Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
I have had this shovel for quite some time and at first was about an unimpressed with it as you can be. I carried it in the winter in the trunk of my car, and found it useless compared to a 3/4 size shovel for removing ice and snow to free a stuck car, and was horrible at cutting through ice for fishing compared to a hatchet. I used it several times for general wood craft and found it useless compared to a decent knife or hatchet. I used it for throwing and the handle promptly broke, and it is far harder to replace than a tomahawk. It only was well recieved when I had to reset the soil in a garden (12x12) and it did this far easier than a knife or a tomahawk. It sat for about a year under the seat of my car and I forgot about it until I found it again recently when I decided to have a look at it again.
It was very rusted and the edges completely blunt. The first thing I did was file decent edges on the sides. Cold Steel describes them as sharp, but mine came without formed edges so you were basically just mashing things instead of cutting them. The steel is soft though and can be filed readily, even with a worn file which won't cut a decent machete (Martindale). The edges are really thick as well, and you will want to thin them a little to enhance the cutting ability if you are going to do any serious wood work with them. I didn't change mine that much simply because I wanted to see how it would perform with similar to NIB geometry when fully sharpened. It only took about five minutes to file the edges so that they met and were sharp. After this shaping I cut off the burr with a 600 grit DMT hone. Since the steel is so soft it is floppy so it needs a few passes to grind the burr completely off. If you are mainly digging with it, you really don't need to bother with the last step as the sharp edge gets dented/rolled quickly anyway, so just stop at the forming process.
The next few times I went cutting wood I took the shovel along to mainly use to start the fire. I then faced the problem of carrying it as you could not just throw it in a bag as it would cut through the sides. I just used rubber tubing on the edges and wrapped an elastic around them. Cold Steel sells a sheath, however it is about as expensive as the shovel itself (~$20). Anyway, the shovel excelled at digging through the rooty soil, being able to chop the roots easily so you would have much more trouble with a digging stick. A knife could do the same of course, but constantly putting mm sized dents in a high end knife is going to reduce its lifetime significantly, but who cares about the shovel, you just file the edge at the end of the day. It can scrape wood for shavings but needs a keen edge for this so I kept one side sharper than the other but concentrating all heavy hacking on one side. It also had no problem chopping and splitting up light wood for kindling. It is readily outperformed by a knife, but offers a many to one larger advantage over bare hands. Most of the dried wood can be cracked up, but the shovel could chop through it much faster with far less effort.
It does have fairly large problems with thicker woods and you now see significant drawbacks as compared to regular tools for such tasks. Its raw chopping ability is easily less than 50% of the ability of a decent knife (which is going to be smaller and lighter) and thus you end up doing a lot more work. Plus the handle is slick and easy to turn in hand which enhances fatigue and frustration, get it a bit wet or slick and it becomes very difficult, near impossible to hold onto. The slick finish should be sanded off and a coat of boiled linseed oil applied. For splitting heavy wood the performance is even worse, the blade just binds readily and now you have to pound on a sharpened edge to try to baton it through, it is better to reverse it and drive the wood into a log or stump. Again a large knife, or even better a small hatchet is a *much* better tool here. On shaving wood for kindling, or misc. cutting, the performance ratio between the shovel and a knife is even worse (~10%) due to the thicker edge on the shovel, the way the edge curves, and that it is out in front of your grip which induces a leverage disadvantage. I would recommend leaving one edge really coarse for general cutting, a 100 grit AO belt finish would be about perfect from my experience. This isn't a great chopping finish, so you might want to polish the other side a bit finer. You could also thin out the coarse ground edge as well and try to avoid any rock and such contacts off that side.
