Let me start by saying that I have always loved the Cold Steel Bushman. I bought my first one two decades ago and it served me well. That first one was made in Taiwan however, not China. It seems like over the last 10 years, I've seen more and more feedback and reviews saying that their Bushman failed after being used as a spear, chopping branches, or while batoning. Even with the originals being made in Taiwan, I have seen way too many SK-5 knives fail prematurely, even from other manufacturers. Maybe this is why almost no one uses it except Cold Steel?
In theory, SK-5 should be a very tough steel. But at this point, there is a large body of evidence that demonstrates that it is brittle when subjected to stress. I say this in comparison to Cold Steel's AUS-8, AUS-10, Carbon V, 52100, O-1, 4116, 1055, 420 Stainless, and San Mai III. All of those have proven much tougher, or when they break, it's very predictable due to the extreme amount of stress being applied. A good example are the Cold Steel Recon Scouts in SK-5. Almost anytime I hear of one breaking, it's the SK-5 version. I almost never hear of one in Carbon V or O-1 breaking by comparison. Same goes with the Carbon V and AUS-8 SRK vs the SK-5 SRK.
I say all of this not because I have any reason to hate on SK-5 steel, but because a lot of people have spent their hard earned money on knives made of SK-5 and are expecting them to perform in survival, military and police situations. At this point, it might be a bit of false hope to rely on this steel when the going gets tough and I think Lynn (as an adviser) and GSM should consider pulling this steel and switching back to AUS-8 or AUS-10. I own several Cold Steel's in SK-5 and I no longer use them in my survival kits because of what I've seen over and over again.
Your thoughts? (Please, no flaming if you disagree. I am a Cold Steel superfan and this is a materials/QC discussion, not a mark against Cold Steel- thanks)
I just watched the video, and after having a good laugh about it, here are my thoughts.
I don't know who the guy is but it kinda seemed to me that he is vehemently anti-Communist China. (Maybe he's from Taiwan.) I only watched it once, and I'm not quite sure I understood some of what he was saying, but it sounded like he was saying the knife is crap because it was made in China. If it's true that it's made in communist China, (and I hate everything made in communist China), I agree with the guy that almost everything made in China is crap, so I thought that was hilarious.
Where I have to disagree with the guy, though, is that the knife actually took a very impressive amount of abuse before it broke. I don't know about you guys, but I was impressed with the toughness. It took a tremendous bend before it finally snapped. I didn't measure with a protractor or anything, but it sure looked like something close to a 90 degree bend. The guy almost stabbed himself accidentally as he broke the knife. I'm not a knife maker or professional knife tester, but don't almost all knives break before they bend 35-40 degrees? Isn't the British proof test 20 degrees for a sword? Isn't the American Bladesmith Society Master Smith test 35 degrees? In past years, I have checked on the ABS requirements once or twice, but I'm too lazy to do it right now, and I can't remember exactly.
So actually, it seems to me that this knife did very well in this test.
I don't recall seeing many SK5 blades snapping on youtube. It's supposed to be equivalent to 1080 American. It should be tougher than many cheap stainless steels. But performance still comes down to heat treat. The Bushman is not exactly a high performance, high quality blade. It is a cheap, poor man's survival knife. And just to use common sense, you get what you pay for. To draw any overall conclusions about SK5 steel from the Bushman's performance wouldn't be logical.
As for the Recon Scout too, I haven't seen any videos of SK5 versions breaking. But keep in mind that, just because you see a bunch of videos of SK5 versions breaking, whereas there are no videos of any other versions breaking, that doesn't mean that you should draw an inference that SK5 versions are brittle. It's the old sample size/ratio fallacy of statistics. There could be a million SK5 Recon Scouts out there, versus 10,000 Carbon V and 5,000 O-1 versions. Therefore, there could be five SK5 failures out of ONE MILLION knives. And perhaps no one has tested enough Carbon V or O-1 versions to have a failure yet. This is not a scientific result from which you can draw any conclusion.
It could be the same statistical fallacy that was in the news a few months back. Someone said that everyone who died of Coronavirus in the United Kingdom for some specified period of time had received the Covid vaccine previously. Whereas no unvaccinated person had died of the virus. Therefore, it was argued that the Covid vaccine had killed these people, that you would die if you got vaccinated!
It sounds good to the lay person, unfamiliar with statistical arguments. But if you think about it, you'll see the ridiculousness of it. They were comparing
grossly unequal sample sizes. In the UK, nearly everyone had received the vaccine. Therefore, the pool of vaccinated persons was enormous. The pool of the unvaccinated was tiny. You have to expect that there would be many more vaccinated people dying of the virus than unvaccinated, simply because of unequal weighting. In other words, assume that there are 10 million people in the UK and assume that everyone except one person had been vaccinated. Now you can easily see why there would be 10,000 deaths among vaccinated people. For statistical arguments like these to be valid, they have to be based on ratios, not absolute numbers. The absolute numbers can be meaningless.
