Scandi, just how good are they?

[Temper]

I couldn't let this go. You already know the answer to that, don't you?

Doc

LOL, hey man I'm married with a small kid, I dont drink any more and I dont smoke. I gotta have at least one more vice after coffee

 

[Cliff Stamp]

Yeah I would like to see the Rc info too along with the spec and use.

I don't think in general this is going to happen though for obvious reasons. The secret nature of the steel is one of the most common sources of promotional ability.

It stains easy but there always has to be give and take. I can live with having to keep it clean.

The corrosion resistance while low compared to stainless steels is high compared to general other cutlery steels. It isn't like it rusts as easily as L6. I would like to see the data on lower tempering temperatures and cold treatment as tempering hot has issues with carbide precipitation and I would be curious as to the torsional strength/toughness peaks as the behavior is in general complex with high alloy tool steels. There is a lot of chromium in 3V, the problem is getting it in the austenite and not having it come back out in the quench or temper.

I think I am leaning to FC at the moment, not by much, but considering sharpening and strength its hard to beat..

Generally mult-beveling is superior. One way to look at it is that a typical scandinavian blade is just a full ground blade waiting to be made. If I took a Mora 2000 to a belt sander, I could rip off all the unnecessary steel from the sides and make a fully flat ground blade out of it. All that steel on the sides certainly doesn't make it cut better or be easier to sharpen.

-Cliff

 

[Abe]

If I took a Mora 2000 to a belt sander, I could rip off all the unnecessary steel from the sides and make a fully flat ground blade out of it. All that steel on the sides certainly doesn't make it cut better or be easier to sharpen.

-Cliff[/QUOTE]
Probably right. This scandinavian grind thingy's probably just a 'flash in the pan'....it'll never catch on

 

[Cliff Stamp]

It is the cheapest way to make a knife, flat stock and a bevel. This has interest to a lot of makers especially when they can be sold for high end prices and there will obviously always be a market for inexpensive knives for users. I would rather a forged parang than a machete but I can't buy the parang for $5 and sometimes a machete is enough. Machetes have the same profile as scandinavian blades, so do really cheap stainless kitchen knives, really shallow grinds on flat stock, this is a common grind on inexpensive knives, simply a cost issue. It is kind of amusing that would get a reputation as a optimal "bushcraft" blade. I just sharpened a dozen small stainless blades with that profile last weekend for paring/utility knives. I converted them all to full profiles and applied a minimal secondary bevel, 0.005" thick. They cut much better and sharpen much faster with all the extra steel ripped off.

-Cliff

 

[North61]

The original question was how good is a Scandi knife...... well after spending some time with Kochanski and getting our outdoor ed program going I have witnesses and learned what a scandi can do and I would say that they are fantastic.

The through tang is much tougher than you would think. The single bevel designs are fantastic wood working knives and the micro beveled Finnish type designs great hunters and all-rounders.

Fantastic gear.....Kochanski's the man....

 

[Temper]

Thank You North61

What thickness stock were you using and what was the hardest task you put them to?

 

[Cliff Stamp]

The original question was how good is a Scandi knife......

In comparison to a fully ground blade was the actual question, convex to be specific. If can concert a scandinavian blade to a full ground one by grinding all the unecessary steel above the edge away, do you really need an edge on a blade for wood carving to be 0.125" thick when a large bowie knife for chopping has to be about 0.025". Does having all that extra steel there make it cut better or worse. Does it make it easier or worse to sharpen. How many people raving about the performance of scandinavian blades have actually used blade with primary grinds with similar edge angles. That edge profile by the way of 10 degrees per side isn't close to the limit of what is needed for wood cutting. I have knives that do that which are ground at 3/5 degrees at the edge. Try using that and then going back to a Mora and seeing if you are still impressed by how well they cut.

-Cliff

 

[North61]

Cliff no offense but when Mors Kochanski talks or demonstrates I listen. When you write I tend to drift off at times especially when you seem so dang argumentative and territorial with these threads.

Temper.. My Scandis go from .100 to .160 or so. I have done some helacious stuff to even the plastic handled Moras. Batoning won't phase them but I admit I have never had my 275 pound brother do chinups on one.

The .160 is a self handled Helle with a caribou antler. birch bark and oak handle. It's tough enough to tackle any likely task.

I have done a lot of woodwork over the last few months. Everything from whittling to log splitting. I like the thinner scandi's the best myself but I am sure if you take a lawnmower blade and reprofile it with a 13.7 degree concave mirror finish and a duct tape handle you will have a better rig.

 

[Temper]

North61

Thanks again.

Thinking about it I have handled every Fallkniven they make and can easily take one for my own. I dont own a scandi grind knife so I think I may go ahead and see how it works out. On your thicker stock model, how high up the blade does the grind go, and at what angle?

Cheers!

 

[North61]

The thicker Helle(.160) has a fairly short bevel (see picture) of .250. The Karesuando (.125) has a more Finnish type bevel of .380 with a microbevel.
People who have kept the main bevel angle and ground out the microbevel of the Karesuando report durability issues. The cheap Mora's (.10) have about a .250 bevel as well but as they are thinner than the big Helle are less obtuse.

An advantage of the single bevel knife is that when making long slicing cuts on wood the bevel acts as a guide and allows consistency and precision in cutting. The bevel also acts as a sharpening guide and it has been said that they can be sharpened by a blind man. When you lock the bevel in on the sharpening stone you have a great tactile guide for maintaining the angle.

 

[Cliff Stamp]

An advantage of the single bevel knife is that when making long slicing cuts on wood the bevel acts as a guide and allows consistency and precision in cutting.

This is a chisel, and why drawknives have that profile, as do axes for shaping logs. It however has problems when turning the blade in cuts and when cutting cross grain, such as making points, carving notches, or actually cutting through wood, which is why in general wood working blades don't have that profile.

The bevel also acts as a sharpening guide and it has been said that they can be sharpened by a blind man. When you lock the bevel in on the sharpening stone you have a great tactile guide for maintaining the angle.

You can do the same thing with a primary grind, Boye showed how to do this years ago using the guard. You also don't need precision for shaping, so unless you are not applying a micro-bevel this has no use anyway. Frank K also showed pictures of plastic handled Moras shatter in batoning, no pullups, but that would be easily possible if you loaded the knife through the width and not the thickness.

Both of these issues by the way are also found in japanese wood cuting tools which have the disadvantges of the single bevel grind eliminated by use of hollow relief bevels. There is no performance arguement against that upgrade, and no one who has ever used the japanese hollow ground chisels would take the flat backed ones after the first time they were sharpened.

As for it being my viewpoint, these issues are not as I have stated ideas that I have simply origionated. As I have noted they draw heavily from discussions with makers and other users as well as my own experience. People who are not into selling knives but understanding performance and who also *never* argue that you should listen to them because of who they are but instead discuss the idea independently of who proposed it, because facts and logic are independent of the speaker - hpye however depends on people being willing to give credit to an arguement because of who said it and not what it actually says.

The single bevel hype engine was pretty strong for awhile, but a number of people are reaching the same conclusions as I have outlined in the above about multi-beveling after comparing the knives to full ground blades and looking at the issue critically and are voicing their conclusions publically. It is for example highly illogical to praise micro-beveling and then ignore primary grinds when they are the exact same thing.

The main reason people by the way have durability issues with the single bevel is that they are usually hollow ground as again this is the cheapest way to make the knives. This is why when people convert them to convex there is a huge increase in durability. This is incorrectly attributed to the convex nature of the grind. The long Mora I have tore up readily on woods the first time I used it. The edge looked like this :

Once the edge was sharpened until the hollow removed the durability was fine and it easily handled limbing of hardwoods :

The performance would of course increase with the addition of a primary grind and suitable adjustment of the edge bevel to compensate, essentially making it into a small parang.

-Cliff

 

[North61]

I'll try to keep an open mind and experiment with some of these ideas on my own. In the meantime my scandi knives are heading with me to the woods as part of my permanent kit.

I have gone through a lot of knife drills over the past few months making all kinds of stuff from snowshoes, to shelters and traps. I have made mortice joints and whittled roosters. My students have done the same. A 10.00 Mora is a force to be reckoned with.

 

[Paul Davidson]

Somebody needs to tell all the Scandinavians that have survived in the outdoors and crafted different items with their knives that the knives were (and are) no good. The Sami of today will be shocked to learn their people barely survived. Must have been luck.

 

[North61]

Somebody needs to tell all the Scandinavians that have survived in the outdoors and crafted different items with their knives that the knives were (and are) no good. The Sami of today will be shocked to learn their people barely survived. Must have been luck.

Now that's pretty funny. I lived with the Inuit for a decade and they had a good natured contempt for my attempts to improve on the systems that had evolved over hundreds of generations. When you have skill the 10.00 knife is made to perform and is used till it is worn away and then replaced.

White folk tend to spend hundreds and end up with something that is too precious to use and when pressed into service does no better (actually usually worse) than the inexpensive job from the Northern store.

Unfortunately Inuks or Sami or other true outdoors people tend not to hang out on the Internet.

 

[TLM]

Somebody needs to tell all the Scandinavians that have survived in the outdoors and crafted different items with their knives that the knives were (and are) no good. The Sami of today will be shocked to learn their people barely survived. Must have been luck.

I have tried a couple of times to explain the differences in knife usage traditions here in the Old North but last time a was called a liar and told to go tell fairy tales elsewhere - the idiot just could not take the fact that somebody dares to use a knife differently. :yawn:

One just learns from an early age that a knife takes just that much and for the rest one uses a proper tool for each job, like an axe or a billhook or whatever.

Very simple actually - and has worked for the last 1500 years or so. It's not the only way but one of the ways that demonstrably works.

TLM

 

[kel_aa]

Somebody needs to tell all the Scandinavians that have survived in the outdoors and crafted different items with their knives that the knives were (and are) no good.

Are they absolutely the best general purpose small/medium sized blade design possible? If not then you'll have to agree that there are practical qualities/properties that it does not have.

No one has said how bad a 10 dollar Mora knife is. What has been proposed is how a Mora, despite being 10 dollars, is not all it can be.

 

[Cliff Stamp]

No one has said how bad a 10 dollar Mora knife is.

Generally it depends on what it is being compared to and in what regard. Yes if you compare a Mora to a SRK it looks really efficient for wood carving, until you resharpen the SRK anyway which actually takes a shorter period of time than to remove the hollow from Mora's as Jim Aston has noted in detail, which is really ironic. However compare the Mora to an Opinel or flat ground blade with a suitable edge profile and see what happens, now blunt the two of them extensively and resharpen the 1 mm bevel on the Deerhunter and 10 mm bevel on the Mora and see what happens. Look at how other cultures have approached the same issue and have improved the design such as the japanese use of hollows.

One of the most obvious commentaries on that grind is to look at really cheap knives and note they have the same type of "scandinavian" bevel. The $1 kitchen knives or the fantasy bowies with 2" wide blades and half an inch of grind. It is amusing that a sabre grind on a Mora is somehow ultimate performance and the ideal bushcraft geometry when on every other knife it is regarded as directly inferior to full grinds and uniformly known to be a cost saving measure because all that flat stock required no grinding. Show anyone a really low sabre flat stamped chef's knife and one with a full grind and distal taper from Wilson and see how many pick the cheaper one as the optimal blade. It is the exact same geometrical arguement.

People also of course survived for a very long time without knives, and lots of traditional behavior persists for reasons that have nothing to do with it actually being the best way to do something. This should be obvious in any culture as well as where we would be if that was actually the dominant viewpoint.

-Cliff

 

[Paul Davidson]

Are they absolutely the best general purpose small/medium sized blade design possible? If not then you'll have to agree that there are practical qualities/properties that it does not have.

No one has said how bad a 10 dollar Mora knife is. What has been proposed is how a Mora, despite being 10 dollars, is not all it can be.

There is no "best," especially when comparing apples to oranges. Everything in this thread is nothing more than opinion.

 

[kel_aa]

There is no "best," especially when comparing apples to oranges. Everything in this thread is nothing more than opinion.

Forgive me for being anal: so tradition aside, it is possible for replace what one can use a Mora for with a different blade design and prehaps it'll be more suitable? As long as we are all clear on that...

Opinions are what properties you want in a knife to suit your purposes.

How a knife performs in a certain task can be qualitatively, if not quantitatively measured. So that is not an opinion.

 

[Temper]

How a knife performs in a certain task can be qualitatively, if not quantitatively measured. So that is not an opinion.

Exactly. I have tested a Hollow grind, full flat utility and a full convex, all with similar stock and blade sizes and the full convex in my experience out cut them all. I found fuzz sticks, branch cuts, stock revoval and splitting easier with the full convex than anything else I have ever used. I have never used a knife with a Scandi grind, so I really want to put it against the FC and see how it fares. I almost bought an EKA that is about the same spec as the hand made I was thinking about but didnt get around to it. Maybe I should just buy that and see whats what! What-o!