RokJok
Gold Member
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2000
- Messages
- 4,221
Disposing of some maple limbs I tested the performance of several knives. To a large degree there weren't any major surprises in the way the blades performed in this mostly chopping usage. I did some slicing/whittling specifically to check out the cutting of the various edges & blade thicknesses.
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KNIVES & TOOLS USED
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-- Busse Battle Mistress-E
-- Busse Basic 7 w/ heavily used somewhat dull edge
-- Busse Basic 7 w/ new factory edge
-- Busse Satin Jack combat grade
-- Busse Basic 5
-- Newt Livesay RTAK
-- Becker Knife & Tool Combat/Utility 7
-- Fallkniven A1
-- Cold Steel Bushman
-- Cold Steel SRK
-- Gerber Yari
-- Spyderco Moran Featherweight FB-1 trailing point
16 oz claw hammer
3" thick 1 ft long maple branch baton
$8 10" pruning saw from Walmart, which worked very well for a cheapie
2x4 clamped between saw horses as an anvil for heavy chopping
Note: all Busse knives had Busse's asymetrical edge (one side ground flat, the other side ground convex) and the primary grind is flat ground to the spine of the blade.
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MATERIAL, CONDITIONS, & METHODS
------------------
Temperatures were about 40 degrees Farenheit overnight, around 50 degrees F during the day. No ice in the wood. No rain (rare during Seattle winter). No wind. All the wood used was freshly cut maple in winter condition. It is a somewhat hard, thin-barked green wood with relatively little sap in it.
Unless otherwise noted the wood was chopped while being held in mid-air with my weak hand. This means that it was a dynamic target and some of the energy from a chopping stroke was dissipated by movement of the holding arm when the stroke did not totally sever the branch.
------------------
THE TESTS
------------------
SNAP CUTTING (toothpick to matchstick size branch tips)
Favorite blades - Busse 5, CS SRK, BK&T C/U7
For this type of extremely light chopping I was aiming for flicking strokes that were done with a wrist snap and would not require much if any energy to come from the arm. The shorter yet thick blades fit this job well -- particularly the Basic 5. These blades were easy to start/stop but with enough mass & momentum to insure that they got through the light branches in one popping stroke. The C/U7 and SRK also easily cut into the outer skin of these extremely thin branches.
While larger knives easily severed or broke off such fine branches, they were more tiring because the energy needed to start/stop them was mostly wasted. I had to apply braking energy to stop them after they easily blew through these thin bits of wood.
Even though they were both very sharp, the Yari & Moran seemed to simply push these branch tips around instead of cutting into them.
LIGHT CHOPPING (matchstick to about 1" branches)
Favorite blade - BK&T C/U7, CS SRK
At this level I was taking from 1 to about 10 strokes (depending on which knife is used) to sever the branches. This is a level of chopping that starts to require that I put more of my arm into the stroke. Handle ergonomics became more important on the thicker branches. It is also here that one single stroke is not always sufficient to pop all the way through the branch, so the weight & balance of the knives were important for their contribution to making repeat strokes efficiently.
The small blades (Yari & Moran) handled the smaller end of this range okay, but faded quickly from the running as the size of wood increased. Not a surprising result since I consider them both to be cutters, not choppers. The Busses all did well with this size wood, as did the RTAK. But the BM, B7's, A1, & RTAK seemed to be over-gunned for the job. While the large end of this range started to really show off Jerry Busse's knack for making chopping blades, there was still some tiring wasted energy at the small end of this range with the longer blades. The B5 did very well at the smaller end of this range of chopping, but rapidly ran out of the momentum needed on the larger branches to get through them in a single stroke. Making multiple chops with its relatively light blade (compared to its bigger Busse brothers) on the larger branches became tiring.
I've always found the Busse Basic handles to be particularly comfortable & secure in my hand and today simply reconfirmed that belief for me. What surprised me was the fact that the BK&T handle on the CU7 gave this long-standing favorite handle design of mine such a strong run for the money, especially given that the CU7 is a $50 knife and the Busse Basics cost 3-4 times that much. The downside to the BK&T handle is that the scales are very slick surfaced. I would expect that wetting by water or blood would really tax the hand's ability to work with the handle without expending a lot of energy to over-grip the handle. In spite of the fact that I found the BK&T handle so comfortable, once my hand tired the BK&T handle made me feel the fatigue much worse than the tackier handles of the Busse Basics, A1, and SRK. Again, this is not a surprising result.
