Riverwarrior & Rustyboy - I'm gonna end up keeling over in a sugar coma that day!
Wroughndt - I spent the first several minutes of the video talking about the different options and reasoning behind the designs, showed the sheaths and some of the carry options, and demonstrated a few of the lanyard options that the flared-tube rivets give you.
All the testing was shown with an 18" Wrecker and an 18" War Chief. I demonstrated cutting into a piece of seasoned oak firewood as a basis of comparison. I did lose some energy from the short length of the firewood making it bounce around when struck, but it bit into the wood well and my cameraman got hit by the flying chips of wood several times.
Then I moved on to cutting the corner off a cinderblock, smashing it, and using both spike designs to bust it into pieces. No damage and it cut wood like before. After that I did a deliberate overstrike onto the web of the cinderblock with the neck of the Wrecker. No damage to the neck, but I hit the point of the sharpened inner beard on the cinderblock in the process and rolled the point over a bit. That's both bad and good, as I think I ground the point a little thin on that one and it picked up that damage. However, it took slight damage without catastrophic failure, i.e. snapping off, which is what I want with the heat treatment. None of my prototype tests that focused on the point of the beard (the weakest part of the design by necessity as it is the sharpest point with the least steel), and further testing on the points of the beards in the video didn't pick up more damage, so I really think it was simply I took the grind down too far on that particular one.
After the overstrike test, I chopped some more cinderblock pieces before moving on to heavy gauge electrical cord that was the 220 plug for the clothes dryer we chopped up in the demo. It took some small nicks in the edge, but cut almost all the way through the cord; i.e. cut all the way through all of the thick copper wires except the last one, and cut most of the way through that one. After that, back to the wood cutting where it chopped as well as before.
Then I moved to cutting into the clothes dryer with the War Chief. It's at least 30 years old and has sheet metal comparably thick to modern cars. It did some minor damage to the sharp edge of the 'hawk, but once again chopped the seasoned oak as well as it had started out doing. Then I tested the point of the beard pulling it down into the dryer and opening up large holes. No damage to the point. Tried it with the damaged beard of the Wrecker, with no difference in penetration.
Next up was testing the spikes, first showing the penetration of the War Chief's combat spike vs. the Wrecker's pry spike going through the dryer sheet metal. Both penetrated well, but the combat spike penetrated deeper more easily, as expected. Then we stepped it up by spiking the cut-off end of a propane tank. Both penetrated, neither took any damage, even when deliberately hitting where there were two layers of the steel. Somewhere in there was further chopping with the edge into the corner of the dryer, where the metal folds over and is strongest. No further damage to the edge.
Then I used the pry spike to wrench the back panel off the dryer, ripping it off the screws holding it on. After that, I used the Wrecker to bust a couple of padlocks. It was the same 'hawk that I had previously busted two padlocks, so by the end it had busted four in addition to the other tests. It took more hits in the video to bust the locks than it did the previous two, so the spike had gone through quite a bit of shock by the time I got through. There was some slight deformation to the tip of the spike, but that was it.
The rest of the video was general wailing on the dryer with the edge, spike, and overstriking with the neck of the handle. No further damage, and at the end, it still had a pointy spike and an edge that would make chips fly from hardwood.
So, general conclusion was that it's a cutting tool that does well at wood-chopping duties, and while not indestructible (which would compromise its other desirable properties such as nimbleness and cutting ability), is very tough and should take minor damage without failing catastrophically when used for breaching and vehicle extraction. That's exactly what I was aiming at. We also talked some about combat application, but the main focus of the video was on durability and cutting ability.
Though it does have occasional shots of my shop cat and me being silly since I tend to be a bit dry when I go into "teacher mode".
