Finally a GEC Saw Cut Test VIDEO!!!!

Thanks to you two for the vid.

Seriously shocking saw. The Vic is a chainsaw in comparison.

As for other cutting comparisons....well I think it'd struggle to cut polony!!
 
jujigatame said:
If you put a saw on a knife then it should work. Same as a bottle opener, screwdriver, file, or whatever other tool there could be. The rest of the knife is meant to work so why waste time, energy, and material on a part that won't function? Something like that on the finished products for which the customer is paying full freight really irks me.
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Agreed. All kidding aside, the saw should work or not be there. I like GEC and I'm pretty disappointed they did this.
 
A couple of weeks ago, one of the GEC distributors had said that he's going to take a lumberjack to a saw shop and have the teeth modified to see if it can cut better but I haven't seen an update yet.
 
I didn't read all the posts, so forgive me if it has been said already: Looking at the tooth design of the GEC, they are angled back, so as to only cut on the pull stroke. Therefore, in the best case, it would cut half as fast as a Victorinox saw.

If you kept this in mind, it would be slightly less tiring than you show in your video, as you would kind of rest a little on the push stroke. But it'd still be slower. ;)

Lots of jigsaw blades are like this too, which is why they make orbital jigsaws. Kind of a side note, but that might be worth keeping in mind when buying one of those Leathermen that can interchange jigsaw blades.
 
midnight flyer said:
I think everyone here likes GEC and is just playing nice. I don't doubt most here feel the way you do but don't want to offend the fans.

On the other hand, think about the poor guy that has heard the mantra chanted here and elsewhere about the quality of design and build of GEC products that buys this knife. A lot of hard earned cash wasted on a knife that doesn't work as well as a SAK or Leatherman if you are depending on the saw as an important component. Especially when you could buy 3 of them instead of the GEC.

Robert
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If we can call a spade a spade when their knives, or anyone else's, come with dull blades but we all still love their work then I don't think telling it like it is on the saw will really tip over into the realm of offending anyone. I'm a fan of GEC and it would offend me as a customer to get something like what Ash showed in the video. Maybe offended is too strong a word for that example, but you get what I'm saying.

Playing nice is one thing but past a certain point it doesn't do any favors for the company or the customer. As you mentioned, a potential first time buyer who went with a Lumberjack expecting a truly useful saw is going to come away with some poor impressions.
 
Smaug said:
I didn't read all the posts, so forgive me if it has been said already: Looking at the tooth design of the GEC, they are angled back, so as to only cut on the pull stroke. Therefore, in the best case, it would cut half as fast as a Victorinox saw.

If you kept this in mind, it would be slightly less tiring than you show in your video, as you would kind of rest a little on the push stroke. But it'd still be slower. ;)

Lots of jigsaw blades are like this too, which is why they make orbital jigsaws. Kind of a side note, but that might be worth keeping in mind when buying one of those Leathermen that can interchange jigsaw blades.
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The problem is not that the teeth are angled in any particular direction, the problem is that the saw does not have cutting teeth as such. The teeth are just so many cutouts in the bottom edge of the saw blade. There is no cutting edge to speak of, no set to the cutters, and there is little or no taper from the top edge of the blade to the bottom. In order for the saw to work, the part where the cutters are needs to be somewhat wider than the rest of the blade, the cutters have to be angled in particular directions in relation to each other to both cut and clear efficiently, and, first and foremost, there actually has to be a sharpened cutting edge.
 
I'm very keen on GEC and feel they generally make the best production Traditionals, at the moment.

However, when I hear of an unsatisfactory experience I want to know more about this.I don't feel this is offending fans, it's enabling us to gain an overall perspective actually. Puerile fanboyism is very irritating indeed and can be highly counter-productive: Cult grows around a firm, or its owner...., people will counternance no criticism, the firm or product becomes identified with the self, personal offence is taken and abuse is handed back.In the meantime, product quality can go off the rails but nobody will acknowledge this. The elephant in the room....

