I was just told a skeletonized tang has more strength. Is that true?

[Danke42]

No actually it was not at all "junk" .

Many good knives would have broken under my destruct testing . Please send me some of yours , if you doubt me !

You can break anything . It's all relative .

I set out to break the knife and pushed it far beyond any reasonable use for the type .

The surprise for me was NOT that it broke , but how hard it was to do so .

I don't break my knives while testing. Funny thing that.

Your knife didn't break because it had holes in the tang like 99.9% of the other fixed knives out there.

Your knife broke because it was a piece of junk pushed by a scam artist.

 

[OrangeBlueOrangeBlue]

The only situation I've heard of where removing metal can make it "stronger" is dimple die holes in sheet metal, which can greatly improve rigidity.

 

[eKretz]

This is from an email chain with winkler knives. It eventually went up to the man himself.

When skeletonizing a knife or axe tang you do technically change the strength of the steel. Just like an “I” beam in a building the more steel that is there the stronger the structure is. However, you wouldn’t use a 12” beam to support a standard home floor. That would be more strength than is necessary. The same is true for a knife tang. To make a knife comfortable to hold, the tang especially full tangs are more than is necessary to hold up to the strength needed to perform whatever the knife is used for. By either tapering a tang or skeletonizing we can reduce the weight without compromising the knife function. Axe tangs are similar but when designing an axe that will be used for chopping you must be careful to not remove too much material and what you do remove needs to be designed to not cause a place for a stress fracture. This knowledge comes from a lot of testing.



Thanks for your interest,



Daniel Winkler

I think the quoted reply from Daniel Winkler himself makes the most sense in regard to knives and axes. His work speaks for itself.

The only thing I might wonder about, hypothetically, is whether the skeletonization could add more "flex" which might allow the tang to bend more before breakage.

But, since I'm not an engineer and don't work in metallurgy and material sciences, I'll leave it to those who actually know what they're talking about, and not worry about it one way or another.

I do tend to be a little more gentle on knives with "stick tangs".

It is probably one of the better answers I have received. It did confuse me a bit, if I’m being completely honest. From what I could understand, he essentially said that skeletonizing the tang does reduce strength, but so little it doesn’t matter. And, if I recall correctly, bark river knives skeletonizes a lot of their knives, and those are often used as survival knives.

So... The answer that makes the most sense is the same as the one I have given years ago on page 2, post 29? Well at least people are paying attention, lol.

 

[Blues]

So... The answer that makes the most sense is the same as the one I have given years ago on page 2, post 29? Well at least people are paying attention, lol.

Sorry you had to wait so long to have your brilliance recognized.

 

[sgt1372]

I'm not an engineer or structural expert , but the idea of holes ADDING strength is pure BS , IMO .

Here's a real life failure under very extreme usage ( my doing ) , but note that the fracture goes right through where a hole has been drilled .

I'm not an engineer either but common sense (based on experience doing stupid things myself) tells me that cutting holes in things generally makes things weaker not stronger.

I assume that most designers of "things" choose a skeletal or cut-out structure in order to REDUCE WEIGHT which can also reduce cost but they have to do so in a way that does not compromise strength. The simplest example of this is a steel I-beam.

I assume there are CAD programs out there that will assist in doing this in the most efficient way possible for all types of "things" including but not limited to knives.

Designers can also choose lighter metals/materials to achieve the same goal but those materials tend to be more expensive. So, there's a push-pull in terms of cost/strength/weight in using them versus just plain old steel (regardless of the variant) and cutting holes in it.

 

[ferider]

Well, I am an engineer. Sandwich structures with holes in the middle layer (like scale/tang/scale, or liner/tang/liner) can certainly be stiffer than solid structures, depending on the hole pattern. Just google "honeycomb structures".

 

[Danke42]

Well, I am an engineer. Sandwich structures with holes in the middle layer (like scale/tang/scale, or liner/tang/liner) can certainly be stiffer than solid structures, depending on the hole pattern. Just google "honeycomb structures".

Let's not get all bogged down with facts.

 

[eKretz]

Well, I am an engineer. Sandwich structures with holes in the middle layer (like scale/tang/scale, or liner/tang/liner) can certainly be stiffer than solid structures, depending on the hole pattern. Just google "honeycomb structures".

For equal mass, yes. Not for equal size. A 1" thick aluminum honeycomb for instance won't be nearly as strong as a 1" solid aluminum plate. And the honeycomb sandwich structures rely strongly on the adhesive bond between that layer and the surface layers. They have very little stiffness on their own. The adhesive bonds are nowhere near as strong as the metals themselves. As has already been mentioned several times, just adding holes does not add any strength. In fact, lessens it.

Anyway, the original question was not regarding stiffness, but ultimate strength. Large honeycomb sandwiches will sag less under their own weight than a similar solid panel, that much is true.

 

[ferider]

For equal mass, yes. Not for equal size. A 1" thick aluminum honeycomb for instance won't be nearly as strong as a 1" solid aluminum plate. And the honeycomb sandwich structures rely strongly on the adhesive bond between that layer and the surface layers. They have very little stiffness on their own. The adhesive bonds are nowhere near as strong as the metals themselves. Just adding holes does not add any strength. In fact, lessens it.

Anyway, the original question was not regarding stiffness, but ultimate strength.

Must have missed the definition of "ultimate strength" in structural mechanics.

 

[DocJD]

I'm not an engineer or structural expert , but the idea of holes ADDING strength is pure BS , IMO .

Here's a real life failure under very extreme usage ( my doing ) , but note that the fracture goes right through where a hole has been drilled .

I've seen nothing here to change my mind about the claim that making holes adds strength .

It's pure BS , IMO .

Maybe weight reduction or gain in flexibility , but not in basic raw strength .

 

[eKretz]

Must have missed the definition of "ultimate strength" in structural mechanics.

Stiffness and ultimate strength are two separate things... Not sure what you're trying to (slyly?) hint at here.