Interesting little idea

T

thedancingsousa

Joined
Jul 9, 2014
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Hello all,

I've been fooling around with two things a lot lately, and those are my new work sharp KTS and my Gerber parang.

Now, I know the Bear Grylls line of merchandise doesn't get much love, but even it has a few goodies. This parang has been working pretty well for me in yard work (i.e. clearing excess bamboo, getting rid of larger vines and weeds, and even chopping up some chunks of trees that had fallen in a big storm). It held up pretty well, but the fact that it's hollow ground worries me. My understanding is that a hollow grind slices well because it's thin, but has high risk of folding over for the same reason.

So, here's my idea. I want to completely reprofile the parang. I have the compact parang, as well, and I intend to practice on it first. I'm thinking that I want to grind it down to completely eliminate the hollow grind (being careful not to hurt the heat treat, of course) and give it a 40 degree convex grind, then use the outdoor guide to give it a 50 degree convex edge for some added sturdiness.

Has anyone heard of someone doing this? The compact parang is cheap, so I'm not too worried about messing it up in my little experiment. Any ideas or tips?

Thanks,
TheDancingSousa
 
I haven't done anything like this so maybe I'm totally off-base, but wouldn't that just make the knife weaker overall? Since you're reprofiling it you'd be removing blade stock, leaving you with a thinner edge even if it is convex. Maybe the convex-ness makes up for that, but it seems like it wouldn't be worth the trouble to me.
 
How would the edge become thinner? The gerber parangs are flat up until the grind, about a third of an inch from the edge. Grinding it back to reprofile the edge shouldn't make the edge any thinner.
 
Kinda, yeah. Like how you typically have a primary and secondary grind for a hollow or flat ground knife, but with convex bevels instead.
 
Ok, I was envisioning a much higher hollow grind than that, which would involve removing metal mostly from the "hollow" portion of the grind and not the flat. Regardless, reprofiling a hollow grind to convex will involve removing quite a bit of material, and I don't know that you'd see much of an improvement in performance unless you're seeing serious rolling issues now. Note that you may burn through more than one belt (even just the coarsest belts) doing such a dramatic reprofile on a larger knife like a Parang. Best of luck though, let us know how it turns out if you go through with it.
 
I did consider doing this myself at one time.

Last time I used my Gerber parang though, I was clearing a bunch of vines and brier from a friends yard and ended up hitting the occasional cinderblock. The edge was dulled like any machete would be, but did not fold or roll or chip. Due to this, I am no longer toying with the idea of changing the grind since it seems to be plenty sturdy enough for my use.

If you go ahead and regrind yours, I would be interested in the results (even though I don't plan on doing so myself).
 
thedancingsousa said:
How would the edge become thinner? The gerber parangs are flat up until the grind, about a third of an inch from the edge. Grinding it back to reprofile the edge shouldn't make the edge any thinner.
Click to expand...

So you want to remove the ground part entirely, right? And then convex what is left?
 
I think I'd use it as is. If the edge did ever roll or chip then try your mods when there's nothing to lose.
 
Yes, essentially. I want to keep as much metal as possible, though, so I'm only going to partially remove the ground section.
 
I think that's going to be a lot harder than you think, you're talking about an awful lot of free hand control, it looks easy on paper but in practice it takes muscle memory and control that only comes from a lot of repetition, I mean a lot.

Also to do what you want would be doable if you were good on the slack side of a2"X72" belt grinder I can't imagine the difficulty using the WS.
 
I managed to grind it back a little more than halfway before my first low grit belt wore down. I ordered some new belts that came in yesterday and plan on finishing it up in the next couple days. The convex grind, in my opinion, looks a lot nicer than the hollow grind did, anyways.
 
Can you post some pics? I wanted to do the same thing to a BG mini-parang but ended up just convexing the bevel waiting for it to wear some before modifying the grind. So far I've discovered the grind has held up very well and the convex bevel is plenty sharp. But I would still like to see how you're doing it. :thumbup:

OT: I'm also curious about modifying the handle. I've seen one thread where it was removed and changed but the new handle wasn't what I have in mind. Does anyone know of any threads they could point me towards with handle mods on BG parangs? Thanks and sorry for drifting OP.
 
The parang I'm doing right now is the compact parang. I wanted to try out what I'm doing on the cheaper one before I moved to the full size model. :D
 
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