- Joined
- Jan 28, 2006
- Messages
- 7,035
Well, got the R-10 I ordered last week.
This knife surprised me. I thought it was going to be much thinner and lighter and smaller than it is. I wasn't sure I would like it.
Getting it in hand isa different story. It's much larger and heavier than I thought it would be, yet more usable than most thick, heavy knives for the ever popular "bushcrafting". Let me 'splain.
OK the knife is 9 7/8" OAL, with a 5 1/16" blade and 4 13/16" handle. It is a full, exposed tang. The handle is 3/4" wide and the blade, well it's .275" thick at the tang! WOW. So how is this good for fine bushcrafting? Well, it has two features that I find missing on most of the commercial knives out there:
1.) Distal taper
2.) a fine tip.
The distal taper takes it from .275" at the tang to .140" just before the primary bevel at the tip. So it's bulldog strong, yet can do fine work. The other thing is the fine tip. It's a pet peeve of mine with commercial knives that they may come with fine, sharp edges great for slicing, and a tip that has about a 90 degree included angle and has trouble punching through plastic or packing tape. If you grind them back to a fine tip, they look stupid, because now the tip bevel is about 1/2" with the final bevel on the rest of the blade at about 3/16", due to a lack of distal taper.
The R-10, however with its distal taper and .400" bevel leave a nice, fine, sharp point good for detail work.
The grind is what I'll call a modified scandi. There is some taper (from .210" to .170" at the middle point of the blade) from the spine toward the edge, then a final single bevel to the edge. Very strong, yet slices well (at least it did a real number on a slab of London Broil).
It was sharp out of the box, but the edge was rolled to one side (no doubt a result of the heavy buffing). So it was easy to straighten the edge and get it very sharp. Like I said, it did a number on a slab of London Broil. The grind also made it very good at cutting some soft vegetation in the yard, as well as harder vegetation (palmetto stalks), and still carved up fuzz sticks well, with nice, curly strands.
The blade is wide enough to get a good pinch grip to choke up on the blade to within about a half inch of the tip for fine carving and notching.
While this blade may seem too large and ungainly, it actually works quite well, and for guys with large hands, it's a perfect fit. I had originally wanted a JKM-1 for this purposed, and missed it on the DOTD where I picked this up, but this is, for me, the better of the two because of the longer handle, and I'm actually feeling lucky that I missed the JKM-1.
This knife surprised me. I thought it was going to be much thinner and lighter and smaller than it is. I wasn't sure I would like it.
Getting it in hand isa different story. It's much larger and heavier than I thought it would be, yet more usable than most thick, heavy knives for the ever popular "bushcrafting". Let me 'splain.
OK the knife is 9 7/8" OAL, with a 5 1/16" blade and 4 13/16" handle. It is a full, exposed tang. The handle is 3/4" wide and the blade, well it's .275" thick at the tang! WOW. So how is this good for fine bushcrafting? Well, it has two features that I find missing on most of the commercial knives out there:
1.) Distal taper
2.) a fine tip.
The distal taper takes it from .275" at the tang to .140" just before the primary bevel at the tip. So it's bulldog strong, yet can do fine work. The other thing is the fine tip. It's a pet peeve of mine with commercial knives that they may come with fine, sharp edges great for slicing, and a tip that has about a 90 degree included angle and has trouble punching through plastic or packing tape. If you grind them back to a fine tip, they look stupid, because now the tip bevel is about 1/2" with the final bevel on the rest of the blade at about 3/16", due to a lack of distal taper.
The R-10, however with its distal taper and .400" bevel leave a nice, fine, sharp point good for detail work.
The grind is what I'll call a modified scandi. There is some taper (from .210" to .170" at the middle point of the blade) from the spine toward the edge, then a final single bevel to the edge. Very strong, yet slices well (at least it did a real number on a slab of London Broil).
It was sharp out of the box, but the edge was rolled to one side (no doubt a result of the heavy buffing). So it was easy to straighten the edge and get it very sharp. Like I said, it did a number on a slab of London Broil. The grind also made it very good at cutting some soft vegetation in the yard, as well as harder vegetation (palmetto stalks), and still carved up fuzz sticks well, with nice, curly strands.
The blade is wide enough to get a good pinch grip to choke up on the blade to within about a half inch of the tip for fine carving and notching.
While this blade may seem too large and ungainly, it actually works quite well, and for guys with large hands, it's a perfect fit. I had originally wanted a JKM-1 for this purposed, and missed it on the DOTD where I picked this up, but this is, for me, the better of the two because of the longer handle, and I'm actually feeling lucky that I missed the JKM-1.
