Hello everyone, I thought I'd repost an edited version of my tests that I posted in "THE holow handle knife thread", for those who did not follow that particular thread.
So I finally did my "Survival Chopping" contest, over two days with more to come, with some quite surprising results... Not an updated line-up...:
The most important thing I found out is really rather weird: It has to do with a phenomenon that is more pronounced on hollow handles, but is to my mind somewhat universal, in different ways, to all 9" class knives (or less) used as chopping implements: The violence to the hand takes an unexpected form I have never heard described: I call it the "Pommel Down Bite", and the fact hollow handles don't taper may make this more pronounced.
Curiously, now that I am aware of the the "hollow Handle Roll", that phenomenon never occurred once...: It takes fairly "grainy" wood for this to be a concern apparently. In any case, once understood, it is easy to hold the knife and hit squarely enough to prevent this in any wood.
Basically the "Pommel Down Bite" is the reaction any knife has when the blade is abruptly stopped by wood forward of the guard: Within the hand, the pommel is what snaps down with the most violence, no matter how the knife is held... The result is the most affected area is shown where the band aid is on my hand, the knife being in a position to illustrate (and exaggerate) its reaction to hitting the wood...:
This reaction it turns out is crucial to how the knife will perform: It is not the performance itself however: The Randall Model 18 has absolutely terrible "Pommel Down Bite", at least with big cord around its handle, yet its chopping performance is surprisingly good, thanks to the thin edge and hollow grind...: If you make the mistake of putting any "largeish" cord around its handle, it will make it harder to avoid blistering your hand in seconds, depending on how tightly it is wrapped, and how "hard" the cord surface is...
This is why, although the Neeley SA9's handle appears to have cord that is too smooth, ultra-fine cord is in fact the way to go for these knives... Rougher cord does feel better for "normal" whittling and general use. It also conveys an impression of greater security and quality. But at the real "emergency" chopping use that the larger size implies, the actual cost of this rougher cord is great in my opinion (rougher cord does feel much nicer for finer tasks)... I think even callused hands would get chewed up in the area of my band-aid, because the cylindrical shape simply does not conform to the hand there.
"Normal" non-cylindrical knife handles do not bite in the same way, but they are equally deterrent to hard use by imparting shock in that area: This means you don't get blisters, but the chopping performance is actually lower than a hollow handle, because the impact has a reverberation in the hand that is a deterrent to hitting or gripping hard enough...: At least the hollow handle is the same wide width from any angle, so it encourages hard hits...: Being wider between the thumb and forefinger, the grip "sinks" backwards into the hand's web less, making for a more "rigid" connection between arm and knife: The weight of the arm is thus contributing more to the impact of the chop.
Because of its very poor edge geometry (15° per side on a monstrous 1.6 mm edge base), I almost did not include the Neeley SA9, because I felt it would have no chance at all against the thin edge of a Randall Model 12, or the blade-heavy heft of a "Battle-Mistress defeating" San Mai III Trailmaster -see various eye-opening videos-... (In a previous post I speculated the SA9 would rank dead last...). Imagine my utter astonishment to find, on the second day, that the Neeley SA9 was not only the most confortable chopper, but that despite its pathetic thick edge that I had applied poorly (the edge had an undetected wire edge that bent over heavily during the test), it outperformed everything by a large margin... Narrow non-chopping-looking blade and all...:
As I expected the Model 12 proved better than the San Mai III Trailmaster, but not by much... I attribute this to 3 factors: 1-The stock is 0.22" (all Randalls are always way under the claimed stock thickness -except maybe for my Clinton dagger-), while the Trailmaster is a true 5/16". 2-The Model 12's point taper is very long, not carrying full thickness anywhere near the point. 3-The edge is 0.020" thin (wonderful), but has a slight "convexing" that swells just above the V-edge bevel, maybe after some customers complained they couldn't "twist" the blade sideways out of the wood, like every incompetent user has a right to do, without "rippling" the edge... Fortunately the Model 14 and 18 don't display this nonsense, but they are of course not as great choppers... One of the reasons the Al Mar "Special Warfare" chops so far above its size and weight range is it doesn't have this "swelled edge" nonsense either... (One thing I noted though, is that the deeper "blade trapping" bites sure scratched up the Aus-6 finish more, despite the edge-holding being quite good)