I was disappointed in the A1 in this level of chopping. It is touted as a survival knife and chopping is one of the requisite activities I need a survival blade to perform well. In spite of having a beefy blade and a slightly blade-heavy balance, the A1 didn't seem to want to dig into these branches very readily. However, once it bit into the wood it sliced cleanly and dug in deeply. Because its blade is a full inch shorter than the Busse 7's, I took to choking way back on the handle in an effort to increase the effective blade length enough to make use of its relatively massive blade. But as I choked back, the sharp corner at the top of the very slightly protruding tang of the knife dug into the ball of my hand. The longer I chopped this way, the more it aggravated my hand. Finally I got aggrieved enough by it to take my Dremel to it and rounded off that upper corner of the exposed tang. Thereafter, the comfort of chopping with the A1 went way up. The checkered kraton-like handle of the A1 was secure, the smallish single guard & pinky hook served their purposes minimally, and the handle didn't cause blisters or severe hotspots during chopping. But I found the squarish cross-section of the handle far less comfortable than the other knives used, with the exception of the SRK's squarish kraton handle. That may have been exacerbated by the fact that I have very small hands with short fingers. The squarish handle may work better for others with larger hands.
MEDIUM CHOPPING (1"-2" thick branches)
Favorite blade - Busse 7, BM, BK&T C/U7
In this size range, the bigger heavier Busse blades shone. Their full flat grind and the sharpness of the asymetrical edge, backed by their massive 1/4" thick blade, allowed them to power through in a single blow branches that the smaller blades could only chip-chip-chip their way through.
I found the A1 actually did better in this size of branch. My guess is that the target was large enough to offer enough resistance to moving that the blade could now break through the surface before the target got pushed away. At the upper end of this range I started laying the branch on the 2x4 between a pair of sawhorses and the A1 did well in that configuration.
This range of chopping pointed out the importance of edge condition. The A1 chopped about as well as the duller Busse 7, in spite of the fact that the B7 has a heavier longer blade and slightly more blade-heavy balance which should have raised it well above the A1 in chopping performance. But the detriment of the B7 blunted edge overpowered its advantage. Once I compared the A1 to the Busse 7 with a factory edge, the B7 was markedly better as expected.
The surprise at this level of chopping was how much I enjoyed using the BK&T C/U7. It was taking several chops to make it all the way through the bigger branches. The virtually full flat grind dug deeply into this size branch, but the blade was just too light to power all the way through. But the combination of its incredibly comfortable radiused handle and the neutral balance, coupled with enough blade mass & a very good blade geometry, make the CU7 a whole lot of "just plain FUN" to use. After I'd established my impressions of the blades and still had some more branches to chop up, I found myself reaching for the CU7 more often than most of the other blades.
HEAVY CHOPPING (2"-4" thick branches on solid surface)
Favorite blade - Battle Mistress
No surprises here - the big heavy blades work best. The mid-size blades still held their standings relative to each other: B7 (factory edge), CU7/A1/B7(duller edge), Satin Jack, SRK, & B5 in descending order. I didn't bother trying to use the Yari or Moran on such heavy work. The fully convex edge of the A1 actually showed itself well in this heavy chopping. It would slice out extremely clean-cut chips compared to the flat ground edges, which left somewhat torn patches as they displaced the chips. I expected the Livesay RTAK to work extremely well here, because it is even more blade-heavy than the Battle Mistress. But its thin profile bound in the cut much more than the 1/4" thick BM and it wasn't as efficient at chipping out the cut. I expect in light green vegetation the BM/RTAK standings would be reversed.
WOOD SPLITTING
Favorite blade: A1 or Busses
This test consisted of cutting approximately 12-inch long sections of 3"-4" thick branch with the saw, standing the sections up on a sawhorse, then driving the knife blade through the branch section lengthwise with a 16-ounce claw hammer. By beating on the knife spine, I was using the knife like a wedge. When I tested the Yari and Moran I used a branch baton instead of the hammer to beat the blades through half- or quarter-sectioned lengths of wood. I did not want to subject their thinner lightweight blades to the metal-on-metal impact of the hammer head, so used a slightly yielding baton to drive them through. I used less-than-full-size cross section wood because if I'd used full-size wood, I'd have been reduced to beating on the last inch or so of the blade tip which might have caused a broken tip. Because I was testing wood splitting capability not tip strength, I used wood thin enough that I could pretty much beat on the full spine width of the blade and not endanger the tip.
