Chuck Bybee said:
...have you ever made a knife and/or attempted the ABS journeyman tests with a knife?
Have you ever chopped through a 2x4?
Have you ever sliced through a 1" free hanging rope within 12" of the end with the same knife?
Have you ever take the same knife and bent it 90º without breaking the knife?
Kevin addresses this well enough in regards to what the tests show and his statement about the mild steel is fairly dramatic. I think he has made a few knives. Of course you can now go on usual rants about him being delusional and so forth. As for the issue, no I have not made a knife which would pass the ABS tests, I don't have much of a desire to make knives, there are other things I enjoy doing more, and people who are more talented. I make money doing what I like and give it to them to do what they like and get a better knife than I could make. You don't need to know how to make a knife to know if it is difficult for a knife to be able to do something, just do it with a large bunch of knives, and see what happens.
Razorback - Knives said:
...aren't suitable enough to show the strength of the knives being tested.
They are not intended to, the bend test isn't used to show how knives should be made, simply that the maker can produce such an effect. This has been discussed many times before, it is a test of skill on the maker, not an arguement that all knives should be made this way, or that it defines hard use. The rope test is a simple one of sharpness and cutting ability, and the 2x4 shows a measure of edge retention and durability. They are not extremes in any sense.
None of them as well address the issue at hand which is the strength/durability of the tang and in particular the wood grip. Some of them would be just silly to even imply that they could stress a knife in any way. How would cutting a 1" piece of hemp rope possible fault a tang. To even bring that into the discussion makes no sense at all. I don't think I have ever see a knife so fragile it would break cutting a piece of hemp rope.
Similar with the 2x4 chop, even the old Rambo knives with the screwed on handle would easily chop through a 2x4 twice without breaking, or the screw coming loose, it takes a lot of repeated impacts to cause problems. You are applying an arguement to the ABS tests which they are not intended to measure. Ref :
http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ABS_MSTest.htm
I have lots of knives which would not pass these tests for various reasons and I would call them hard use, and I have knives that would pass them and I would not call them hard use.
You can also bend a knife without stressing the tang by gripping towards the front of the handle and making sure to drive with the pressure focused on the bottom fingers and not rotating the hand, or driving with the heel. To stress the tang heavily you would grip far back and rotate the wrist heavily, but even then, with a full distal taper and a soft spine, the blade will bend readily and thus take the strain off the tang. Tang failures in prying are more of an issue with full hard blades without extensive tapers.
Kevin R. Cashen said:
The concept of a full tang making a better knife than a well done hidden tang is patently absurd ...
This comes from mainly the point that if a partial tang fails a grip is difficult or impossible but on a full tang you can at least use the tang as a handle. This has its merits mainly due to a QC arguement. Even the best people make mistakes or have materials problems beyond their control and thus having the full tang is an additional measure of security.
In regards to actual use, a full tang has its benefit for use of the knife as a knife-like tool which involves doing things with it which involve impacts on or with the handle which could cause it to fracture or at least weaken it to the point where it would fracture in normal use. This is mainly used for tactical knives more so than a camp bowie.
As for not posting, I can understand a busy maker such as yourself not wanting to get involved in such discussions, especially when they are often filled with personal rants and back issues which have nothing to do with the issues at hand, however you can often be of tremendous benefit and your posts are appreciated, probably by a lot more people than you think.
NickWheeler said:
Stainless blades do not have differentially hardened or tempered properties.
They can if you want them to, people have differentially hardened ATS-34, and forge stainless.
knifetester said:
... the Pro Guide grind would not be optimal ...
I should have clarified, in the above I meant that style of grind in general, not that exact knife, a deep hollow with a thin and acute edge is optimal for D2's properties. The K2 I have for example is 0.010-0.020" at ~33 degrees included. That was what I had in mind, some of Dozier's tactical designs move away from that.
Personally I would run the grind a little different than Dozier (deeper) and use different steel stock (thinner), but I was commenting more on the style of grind rather than the direct implementation, as noted I would choose Alvin's geometry personally as that steel to me is a light use cutter with long edge retention, not a prying/impact tool.
But I also carry more than one knife, I would not want to only carry such a knife on me (what I just personally described) for general use as it is fairly limited in scope, and Dozier's thicker grind and bladestock is more versatile. I carry my modified Sebenza and Fulcrum for such reasons for example.
There is always of course the cutting ability / durability perspective and everyone has to choose according to their needs / desires. Different people will have a different focus which is why it is important for different people to enter into such discussions to round out the viewpoint and show that while performance can be readily quantified, in the end it comes down to the individual users to pick based on which characteristics they find more important.
[Dozier convex grind]
This is one of the reasons why the convex grind gets so much misinformation, the convex prototype Blues showed had a much thinner edge profile than what I have seen on the hollow Dozier's I have handled, which then leads to a promotion of the cutting ability of the convex grind when in fact what was cause the performance was the extent of the grind, specifically the creation of the edge.
I would prefer that over a stock hollow ground Dozier for wood work simply because the edge profile is thinner and more acute, however if the hollow grind was so optomized then the comparison would be different. I have a couple of nice hollow grind knives that work very well for wood work because of the implementation of the grind and they will outcut lots of convex ground knives, including an Opinel. I would like to have Krein actually hollow grind an Opinel.
Nice knife in any case.
-Cliff
I always do at least one when I get a new batch of steel. Which is getting rare as I try to buy steel in large lots for consistency.