We need to do a Malcolm -X and tell it how it is: This saw is clearly rubbish and not up to any kind of realistic work. GEC still make a highly desirable range of Traditional knives however.
 
When I first saw the Lumberjack I thought of this.
They should change it to The Rufus Roughcut.
Or how about Beaverblade?


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willgoy said:
I'm very keen on GEC and feel they generally make the best production Traditionals, at the moment.

However, when I hear of an unsatisfactory experience I want to know more about this.I don't feel this is offending fans, it's enabling us to gain an overall perspective actually. Puerile fanboyism is very irritating indeed and can be highly counter-productive: Cult grows around a firm, or its owner...., people will counternance no criticism, the firm or product becomes identified with the self, personal offence is taken and abuse is handed back.In the meantime, product quality can go off the rails but nobody will acknowledge this. The elephant in the room....

We need to do a Malcolm -X and tell it how it is: This saw is clearly rubbish and not up to any kind of realistic work. GEC still make a highly desirable range of Traditional knives however.
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I can pretty much agree with this.

All to often, I've seen something develop a fanboy base, that can not face the fact that their particular object that they are fans of, can be a defective product. Sometimes just being in the ball park is not enough.

Watching the great video Ash put on for us, I can only wonder if the people at GEC ever heard of the word "prototype". A working model is made, and tested to see if the design works well enough to either putty into production, or go back t the drawing board. This is obviously a case of not testing well enough, if at all, before putting it out there to take the customers money. Not good. GEC makes a very nice looking product, but I hope they are not becoming like some other companies that produce cult worship items like some brands of motorcycles and firearms, and a certain German luxury car. Elephants make poor house companions.

While I own numerous Case knives, I confess that I don't own any GEC knives for this reason. I've seen too many that have obvious problems for too much money over what a good Case costs me. Yes, Case has some QA issues as well, but at least they cost only a fraction of what the GEC will, and I know the people at Case from dealing in the past. Same for a lot of things; when I hear of ongoing complaints of problems, I tend to stay away from that brand of product.

Ash, thank you for doing this video. It was informative to say the least, and should be forwarded to GEC.

Carl.
 
jackknife said:
Ash, thank you for doing this video. It was informative to say the least, and should be forwarded to GEC.

Carl.
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I spoke with Christine from GEC a couple weeks ago about an unrelated matter, and I brought up BladeForums and asked if she was familiar with the site. She replied that she was and that she read here every day on her lunch hour. I would assume she keyed in on GEC threads, and would hope that any big issues, such as the one in this thread, were passed along to the higher ups. Actually I would hope the higher ups read BladeForums for themselves.
 
Arathol's post above is the explanation of why this GEC blade is NOT a saw blade. The design and geometry of saw teeth for various types of saw blades has been known for likely over 100 years.
The important question here is: how did this GEC blade get beyond the 'sketch on a napkin' phase ?
GEC obviously wanted to offer this knife with a saw blade. Surely many people who work there know and understand what makes a saw cut, i.e. the design, spacing and geometry of the teeth.
So why did this childish imitation of a saw blade get put into production ?
Fire whomever it was that gave the approval to go ahead with this pathetic non-'saw' blade.
roland
 
This is what constitutes a saw blade on a knife:

Jan2012009-8.jpg


Jan2012010-7.jpg


Close up of Schlieper:

Jan2012011-8.jpg


Schlieper 99DS and Schrade/USA/97OT

Jan2012013-6.jpg


GEC could use either of these as a pattern for a real saw blade.
roland
 
My thoughts about this revolve around the grey area between "collector" and "user". With this knife I get the impression GEC have moved a little towards the "collector" angle whilst forgetting one of the reasons behind people's enthusiasm for their knives is their ability to produce a knife from yesteryear which you can still go out and do a hard days work with.

It reminds me almost of that feeling we all must have had at some point in our childhood where we'd see a something replicated as a toy, be it a gun etc and lusted after it only to find once we had it in our hands it was a disappointing, plasticky shadow of our dream....:)

Sam
 
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