Here the fully convex cross-section of the A1 put it above the others. The initial entry into the wood with the A1 was slightly more difficult than the Busses and much harder than the CU7 or SRK. I suspect this was due to the small bulging shoulders immediately behind the edge on its full convex grind. But once the A1 was hammered into the wood a bit it really levered the wood pieces apart strongly, with the split staying ahead of the edge except when woodgrain around a knot would bind the blade. With the Busse blades the split stayed closer to the edge than with the A1 (slightly less efficient wedge) and the krinkle-coat on the Busse blades collected green smearing and smudging from the layer immediately inside the maple bark. The smoothly polished surface of the A1 came through this test very much cleaner than the Busse krinkle-coat. To its credit, the Busse coating did not suffer any degradation or breaking from the wood. The hammer blows to the spine of the knife did chip off some of the coating, leaving very tiny sharply defined gaps in the coating.
The C/U7 worked less well as a wedge than the A1 or Busses. It's narrower cross-section, non-convex edge, and mostly full flat-ground primary bevel seemed to keep the split pretty much right at the edge. Not surprisingly, it entered the wood easier than the A1/Busses, but I really had to keep pounding on it with the hammer (and pounding relatively harder than on the A1/Busses) to get the wood split. The coating on this blade also suffered from the hammer blows, but in a way different from the Busses. The coating on the C/U7 seems more plasticene than the more ceramic-brittle coating on the Busses. The damage to the C/U7 coating looked like bubbles or displaced tiny piles of scraped coating. The places that were bare of coating on the C/U7 looked to have less sharply defined edges than the Busses. It looked like the hammer blows had squished the C/U7 coating until it was so thin it broke, whereas the Busse coating looked like it had fractured down through its entire depth all at once. There also looked to be an undercoating (like primer under paint) that remained in some of the gaps where the C/U7 coating had been removed. I don't have a microscope, so these are just my rough eyeball impressions of how the damage looked.
------------------
KNIVES & TOOLS USED
------------------
-- Busse Battle Mistress-E
-- Busse Basic 7 w/ heavily used somewhat dull edge
-- Busse Basic 7 w/ new factory edge
-- Busse Satin Jack combat grade
-- Busse Basic 5
-- Newt Livesay RTAK
-- Becker Knife & Tool Combat/Utility 7
-- Fallkniven A1
-- Cold Steel Bushman
-- Cold Steel SRK
-- Gerber Yari
-- Spyderco Moran Featherweight FB-1 trailing point
16 oz claw hammer
3" thick 1 ft long maple branch baton
$8 10" pruning saw from Walmart, which worked very well for a cheapie
2x4 clamped between saw horses as an anvil for heavy chopping
Note: all Busse knives had Busse's asymetrical edge (one side ground flat, the other side ground convex) and the primary grind is flat ground to the spine of the blade.
------------------
MATERIAL, CONDITIONS, & METHODS
------------------
Temperatures were about 40 degrees Farenheit overnight, around 50 degrees F during the day. No ice in the wood. No rain (rare during Seattle winter). No wind. All the wood used was freshly cut maple in winter condition. It is a somewhat hard, thin-barked green wood with relatively little sap in it.
Unless otherwise noted the wood was chopped while being held in mid-air with my weak hand. This means that it was a dynamic target and some of the energy from a chopping stroke was dissipated by movement of the holding arm when the stroke did not totally sever the branch.
------------------
THE TESTS
------------------
SNAP CUTTING (toothpick to matchstick size branch tips)
Favorite blades - Busse 5, CS SRK, BK&T C/U7
For this type of extremely light chopping I was aiming for flicking strokes that were done with a wrist snap and would not require much if any energy to come from the arm. The shorter yet thick blades fit this job well -- particularly the Basic 5. These blades were easy to start/stop but with enough mass & momentum to insure that they got through the light branches in one popping stroke. The C/U7 and SRK also easily cut into the outer skin of these extremely thin branches.