So the Neeley SA9 was by some margin the best chopper, yet narrow-bladed and so not tall above the edge... No rolling tendency either (maybe the wood used just didn't have the coarse grain to cause this)... The performance of the smooth cylindrical handle was key to this I think, combined with the full 1/4" blade thickness being carried quite close to the massively strong point. The hollow grind must have helped too, even with the edge thickness... Other than that, considering my crap wire edge that became instantly dull, I'm quite stumped... With handle heavy balance, due to the heavy undrilled solid steel pommel, and the pathetic thick edge in very bad condition, it really defied comprehension, even after a few match-ups...: What will it do with a better more closed-angle edge that is not completely broken off as it folded?!?:
The 3 tops ones, aside from the SA9, were the Randall Model 12, the CS Trailmaster and maybe the TOPS Hellion 3rd, but that seemed to do poorly in a later rematch... The hooked handle end was a bit unconfortable, if not terrible. Where the Hellion scored was in a separate test in which I deliberately used lazy low energy swings: It beat out the two others by quite a lot after 20 strokes:
Lazy strokes are less risky, but definitely seem too unproductive for me...
One thing I noticed is that all knives struggled to make headway after 20-25 strokes, hitting a flat expanse of wood, because I did not go "around" the log to get at a "peak". This was an attempt to insure consistency, but it may have instead "flattened" the differences...: Any slight difference should be considered larger than it looks I would think... I went per count, mostly 35, and did not count obvious misses... All knives were phonebook paper push-cutting sharp, including the wire-edged SA9... Not much edge loss was noted, except on the much lighter use the first day on the Hellion (no loss on the heavier second day!), and the SA9's crumbling wire edge of course...
The First Blood did poorly, as I expected, given the 0.043" edge bevel (later modified to 0.030", but not tested) long thinned-out point and 0.23" blade stock. Its "pommel-down bite" was the most vicious outside the Model 18, but all knives (except the SA9!) felt like they were tackling too much on this fallen wood: I chose it for its rigidity and straightness...
It seems blade stock thickness, and how far that carries out to the point, are far more important than I had assumed, especially compared to the blade's depth profile, which seems to have little effect if the SA9's narrow profile is any guide (this later was contradicted by the Lile "Mission" performance with a flat grind)... The Hellion is not helped that much by its Tanto point because it is even thinner stock than the Randall at 0.19-0.20"... Note how heavy-hitting the Al Mar is, for its size, being a full true 0.25" stock sitting on a true un-swelled 0.020" edge...
A final point I'll quickly make is that the "pommel down Bite" really changed my perception of how chopping worked: To minimize the pain over long stretches of chopping, there was no way to use the "sweet spot" often described as at, or beyond halfway down the blade... This was simply impossible: To minimize "Pommel Down Bite", only the portion of the blade closest to the handle could be used... The only mild exception to that was the Cold Steel Trailmaster, which could be used to hit at mid-blade, because its handle was so different it didn't behave like the others. I found the handle unpleasant in a very different, "surface spiky" if unfocussed way, compared to most of the others. The handle shape seemed to "hide" any "Pommel Down Bite", so the blade could be used to hit further out in front of the guard, but the handle's thinness was so unsecure the blade still "reared up" quite a bit, reducing efficiency: It obviously "sank" backwards into the hand, reducing chopping performance vs obviously lesser blades...
I had never heard before that hitting close to the guard was a help to chopping confort, but for me it proved emphatically true for a wide range of 9" sized knives... I suppose the hugely increasing mid-handle "swell" of Busse knives allows moving out the hits away from the handle, somehow, but, on these much lighter 9" knives, I could not imagine the extra pain of the ever increasing "Pommel Down" impact that would happen if you did that... This was the most surprising finding for me...
Come to think of it, how many times have you seen any of these knives, besides the apparently unusual Trailmaster (and similarly blade-heavy BK-9), tested in prolonged chopping cessions? Not often...
