Convex works for me 'cos it does a bit of everything. It incorporates three things that I prize:
1] Flow. I strongly believe that what follows the cutting edge can be as important as the edge itself. The way whatever you have cut flows across the rest of the blade is not something I can ignore. I'm hoping one day someone with the facilities will examine this with ballistic gelatin and post up some photo illustrations.
2] Traditional way to make a strong edge that I have found nothing else to better.
3] By far the easiest for me to maintain.
I'd like to add a necessary component that is the one thing I think makes a convex difficult for some people- balance. A convex edge can get out of balance, and become too obtuse. It can become too fine, as well. Neither case is hard to fix with a stone and a strop.
Excellent points- And I'll bring up that a certain amount of the popularity of angle flat grinds with V edges and hollow grinds comes from the development of machine tools- the tooling making the style popular to a certain extent instead of utility or performance being the drive. I've seen several 3-5 inch blades from the 1970s through the 1990s from small shops that are insane- 1/4 and even more on the spine with hollow grinds that are intended to use outdoors for slicing. To me, this makes no sense- yes, there is effort in the making, but if you cut anything wider than the blade (these are generally 7/8 inch to 1 1/4 inches broad) you will eventually get wedged things. Such extreme hollow grinds are an interesting way to duplicate with a grinder the T spine forging of some period combat blades, but the utility seems to drop significantly for most uses beyond cutting tape and twine.
Most scandi and convex edges are very utilitarian. (Most scandi grinds I've seen are in fact slightly convex)- you can maintain easily with any decent stone, no magic rods, guides, or whatnot are required. And a strop for honing can be made out of any flexible mild abrasive- from denim to leather to muddy flax to cardboard.
A shallow V grind final edge bevel isn't a bad thing, necessarily. I've done several on bird and trout knives for people who have pocket stones and ceramic rods they like. But nearly every knife that's come my way for a touch up - most of them not made by me- that people hand sharpen without a special guide rod system has had a convex final. Mostly unintentionally, I'm sure.
There's been plenty of talk abotu why a convex or a scandi performs well, so I'll skip that.
Kitchen knives are an interesting and very useful area to look at cutting performance. Once you get past 'pedestrian' V grinds, almost everyone is looking at compound bevels and fine convex edges. The duble or triple compound edge bevel being a 'digital' representation of the 'analog' convex edge bevel.
:thumbup:
