Accidentally?
Not really, at the very beginning I was working some very small skinning and boning knves that had no reasonable way to do a flat grind or even a recognizable scandi, so I was putting a convex edge directly on a 1/16 inch thick edge.
From there I did some American scandis (I'll explain that) on some 3/32 and 1/8 blades, but I noticed that all of my swedish and finnish blades were either slightly convex or slightly hollow in the grind (convex on the 2 handmade ones, hollow on the 3 mass produces ones)- very slight, but enough to tell with a glass and a steel straight edge.
So I started working on doing a direct convex grind- not specifically as a scandi modification at first- but deliberate. Over time I have tried to work it as close as possible to an American Scandi (that's the machine tool precision laser straight version of a scandi) on a slack belt or leather backed sandpaper.
You do have to modify how you cut a little bit over a scandi, or a flat grind. but my experience is that carving is very similar in performance to a scandi, and you get a lot of edge strength and splitting power from the convex nature of the shoulders of the grind.
With the convex, when you split wood or cut meat, the shoulders push the cut apart, which saves the edge a bit of wear, helps with tracking on softer materials (like meat), and puts stress points on a thicker portion of the blade.
For the most part, to grind it I make a few passes on a platen as if I'm doing a scandi, then move to lightly grinding on a tight slack belt with the stiffest belts I can find. at 80 grit, the blaze ceramics do fine, at 12 and 220 I use the blue norzon belts- but they have to be pretty fresh and tight. They will actually flatten out the 80 grit grind a bit. 320 with an oxide belt that matches the blue zirc belts. From there it varies depending on miscellaneuous factors- sometimes I will smooth it longitudanally with 400 through 800 grits, sometimes I'll get it worked down to a worn 600 belt. I'm leaning more and more to the hand finishing. From there- the JRE strop bat. Seriously, that thing has changed a lot of how I finish blades. The black rouge side is abrasive enough that I can hit it straight from 600 grit and get worked down to hair wiping sharp and mirrored, and that's before I hit the green, pink, and bare leather sides of the bat.