While larger knives easily severed or broke off such fine branches, they were more tiring because the energy needed to start/stop them was mostly wasted. I had to apply braking energy to stop them after they easily blew through these thin bits of wood.
Even though they were both very sharp, the Yari & Moran seemed to simply push these branch tips around instead of cutting into them.
LIGHT CHOPPING (matchstick to about 1" branches)
Favorite blade - BK&T C/U7, CS SRK
At this level I was taking from 1 to about 10 strokes (depending on which knife is used) to sever the branches. This is a level of chopping that starts to require that I put more of my arm into the stroke. Handle ergonomics became more important on the thicker branches. It is also here that one single stroke is not always sufficient to pop all the way through the branch, so the weight & balance of the knives were important for their contribution to making repeat strokes efficiently.
The small blades (Yari & Moran) handled the smaller end of this range okay, but faded quickly from the running as the size of wood increased. Not a surprising result since I consider them both to be cutters, not choppers. The Busses all did well with this size wood, as did the RTAK. But the BM, B7's, A1, & RTAK seemed to be over-gunned for the job. While the large end of this range started to really show off Jerry Busse's knack for making chopping blades, there was still some tiring wasted energy at the small end of this range with the longer blades. The B5 did very well at the smaller end of this range of chopping, but rapidly ran out of the momentum needed on the larger branches to get through them in a single stroke. Making multiple chops with its relatively light blade (compared to its bigger Busse brothers) on the larger branches became tiring.
I've always found the Busse Basic handles to be particularly comfortable & secure in my hand and today simply reconfirmed that belief for me. What surprised me was the fact that the BK&T handle on the CU7 gave this long-standing favorite handle design of mine such a strong run for the money, especially given that the CU7 is a $50 knife and the Busse Basics cost 3-4 times that much. The downside to the BK&T handle is that the scales are very slick surfaced. I would expect that wetting by water or blood would really tax the hand's ability to work with the handle without expending a lot of energy to over-grip the handle. In spite of the fact that I found the BK&T handle so comfortable, once my hand tired the BK&T handle made me feel the fatigue much worse than the tackier handles of the Busse Basics, A1, and SRK. Again, this is not a surprising result.
I was disappointed in the A1 in this level of chopping. It is touted as a survival knife and chopping is one of the requisite activities I need a survival blade to perform well. In spite of having a beefy blade and a slightly blade-heavy balance, the A1 didn't seem to want to dig into these branches very readily. However, once it bit into the wood it sliced cleanly and dug in deeply. Because its blade is a full inch shorter than the Busse 7's, I took to choking way back on the handle in an effort to increase the effective blade length enough to make use of its relatively massive blade. But as I choked back, the sharp corner at the top of the very slightly protruding tang of the knife dug into the ball of my hand. The longer I chopped this way, the more it aggravated my hand. Finally I got aggrieved enough by it to take my Dremel to it and rounded off that upper corner of the exposed tang. Thereafter, the comfort of chopping with the A1 went way up. The checkered kraton-like handle of the A1 was secure, the smallish single guard & pinky hook served their purposes minimally, and the handle didn't cause blisters or severe hotspots during chopping. But I found the squarish cross-section of the handle far less comfortable than the other knives used, with the exception of the SRK's squarish kraton handle. That may have been exacerbated by the fact that I have very small hands with short fingers. The squarish handle may work better for others with larger hands.
MEDIUM CHOPPING (1"-2" thick branches)
Favorite blade - Busse 7, BM, BK&T C/U7
In this size range, the bigger heavier Busse blades shone. Their full flat grind and the sharpness of the asymetrical edge, backed by their massive 1/4" thick blade, allowed them to power through in a single blow branches that the smaller blades could only chip-chip-chip their way through.
I found the A1 actually did better in this size of branch. My guess is that the target was large enough to offer enough resistance to moving that the blade could now break through the surface before the target got pushed away. At the upper end of this range I started laying the branch on the 2x4 between a pair of sawhorses and the A1 did well in that configuration.
This range of chopping pointed out the importance of edge condition. The A1 chopped about as well as the duller Busse 7, in spite of the fact that the B7 has a heavier longer blade and slightly more blade-heavy balance which should have raised it well above the A1 in chopping performance. But the detriment of the B7 blunted edge overpowered its advantage. Once I compared the A1 to the Busse 7 with a factory edge, the B7 was markedly better as expected.
