the spine were the contact points while it was wedging apart the wood and the edge wasn't touching the wood, so the condition of the edge doesn't matter. After quarter-sectioning the wood, I took the Basic 5 and whittled heavily into the wood, again as if trying to hog off a lot of wood in a hurry to make the wood pointed. It did this very much better than when the edge was compromised, as one would expect it to do. A rough subjective estimation would place it about a 5-to-1 improvement.
So what does all this prove?? My observation is that it shows how important geometry (stock thickness, bevel shapes, belly & blade length) is to the CUTTING & SPLITTING abilities of the blade and how raw mass (plus some nominal geometry) influences the CHOPPING ability of the blade.
The other more important point perhaps, was summed up by my cohort in all this whack & whittle. He enthusiastically commented after we were finished how comments about some of these factors on numerous occasions were suddenly, starkly, EMPHATICALLY conveyed in a tactile manner that was much more visceral and comprehensive than all the talking & reading about them.
Bottom line: Spend as much time with knives in hand testing & checking blades as with your mouse in hand researching blades here on BFC and elsewhere online.
That way you really develop YOUR OWN sense of not only what type of knife works for you, but come to understand in that tactile sense the subtle and not so subtle mechanics & reasons involved in why you prefer those blades.
The knives we used were a Fallkniven A1 in VG10 stainless, Cold Steel SRK in Carbon V steel, Cold Steel large Twistmaster clip point in Carbon V steel, a Victorinox SAK with 3" large blade in stainless, and three Busse knives: a Busse Basic 5 & Basic 7 in M-INFI, and a Battle Mistress -E in INFI. Extraneous tools used were a cheapo pruning saw (Japanese pull-stroke coarse-toothed and deep-gulleted blade configuration), a short Stanley toolbox crosscut saw (standard western push-stroke fine-toothed config), a 16 oz claw hammer, and an Estwing camping hatchet that was about 12" total length. The hatchet was hollow ground from the hammering face down to the chopping edge, which was somewhat dull & blunted although not chipped.
The condition of the blade edges were:
- A1 = not shaving sharp but decent, what I'd call a "working edge"
- SRK = very sharp, fresh from a session on the Sharpmaker
- Twistmaster = NIB, which was very sharp
- SAK = very sharp, likewise unused since a Sharpmaker session
- Busse Basic 5 = compromised edge, somewhat dulled. Rolled along some sections of the blade.
- Basic 7 = not quite NIB, had seen some duty chopping apple branches since NIB, but still decently sharp
- BM-E = not shaving sharp, another "working edge" that had seen some use, but still remained reasonably sharp since its last sharpening
In earlier tests, the wood I worked with was green soft branches ranging from toothpick size to about four inches in diameter that I cut off of large bushes (~20 ft tall) along the fenceline. Chopping and whittling on that soft fresh wood allowed decent baselining for various blade thicknesses, geometries, and sizes. This Sunday we had some different stuff to work with and we were specifically testing for performance variance across differing blade geometries. We used a 1/2" thick x about 1-1/2" wide piece of dimension lumber that looked to be some kind of pine by the grain pattern for testing whittling/carving/cutting abilities of the blades. The wood was quite soft and of very low density. The other wood there to work with was approximately 2.5" thick sections of pine (maybe fir by the look of the bark) branch that had lain beside the furnace in his basement drying out for about three years. Consequently the chunks were very dry and hard; extremely well cured by the warmth.
We first tested the various blades' carving/whittling/cutting abilities on the very soft dimension lumber. We ran two rounds to produce both thin shavings and very coarse chunks. This approximated making fine delicate shavings for catching a spark in firestarting and rapid hogging off as much wood at a stroke as the blade would produce as if creating shelter poles in a hurry.
- A1 = did fairly poorly compared to the other blades at producing thin shavings, but worked very well for digging in and removing a lot of wood in a hurry for the bigger chunks. The thick convex ground blade produced heavy chunky curls that were comprised of individual segmented chunks of wood (maybe 1/16" thick or less) that were stacked offset-wise on each other to create the overall curl shape. The blade immediately behind the edge was actually breaking off & pushing aside these little sections of wood after the edge had cut them.
- SRK = worked quite well for slicing off both thin shavings and thicker chunks by merit of its very sharp edge, although its control was not equal to the SAK
- Twistmaster = much like the SAK below, except that it's taller blade made it harder to alleviate pressures by changing the blade-to-wood angle if you found you'd entered the wood at too steep an angle. The flat-ground thin-stock blades really shone in this testing as being cutters extraordinaire!
- SAK = worked quite well due to its thin stock & not tall blade that allowed good control for thin shavings and sharp edge that allowed the blade to keep digging deeper when used forcefully to hog off big chunks. I would worry about breaking the pivot pin on the knife if it were to be used in this manner on a regular basis.