Gaston
So I finally did my "Survival Chopping" contest, over two days with more to come, with some quite surprising results... Not an updated line-up...:
The most important thing I found out is really rather weird: It has to do with a phenomenon that is more pronounced on hollow handles, but is to my mind somewhat universal, in different ways, to all 9" class knives (or less) used as chopping implements: The violence to the hand takes an unexpected form I have never heard described: I call it the "Pommel Down Bite", and the fact hollow handles don't taper may make this more pronounced.
Curiously, now that I am aware of the the "hollow Handle Roll", that phenomenon never occurred once...: It takes fairly "grainy" wood for this to be a concern apparently. In any case, once understood, it is easy to hold the knife and hit squarely enough to prevent this in any wood.
Basically the "Pommel Down Bite" is the reaction any knife has when the blade is abruptly stopped by wood forward of the guard: Within the hand, the pommel is what snaps down with the most violence, no matter how the knife is held... The result is the most affected area is shown where the band aid is on my hand, the knife being in a position to illustrate (and exaggerate) its reaction to hitting the wood...:
This reaction it turns out is crucial to how the knife will perform: It is not the performance itself however: The Randall Model 18 has absolutely terrible "Pommel Down Bite", at least with big cord around its handle, yet its chopping performance is surprisingly good, thanks to the thin edge and hollow grind...: If you make the mistake of putting any "largeish" cord around its handle, it will make it harder to avoid blistering your hand in seconds, depending on how tightly it is wrapped, and how "hard" the cord surface is...
This is why, although the Neeley SA9's handle appears to have cord that is too smooth, ultra-fine cord is in fact the way to go for these knives... Rougher cord does feel better for "normal" whittling and general use. It also conveys an impression of greater security and quality. But at the real "emergency" chopping use that the larger size implies, the actual cost of this rougher cord is great in my opinion (rougher cord does feel much nicer for finer tasks)... I think even callused hands would get chewed up in the area of my band-aid, because the cylindrical shape simply does not conform to the hand there.
"Normal" non-cylindrical knife handles do not bite in the same way, but they are equally deterrent to hard use by imparting shock in that area: This means you don't get blisters, but the chopping performance is actually lower than a hollow handle, because the impact has a reverberation in the hand that is a deterrent to hitting or gripping hard enough...: At least the hollow handle is the same wide width from any angle, so it encourages hard hits...: Being wider between the thumb and forefinger, the grip "sinks" backwards into the hand's web less, making for a more "rigid" connection between arm and knife: The weight of the arm is thus contributing more to the impact of the chop.
Because of its very poor edge geometry (15° per side on a monstrous 1.6 mm edge base), I almost did not include the Neeley SA9, because I felt it would have no chance at all against the thin edge of a Randall Model 12, or the blade-heavy heft of a "Battle-Mistress defeating" San Mai III Trailmaster -see various eye-opening videos-... (In a previous post I speculated the SA9 would rank dead last...). Imagine my utter astonishment to find, on the second day, that the Neeley SA9 was not only the most confortable chopper, but that despite its pathetic thick edge that I had applied poorly (the edge had an undetected wire edge that bent over heavily during the test), it outperformed everything by a large margin... Narrow non-chopping-looking blade and all...:
As I expected the Model 12 proved better than the San Mai III Trailmaster, but not by much... I attribute this to 3 factors: 1-The stock is 0.22" (all Randalls are always way under the claimed stock thickness -except maybe for my Clinton dagger-), while the Trailmaster is a true 5/16". 2-The Model 12's point taper is very long, not carrying full thickness anywhere near the point. 3-The edge is 0.020" thin (wonderful), but has a slight "convexing" that swells just above the V-edge bevel, maybe after some customers complained they couldn't "twist" the blade sideways out of the wood, like every incompetent user has a right to do, without "rippling" the edge... Fortunately the Model 14 and 18 don't display this nonsense, but they are of course not as great choppers... One of the reasons the Al Mar "Special Warfare" chops so far above its size and weight range is it doesn't have this "swelled edge" nonsense either... (One thing I noted though, is that the deeper "blade trapping" bites sure scratched up the Aus-6 finish more, despite the edge-holding being quite good)