The surprise at this level of chopping was how much I enjoyed using the BK&T C/U7. It was taking several chops to make it all the way through the bigger branches. The virtually full flat grind dug deeply into this size branch, but the blade was just too light to power all the way through. But the combination of its incredibly comfortable radiused handle and the neutral balance, coupled with enough blade mass & a very good blade geometry, make the CU7 a whole lot of "just plain FUN" to use. After I'd established my impressions of the blades and still had some more branches to chop up, I found myself reaching for the CU7 more often than most of the other blades.
HEAVY CHOPPING (2"-4" thick branches on solid surface)
Favorite blade - Battle Mistress
No surprises here - the big heavy blades work best. The mid-size blades still held their standings relative to each other: B7 (factory edge), CU7/A1/B7(duller edge), Satin Jack, SRK, & B5 in descending order. I didn't bother trying to use the Yari or Moran on such heavy work. The fully convex edge of the A1 actually showed itself well in this heavy chopping. It would slice out extremely clean-cut chips compared to the flat ground edges, which left somewhat torn patches as they displaced the chips. I expected the Livesay RTAK to work extremely well here, because it is even more blade-heavy than the Battle Mistress. But its thin profile bound in the cut much more than the 1/4" thick BM and it wasn't as efficient at chipping out the cut. I expect in light green vegetation the BM/RTAK standings would be reversed.
WOOD SPLITTING
Favorite blade: A1 or Busses
This test consisted of cutting approximately 12-inch long sections of 3"-4" thick branch with the saw, standing the sections up on a sawhorse, then driving the knife blade through the branch section lengthwise with a 16-ounce claw hammer. By beating on the knife spine, I was using the knife like a wedge. When I tested the Yari and Moran I used a branch baton instead of the hammer to beat the blades through half- or quarter-sectioned lengths of wood. I did not want to subject their thinner lightweight blades to the metal-on-metal impact of the hammer head, so used a slightly yielding baton to drive them through. I used less-than-full-size cross section wood because if I'd used full-size wood, I'd have been reduced to beating on the last inch or so of the blade tip which might have caused a broken tip. Because I was testing wood splitting capability not tip strength, I used wood thin enough that I could pretty much beat on the full spine width of the blade and not endanger the tip.
Here the fully convex cross-section of the A1 put it above the others. The initial entry into the wood with the A1 was slightly more difficult than the Busses and much harder than the CU7 or SRK. I suspect this was due to the small bulging shoulders immediately behind the edge on its full convex grind. But once the A1 was hammered into the wood a bit it really levered the wood pieces apart strongly, with the split staying ahead of the edge except when woodgrain around a knot would bind the blade. With the Busse blades the split stayed closer to the edge than with the A1 (slightly less efficient wedge) and the krinkle-coat on the Busse blades collected green smearing and smudging from the layer immediately inside the maple bark. The smoothly polished surface of the A1 came through this test very much cleaner than the Busse krinkle-coat. To its credit, the Busse coating did not suffer any degradation or breaking from the wood. The hammer blows to the spine of the knife did chip off some of the coating, leaving very tiny sharply defined gaps in the coating.
The C/U7 worked less well as a wedge than the A1 or Busses. It's narrower cross-section, non-convex edge, and mostly full flat-ground primary bevel seemed to keep the split pretty much right at the edge. Not surprisingly, it entered the wood easier than the A1/Busses, but I really had to keep pounding on it with the hammer (and pounding relatively harder than on the A1/Busses) to get the wood split. The coating on this blade also suffered from the hammer blows, but in a way different from the Busses. The coating on the C/U7 seems more plasticene than the more ceramic-brittle coating on the Busses. The damage to the C/U7 coating looked like bubbles or displaced tiny piles of scraped coating. The places that were bare of coating on the C/U7 looked to have less sharply defined edges than the Busses. It looked like the hammer blows had squished the C/U7 coating until it was so thin it broke, whereas the Busse coating looked like it had fractured down through its entire depth all at once. There also looked to be an undercoating (like primer under paint) that remained in some of the gaps where the C/U7 coating had been removed. I don't have a microscope, so these are just my rough eyeball impressions of how the damage looked.