- Busse Basic 5 = didn't do very well for either thin or thick when compared to the thin-stock blades or the other Busses due to its compromised edge.
- Basic 7 = worked fairly well for thinner shavings, although not to the benchmark of the SAK/Twistmaster, and did very well at removing a lot of wood in a hurry.
- BM-E = did okay with the thin and did the best of the thicker blades (Busses, A1, & SRK) due to its longer edge being able to present vastly more cutting edge to the medium being cut on a draw stroke cut.
Next we laid the dried out pine branch that had been by his furnace on the workbench and took to chopping on it with the various blades. After working with considerably larger green wood (4" vs 2.5"), this dried wood shocked me with its resistance to blows. Whereas the soft green wood I was used to working with might take a dozen or so BM-E blows to sever the branch, this dried piece of pine took many many blows from each of the blades and we still only got a bit past half-way through it. As the cutting test above illustrated the influence of blade geometry on that aspect of working the soft wood, this work illustrated the influence of the condition of the wood on the efficiency & speed that can (or cannot) be achieved in chopping the wood.
- A1 = did sort of okay, but it was slow going and didn't fling off terribly big chips which says it wasn't penetrating very deep per stroke. Since the wood was so resistant to deformation, it wasn't allowing the A1 in very far before the convex grind presented enough resistance to further penetration that the blade's progress was halted.
- SRK = did sort of okay at first, but its short blade didn't have enough mass to drive its sharp edge very deep as we chopped deeper into the cross-section of the branch (i.e. were chopping wider & wider sections of wood).
- Twistmaster = did poorly in spite of its very sharp edge. It is too light to be effective against such hard wood.
- SAK = didn't even try this one
- Busse Basic 5 = did poorly since its trashed edge kept it from digging in much at all. Plus like the SRK its short blade didn't provide enough mass to drive it into the stubborn wood with much authority.
- Basic 7 = did reasonably well, being able to chip along as we progressed down into the heartwood. But it was creating smallish chips as it went. To use this blade alone to chop much wood this hard would take a lot of energy out of you.
- BM-E = not surprisingly this was the best of the knives, cutting clean-sided strokes and creating larger chips compared to the other knives as deep as we chose to cut into the branch, which was slightly past the center of the branch. The surprise here is that the BM-E continued to cut when the hatchet would no longer cut & chip the hard wood.
After trying to cut through the notched section of the branch with the Stanley toolbox saw and making extremely slow headway, we used the pruning saw to cut the branch into a 4" long section and about a 14" long section. These we used to test the splitting ability of a couple of the blades by using the claw hammer to whack their spine like a splitting wedge through the wood. Both blades so readily split the 4" section that it rendered no particularly meaningful results. They both split it cleanly before the blade was hammered even about half-way into the shorter section.
- A1 = split the wood of the longer section very vigorously. It readily kept the split well ahead of the cutting edge as the straight-grained wood was levered apart by its wedging action.
- Busse Basic 5 = likewise split the wood fairly effectively, but it seemed not quite as well as the A1. When the Basic 5's spine (1/4" thick) had been hammered flush with the end of the section, the split was a measured 4" ahead of the cutting edge of the blade. It appeared to stay about that distance ahead of the edge, except where the grain of the wood took a mild curve and bound the blade a bit more tightly.
This morning I sharpened the Busse Basic 5 on my Spyderco Sharpmaker to restore the edge, then did a bit of retesting of it on a section of the dried branch I'd brought home for the purpose (i.e. same testing medium pre- and post-sharpening of the blade). It split the branch as well sharp as when it was dull. This is not surprising since the outer edges of the spine were the contact points while it was wedging apart the wood and the edge wasn't touching the wood, so the condition of the edge doesn't matter. After quarter-sectioning the wood, I took the Basic 5 and whittled heavily into the wood, again as if trying to hog off a lot of wood in a hurry to make the wood pointed. It did this very much better than when the edge was compromised, as one would expect it to do. A rough subjective estimation would place it about a 5-to-1 improvement.
So what does all this prove?? My observation is that it shows how important geometry (stock thickness, bevel shapes, belly & blade length) is to the CUTTING & SPLITTING abilities of the blade and how raw mass (plus some nominal geometry) influences the CHOPPING ability of the blade.
The other more important point perhaps, was summed up by my cohort in all this whack & whittle. He enthusiastically commented after we were finished how comments about some of these factors on numerous occasions were suddenly, starkly, EMPHATICALLY conveyed in a tactile manner that was much more visceral and comprehensive than all the talking & reading about them.
Bottom line: Spend as much time with knives in hand testing & checking blades as with your mouse in hand researching blades here on BFC and elsewhere online.
That way you really develop YOUR OWN sense of not only what type of knife works for you, but come to understand in that tactile sense the subtle and not so subtle mechanics & reasons involved in why you prefer those blades.
) that are being used for the same jobs.