Unless I had to do a lot of digging in rooty soil, I would take a large knife over this tool any day with its NIB profile. If I had to do that type of work, a decent spiked tomahawk (ATC for example) would do it almost as good (you would have to use your hands as a shovel and the tomahawk spike as a pick), and the cutting, chopping and throwing abilities of the tomahawk are all directly superior to the shovel. The shovel makes a better pry bar though as the point is in line with the handle. Handle replacement is far easier with the tomahawk, you need a screw driver with the shovel. So it comes down to how much digging you are going to do, either in hard ground or have to be able to do it really quickly. If you compare it to a knife, hatchet or tomahawk, it comes up really short in regards to cutting ability, and in general wood craft issues. However if you compare your abilities with it, to bare handed, the difference is much larger and the shovel would be a very valuable tool. I would also imagine that the legal issues would not be much of a problem so you could always have it in your car for example, though it would not surprise me if someone took exception to it. With some work and careful sharpening though, you can raise the performance many to one, and while it won't out perform a quality blade or hatchet, it can be made to at least be in the same class. Some comments by a friend who *really* likes his shovel :
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/2292/shovelrev.htm
ref link :
http://www.onestopknifeshop.com/store/cold-steel-special-forces-shovel.html
-Cliff
It was very rusted and the edges completely blunt. The first thing I did was file decent edges on the sides. Cold Steel describes them as sharp, but mine came without formed edges so you were basically just mashing things instead of cutting them. The steel is soft though and can be filed readily, even with a worn file which won't cut a decent machete (Martindale). The edges are really thick as well, and you will want to thin them a little to enhance the cutting ability if you are going to do any serious wood work with them. I didn't change mine that much simply because I wanted to see how it would perform with similar to NIB geometry when fully sharpened. It only took about five minutes to file the edges so that they met and were sharp. After this shaping I cut off the burr with a 600 grit DMT hone. Since the steel is so soft it is floppy so it needs a few passes to grind the burr completely off. If you are mainly digging with it, you really don't need to bother with the last step as the sharp edge gets dented/rolled quickly anyway, so just stop at the forming process.
The next few times I went cutting wood I took the shovel along to mainly use to start the fire. I then faced the problem of carrying it as you could not just throw it in a bag as it would cut through the sides. I just used rubber tubing on the edges and wrapped an elastic around them. Cold Steel sells a sheath, however it is about as expensive as the shovel itself (~$20). Anyway, the shovel excelled at digging through the rooty soil, being able to chop the roots easily so you would have much more trouble with a digging stick. A knife could do the same of course, but constantly putting mm sized dents in a high end knife is going to reduce its lifetime significantly, but who cares about the shovel, you just file the edge at the end of the day. It can scrape wood for shavings but needs a keen edge for this so I kept one side sharper than the other but concentrating all heavy hacking on one side. It also had no problem chopping and splitting up light wood for kindling. It is readily outperformed by a knife, but offers a many to one larger advantage over bare hands. Most of the dried wood can be cracked up, but the shovel could chop through it much faster with far less effort.
It does have fairly large problems with thicker woods and you now see significant drawbacks as compared to regular tools for such tasks. Its raw chopping ability is easily less than 50% of the ability of a decent knife (which is going to be smaller and lighter) and thus you end up doing a lot more work. Plus the handle is slick and easy to turn in hand which enhances fatigue and frustration, get it a bit wet or slick and it becomes very difficult, near impossible to hold onto. The slick finish should be sanded off and a coat of boiled linseed oil applied. For splitting heavy wood the performance is even worse, the blade just binds readily and now you have to pound on a sharpened edge to try to baton it through, it is better to reverse it and drive the wood into a log or stump. Again a large knife, or even better a small hatchet is a *much* better tool here. On shaving wood for kindling, or misc. cutting, the performance ratio between the shovel and a knife is even worse (~10%) due to the thicker edge on the shovel, the way the edge curves, and that it is out in front of your grip which induces a leverage disadvantage. I would recommend leaving one edge really coarse for general cutting, a 100 grit AO belt finish would be about perfect from my experience. This isn't a great chopping finish, so you might want to polish the other side a bit finer. You could also thin out the coarse ground edge as well and try to avoid any rock and such contacts off that side.
Unless I had to do a lot of digging in rooty soil, I would take a large knife over this tool any day with its NIB profile. If I had to do that type of work, a decent spiked tomahawk (ATC for example) would do it almost as good (you would have to use your hands as a shovel and the tomahawk spike as a pick), and the cutting, chopping and throwing abilities of the tomahawk are all directly superior to the shovel. The shovel makes a better pry bar though as the point is in line with the handle. Handle replacement is far easier with the tomahawk, you need a screw driver with the shovel. So it comes down to how much digging you are going to do, either in hard ground or have to be able to do it really quickly. If you compare it to a knife, hatchet or tomahawk, it comes up really short in regards to cutting ability, and in general wood craft issues. However if you compare your abilities with it, to bare handed, the difference is much larger and the shovel would be a very valuable tool. I would also imagine that the legal issues would not be much of a problem so you could always have it in your car for example, though it would not surprise me if someone took exception to it. With some work and careful sharpening though, you can raise the performance many to one, and while it won't out perform a quality blade or hatchet, it can be made to at least be in the same class. Some comments by a friend who *really* likes his shovel :
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/2292/shovelrev.htm
ref link :
http://www.onestopknifeshop.com/store/cold-steel-special-forces-shovel.html
-Cliff
) so it benefits from the flat front. I think mainly it boils down to soil type and shovel use. For digging in soft soil a flat front is more efficient.
That device that Chad pictured is something known to us guys as an implement that the mafia uses to dispose of their "problems".