Chisel Grind Performance vs Conventional V Grind??

Hartsfield knew what he was doing. So did the Japanese, inwhere Phill made his blades like the traditional Japanese blades.
btw, the yoroi toshi was the blade style that made the wound channel larger than the following blade's cross section.
I love the chisel grind for what it is.
rolf
 
AVigil said:
It penetrates easier because of much less parasitic drag on the blade as it enters and because it creates an asymmetrical wound and does not self seal as a symmetrical one it tends to gape open.

Michael Janich has taught this and teaches to do a comma cut for the same reason.
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Test it on a piece of meat. I doubt you'll have trouble piercing flesh with blades of equal sectional volume as long as they're all sharp. Also, the wound may be asymmetrical but you're just pushing a soft material to the side of the blade. After it's no longer being held open the flesh will push back into a similar position. You want a big wound channel? Lever the blade before withdrawal. A cut will only noticeably gape if sufficiently large for the material cut to hang under the force of gravity. Blood pressure alone will generally be enough to open a wound even if the sides are parallel. After all, a full flat ground blade is technically a triangle shape and we all know what they say about triangular wounds. :p Just because an expert says something doesn't mean they're infallible. The whole "chisel grinds for defense" thing reeks of marketing to me.
 
A business card is a thin object. If you stick a blade, that keeps the same cross section from the handle forward up to the tip area, through a business card, you're sticking an object through an existing hole after clearing the tip area. Of course there will be no more resistance. OTOH, if you stick a blade with distal taper through the business card, the hole has to be extended for the length of the taper. The same applies for blades with lots of belly. It doesn't make a difference whether the blades are chisel or V ground.

It will be different, if you stick the blades into a thicker object. The double edged one with a small cross section will perform best, no matter if it's chisel or V ground.
 
I also read that an origin of the chisel ground knife was that it was the peasants knife. Inexpensive to make and sharpen.
And, I think Phill used a phone book to demonstrate the power of a zero ground blade. He could "push" his blades thru a phone book.
 
A zero grind is simply the strongest grind you can have for a particular edge angle. It's all in the geometry.
 
steff27 said:
A business card is a thin object. If you stick a blade, that keeps the same cross section from the handle forward up to the tip area, through a business card, you're sticking an object through an existing hole after clearing the tip area. Of course there will be no more resistance. OTOH, if you stick a blade with distal taper through the business card, the hole has to be extended for the length of the taper. The same applies for blades with lots of belly. It doesn't make a difference whether the blades are chisel or V ground.

It will be different, if you stick the blades into a thicker object. The double edged one with a small cross section will perform best, no matter if it's chisel or V ground.
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It was a demonstration for parasitic drag. The geometry of the chisel grind creates less drag on the blade when piercing now matter what the profile of the blade
 
The hardest-working cutting blades are usually chisel grinds because of the application. Magazines, paper currency, books, they are all cut with chisel-ground blades hundreds, sometimes thousands of sheets at a time, all day. That said, i have no problem using a chisel grind provided it's ground for use with the proper side/hand. I have both right-hand and left-hand chisel ground knives, and while my Emersons cut fine, my right-handed chisel-ground knives are definitely more efficient and better cutters since I'm right handed. Anyone that says there is no difference when using a left-ground vs a right-ground knife when used with their dominant hand is full of crap.
 
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AVigil said:
It was a demonstration for parasitic drag. The geometry of the chisel grind creates less drag on the blade when piercing now matter what the profile of the blade
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The premiere Emerson blade for stabbing performance is v-ground, btw. The grind wont make much of a difference.
 
It seems that the self defense "stabbing" idea of an EDC knife in relation to general cutting is being way overblown. I've carried chisel and/or V in a few "tough" places. Strangely, how it may have cut, pulled wounds open, whatever was academic at best. The fact that it DID cut/stab is the only thing that mattered.

Which is true for the other uses an EDC will be put to. Which makes up 99.999% of the time the knife is used beyond self defense.

Get what you like based on feel, comfort, accessibility, and cost. Then use it for every cutting situation you can use it for. Learn to maintain it. Then use it for even more cutting.

I like a V grind right now. Why? That's what's on my EDC right now and literally use it daily. The knife does what I need it to do for the vast majority of things I need done. If it were chisel, which I've carried as well, the thought would be the same.
 
AVigil said:
Phill Hartsfield demonstrated that at his tables at knife shows. He would take business card and ask you to push your blade tip first into to it and stop when there was no resistance. So I took my knife FFG and push it through feeling the drag all the way.

Then I took one of his blades, push it into the card and once it cleared the tanto tip the blade slip effortless down to the handle.

"Cutting better" is not the problem. Different grinds cut and pierce material differently.

A lot of great makers like Hartsfield, Fisk, Snody, RJ Martin, Emerson used the chisel grind because performs well for it intended use.

Some people have a problem using it...good thing there are plenty of other grind styles to choose from.
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Can you provide a scientific resource with information about this "parasitic drag"? I've never heard of this before, and I'm curious.
 
bpeezer said:
Can you provide a scientific resource with information about this "parasitic drag"? I've never heard of this before, and I'm curious.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_drag

Which doesn't have a damn thing to do with knives other than:

Form drag or pressure drag arises because of the shape of the object. The general size and shape of the body are the most important factors in form drag; bodies with a larger presented cross-section will have a higher drag than thinner bodies

The presented cross-section looks about the same with either grind.
I think the whole thing is a non-issue of truly un-epic proportions. ;)
 
Exactly. Parasitic drag, from a blade's standpoint, is more relevant to slicing, not stabbing. Even then, it's insignificant as far as performance, given the actual mechanics of a chisel grind when used properly. It's more effective in marketing performance :)
 
stabman said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_drag

Which doesn't have a damn thing to do with knives other than:

Form drag or pressure drag arises because of the shape of the object. The general size and shape of the body are the most important factors in form drag; bodies with a larger presented cross-section will have a higher drag than thinner bodies

The presented cross-section looks about the same with either grind.
I think the whole thing is a non-issue of truly un-epic proportions. ;)
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Interesting, thanks stabman. It's odd that we never used that term in my fluid mechanics classes (or maybe my memory is worse than I thought!) Either way, I find it hard to believe that this is evidence for a chisel grind to cut better than a V grind.
 
As Stabman and Gooeytek say, it's a non-issue of un-epic proportions that only affects marketing performance. A very good way of putting it. The real difference is simply the angle of minimum approach relative to the grip. If you take a flat surface and attempt to cut it with a knife you will find that the edge only bites at an angle of approach greater than that of the edge angle. If you take two knives, both with 30° included angles, but one being a chisel grind and the other a conventional double bevel, you'll see that the double bevel may make the cut at any angle greater than 15° on either side of the blade. The chisel grind will be able to make the cut at any angle on the flat side ("any angle greater than 0°") but must approach the cut at an angle greater than 30° on the other side, which is rather steep. It's just a directionally biased version of a particular included edge angle.
 
gooeytek said:
Exactly. Parasitic drag, from a blade's standpoint, is more relevant to slicing, not stabbing. Even then, it's insignificant as far as performance, given the actual mechanics of a chisel grind when used properly. It's more effective in marketing performance :)
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It WAS insignificant until everybody started using flux capacitors to enhance the laminar flow of the carbides. Since then, you gotta be The Hulk to overcome that drag and stab anybody with anything other than a chisel grind.

Really, if your dedicated SD knife isn't a chisel, you are going to die. That's not marketing hype, that's proven by science.
 
Actually, the most significant amount of drag on chisel ground stabinators comes from the black coating and all the skull and "milspec" stencils on their blades.
 
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