Anything can be broken. But lets look at the facts:
1. Mostly Stick tangs with harsh transitions which can be serious stress risers
2. Mostly leather stack handles, not always though.
3. Mediocre steel. Mostly 440B or C. This is not a tough steel by any measure.
4. Use of low sabre grind to make up for weak steel.
5. Use of weak hollow grind to make up for low sabre grind.
Lots of compromises. I like their looks and someday I want to own one. But I know they will not take severe use, like lots of heavy wood work, using a baton or extended chopping.
Really? Somehow it doesn't surprise me to read you have not owned one...
Randall Model 12 after about 1000 chops into dead dried Maple, 0.020" edge shoulders at about 12 degrees per side:
RJ Martin Raven in S30 V (a $1500 knife) with an edge
twice as thick, 0.040", and about 15-17 degrees per side: Despite about twenty deep hand sharpenings to keep the metal cold and try to get out of the "bad layer" on the edge, the edge will still do micro-folds within FIVE chops into the same wood: The micro-folds are hard to capture on camera, but will grab whitish nail material when swiping the nail against the edge: The Randall has NEVER done this in thousands of chops into the same wood...:
Thousands vs FIVE...:
Into the same wood this is how a Vaughn Neeley edge that is THREE TIMES as thick as the Randall Model 12: 0.060" vs 0.020", and with the angle at around 17 degrees per side (vs 12 on the Randall) held up: This damage occurred within 20 chops into the same wood... Again
20 chops vs
thousands:
And of course vs the
same wood a $700 ACK within 10 chops or so: Again 10 chops vs thousands:
This time to be fair, the ACK had a geometry that actually
matched the Randall... Again we are talking here less than 10 chops vs thousands...
Since the latter two knives are the
same steel as the Randall (I hear Randall occasionally put in 440C when they get a deal on a batch), I hope this underlines just how pointless and uninformed it is to say "oh it's 440: All 440 is the same..."
As far as 440 taking a second seat to anything else, perhaps a reminder of this thread would help?:
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/645414-Randall-14-Vs-Busse-Sarsquatch
This is a thread where an Italian guy tested a similar thickness Busse Sasquatch in INFI
in a concrete chopping test against a Randall Model 14 in 440B stainless... Not surprisingly, given the above photos, Randall's 440B held up
far better than INFI despite more hits with more force applied than to the INFI knife...
Quite amusingly, some Busse fans in that thread complained that the thinner-edged Busse Sasquatch model was chosen, when that made perfect sense to get a more significant comparison with the
extremely thin-edged Randall...
That in itself is quite revealing: Some would have preferred to test a typical Busse edge, which would be around
2-3 times thicker, for a comparison against a much thinner Randall edge...
Another point worth noting about Randall's hollow ground edges (which as you see above are not so fragile after all...), is that hollow ground edges have parallel sides as they near the edge, which means that as you wear these edges up, they do not grow thicker and less sharp (I call this the "reserve"), while convex or flat-ground edges
immediately grow thicker and so duller and duller with each sharpening, unless a full belt-grinder reprofile is done...: This is why Randall knives remain sharp for generations of users...
While it is true other fixed blade knives are also hollow ground, like the Chris Reeve one-piece range for instance, actually very few big fixed blade knives are as thin-edged as 0.020" (0.5mm) on top of such hollow grinds: An 8.75" Chris Reeve Jereboam ranges from 0.040" to 0.058" near the point, so nearly 3 times thicker in some places... This means the cutting performance is nowhere near the thinness that Randall is confident enough to go for in their knives, owing the excellent performance of their steel... The only other "quality" big knife with as thin a hollow grind that I have seen was an old "original" Al Mar "Special Warfare", and its "lowly" Aus-6 also held up very well to chopping, but many Al Mars I have seen where thicker edged, including a smaller "Special Warfare" of more recent vintage.
I suspect the difference in Randall's steel performance could be nothing more complicated than a cleaner steel billet source... With all the pontificating about heat-treatment or steel performance, no one here ever considers the very basic issue of steel "cleanness", probably because that is a complicated issue to verify...
Gaston