pro: ti is between steel and aluminum in terms of weight per unit.
pro: ti absorbs impact better than steel and has a longer fatigue life. I don't know if it's the generally lower hardness, or a property of the material. It feels like you lose less power to vibration or whatever, but I'm no scientist. There is a very solid feel to ti that is hard to explain, and for its weight it feels more powerful, all things being equal.
Agree. I kind of stopped talking about the shock-absorbing property and how it transfers more energy into the target. And how speed transfers more energy into a target than mass. How controllable a ti machete is, which makes it safer and able to be used more quickly and accurately, with way less fatigue. And how it's WAY more fun to use.
I'm going to rebuild my website soon, and it will have a lot of information about this kind of stuff.
con: for applications where a very fine edge is required, ti just is really hard to get screaming sharp. It's so malleable, in a sense, that the burr is very difficult to remove. Polishing the edge is tough, in my experience, because I find I need to finish the burr off with a much lower grit abrasive and end up with a more toothy edge than you might want for cutting meat. It just can't get hard enough to compete at those extremely acute bevels required for certain kinds of knife. Unless its carbidized, but then you definitely don't get a polished edge.
Disagree. A hardened ti blade can get so sharp it's crazy, it just takes a different approach. But agree, although it's kind of easy to sharpen due to low abrasion resistance, it's maybe not the easiest to get screamin' sharp. It does get "hard' enough in that it's very resilient and stable for holding a fine, crisp edge.
Carbidizing is the opposite. It generally makes a toothy edge, rather than the extremely fine edge that's possible with a hardened ti knife with a fine grain. A carbidized one, if made right, is fantastic for cutting things like rope, leather, meat, fibrous stuff.
A hardened ti blade loses nearly all of its malleability, and with most alloys the edge will chip off rather than taking a set, but it takes a hard strike to chip it - not just pressure, due to its flexibility.
But yes the bur seems to drive people crazy. I usually sharpen them with the blade edge facing into a 2000 grit grinder belt, rather than dragging. But for knives I've had the best results with a 10,000 grit stone. I've tried a buffing compound with mixed results, and one of the sharpest edges I ever made was by cutting longitudinally with a super sharp Italian file.
Travis Wuertz sharpened the
Ninja Sword from the Future at blade show, dragging the blade on the belts in the normal fashion. He damn near wore through his jeans swiping that thing trying to remove the bur. But when he was done it was one of the sharpest blades I've ever seen.
Often times to remove the bur I just slice through thick leather like 10 times. Works like a charm.
pro: ti work hardens. I don't know how much, but it's noticeable. Say you have a burr still, just beat on it, eventually the burr breaks off. I've come back from trail sessions and found my Mechatichete is sharper than when I left.
True. It's a fun phenomenon! Ti loves to get beaten. It's a sadomasochistic metal.
A steel machete usually has a fairly obtuse primary bevel, at least the mass produced ones. As we know; geometry cuts! Sam's bevel work is extremely refined for an 'action blade' and it's not without some irony that his bevels have a very 'aerospace' shape to them. Much more acute edge geometry than factory machetes, and similar hardness, but with significant benefits. Significant benefits generally come with significant cost, but this blade with outlast many successive generations of any of us...
The resilience to shock damage is very high, hence why a thin machete can be made with bevels as acute as a kitchen knife and still cut hard green bamboo without edge-damage. I used to do the brass rod test with early machetes, haha. If that tells you anything.
Your machete is TiNb, my personal favorite alloy, which lurks somewhere between fully crispy "hardness" of some ti alloys, and the toughness of a typical, normal titanium alloy that can take a set and has a mushy edge. It's possible for it to take a set but not easy to do. It will also be really difficult to chip it off, short of hitting like a rock or chopping a fire hydrant something else like that.
