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- Feb 28, 2007
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I've been trying to give a little bit of thought to the question of knife thickness and the two questions are:
1) How thick is too thick?
2) How thin is too thin?
Logically the perfect knife seems bounded by these two, but perhaps not. There are more things to simply the thickness of the blade that imparts its characteristics of strength and ability to be flexed.
Blade thickness/length ratio will impart stiffness. Obviously a shorter knife can still be stiff with a thinner stock.
Grind - Full flat vs. convex vs saber or hollow ground. I think the full flat will produce the most flex of these given that it has the most metal removed.
Thinning of the stock at the spine as it approaches the tip. Some knives seem to do this gradually and begin at the handle over a long shallow slope. Other knives are acute and commence a rapid shallowness about 1" from the tip. I think this is forced in part by the type of grind above.
Steel type - this probably has an effect but I don't have enough different steels in my collection to determine if it makes a difference.
All those other add-ons at the spine - sawbacks, swedges, clip-points.
My delimma is that I think my approach to choosing the best blade stock thickness might have been wrong at the offset. Really, my interest in knives involved at first doing alot of comparison shopping, seeing knife designs that I really liked on the internet and starting to put together lists of knives I liked and their specs. I think this approach influenced me greatly.
It seemed that most of the knives I was looking at were 3/16" and 1/4" thick and I became convinced that this was a product of design follows function. I purchased knives in these thicknesses and it formulated my experience of how a stiff blade behaves. It also formulated, I believe, an erroneous opinion of how a thinner stock behaves, without considering all of the other features above.
Okay, so my point to this thread is - I'm pretty surprised with the degree of stiffness of this new .125" breeden pathfinder. At 5" length, there is no way you could have convinced me two months ago that this knife would be as stiff as it is. It feels like a real performer and up to task for heavy duty jobs. Perhaps not a prybar, but certainly a heavy performer for other things. I'd be interested to compare the 4" pathfinder in .125" stock with .187" stock. My feeling is that for the same blade length, grind and profile both stock thickness would perform pretty much identically.
So when does 3/16" really start to show a difference over 1/8" in terms of blade flex? Is it a 6" knife?
At the other scale, 0.109" is definitely thinner in a way that you can directly feel in ability to flex the blade. I think 3.5" is about as long a blade as I like in this thickness before I start to feel that it is losing strength.
What are others thoughts on this? How has your experience with a given knife changed your attitudes?
1) How thick is too thick?
2) How thin is too thin?
Logically the perfect knife seems bounded by these two, but perhaps not. There are more things to simply the thickness of the blade that imparts its characteristics of strength and ability to be flexed.
Blade thickness/length ratio will impart stiffness. Obviously a shorter knife can still be stiff with a thinner stock.
Grind - Full flat vs. convex vs saber or hollow ground. I think the full flat will produce the most flex of these given that it has the most metal removed.
Thinning of the stock at the spine as it approaches the tip. Some knives seem to do this gradually and begin at the handle over a long shallow slope. Other knives are acute and commence a rapid shallowness about 1" from the tip. I think this is forced in part by the type of grind above.
Steel type - this probably has an effect but I don't have enough different steels in my collection to determine if it makes a difference.
All those other add-ons at the spine - sawbacks, swedges, clip-points.
My delimma is that I think my approach to choosing the best blade stock thickness might have been wrong at the offset. Really, my interest in knives involved at first doing alot of comparison shopping, seeing knife designs that I really liked on the internet and starting to put together lists of knives I liked and their specs. I think this approach influenced me greatly.
It seemed that most of the knives I was looking at were 3/16" and 1/4" thick and I became convinced that this was a product of design follows function. I purchased knives in these thicknesses and it formulated my experience of how a stiff blade behaves. It also formulated, I believe, an erroneous opinion of how a thinner stock behaves, without considering all of the other features above.
Okay, so my point to this thread is - I'm pretty surprised with the degree of stiffness of this new .125" breeden pathfinder. At 5" length, there is no way you could have convinced me two months ago that this knife would be as stiff as it is. It feels like a real performer and up to task for heavy duty jobs. Perhaps not a prybar, but certainly a heavy performer for other things. I'd be interested to compare the 4" pathfinder in .125" stock with .187" stock. My feeling is that for the same blade length, grind and profile both stock thickness would perform pretty much identically.
So when does 3/16" really start to show a difference over 1/8" in terms of blade flex? Is it a 6" knife?
At the other scale, 0.109" is definitely thinner in a way that you can directly feel in ability to flex the blade. I think 3.5" is about as long a blade as I like in this thickness before I start to feel that it is losing strength.
What are others thoughts on this? How has your experience with a given knife changed your attitudes?