So the Neeley SA9 was by some margin the best chopper, yet narrow-bladed and so not tall above the edge... No rolling tendency either (maybe the wood used just didn't have the coarse grain to cause this)... The performance of the smooth cylindrical handle was key to this I think, combined with the full 1/4" blade thickness being carried quite close to the massively strong point. The hollow grind must have helped too, even with the edge thickness... Other than that, considering my crap wire edge that became instantly dull, I'm quite stumped... With handle heavy balance, due to the heavy undrilled solid steel pommel, and the pathetic thick edge in very bad condition, it really defied comprehension, even after a few match-ups...: What will it do with a better more closed-angle edge that is not completely broken off as it folded?!?:
The 3 tops ones, aside from the SA9, were the Randall Model 12, the CS Trailmaster and maybe the TOPS Hellion 3rd, but that seemed to do poorly in a later rematch... The hooked handle end was a bit unconfortable, if not terrible. Where the Hellion scored was in a separate test in which I deliberately used lazy low energy swings: It beat out the two others by quite a lot after 20 strokes:
Lazy strokes are less risky, but definitely seem too unproductive for me...
One thing I noticed is that all knives struggled to make headway after 20-25 strokes, hitting a flat expanse of wood, because I did not go "around" the log to get at a "peak". This was an attempt to insure consistency, but it may have instead "flattened" the differences...: Any slight difference should be considered larger than it looks I would think... I went per count, mostly 35, and did not count obvious misses... All knives were phonebook paper push-cutting sharp, including the wire-edged SA9... Not much edge loss was noted, except on the much lighter use the first day on the Hellion (no loss on the heavier second day!), and the SA9's crumbling wire edge of course...
The First Blood did poorly, as I expected, given the 0.043" edge bevel (later modified to 0.030", but not tested) long thinned-out point and 0.23" blade stock. Its "pommel-down bite" was the most vicious outside the Model 18, but all knives (except the SA9!) felt like they were tackling too much on this fallen wood: I chose it for its rigidity and straightness...
It seems blade stock thickness, and how far that carries out to the point, are far more important than I had assumed, especially compared to the blade's depth profile, which seems to have little effect if the SA9's narrow profile is any guide (this later was contradicted by the Lile "Mission" performance with a flat grind)... The Hellion is not helped that much by its Tanto point because it is even thinner stock than the Randall at 0.19-0.20"... Note how heavy-hitting the Al Mar is, for its size, being a full true 0.25" stock sitting on a true un-swelled 0.020" edge...
A final point I'll quickly make is that the "pommel down Bite" really changed my perception of how chopping worked: To minimize the pain over long stretches of chopping, there was no way to use the "sweet spot" often described as at, or beyond halfway down the blade... This was simply impossible: To minimize "Pommel Down Bite", only the portion of the blade closest to the handle could be used... The only mild exception to that was the Cold Steel Trailmaster, which could be used to hit at mid-blade, because its handle was so different it didn't behave like the others. I found the handle unpleasant in a very different, "surface spiky" if unfocussed way, compared to most of the others. The handle shape seemed to "hide" any "Pommel Down Bite", so the blade could be used to hit further out in front of the guard, but the handle's thinness was so unsecure the blade still "reared up" quite a bit, reducing efficiency: It obviously "sank" backwards into the hand, reducing chopping performance vs obviously lesser blades...
I had never heard before that hitting close to the guard was a help to chopping confort, but for me it proved emphatically true for a wide range of 9" sized knives... I suppose the hugely increasing mid-handle "swell" of Busse knives allows moving out the hits away from the handle, somehow, but, on these much lighter 9" knives, I could not imagine the extra pain of the ever increasing "Pommel Down" impact that would happen if you did that... This was the most surprising finding for me...
Come to think of it, how many times have you seen any of these knives, besides the apparently unusual Trailmaster (and similarly blade-heavy BK-9), tested in prolonged chopping cessions? Not often...
Gaston
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