Testing Protocol

Digging, prying, cinderblock chopping, cardoor stabbing are non knife tasks.
My shovel will dig better.
My crowbar will pry better.
My hammer will break cinderblocks better.
And why on earth would you stab a car door?

Now, back to knives &cutting.
Standard materials like Mr. Clark mentioned are great.
Mr. Talmadge adds the base line knife to judge against.
This too is great.
I'll add: in addition to the standard tests mentioned above, use the knife for what it is intended for. Clean a bunch of fish with a fillet knife.
Cut meat with a butcher knife.
Whittle with a whittler.
Utill with a utility. ;) :D

: polite rant on :
Chopping a cinderblock with a mora would make as much sense as making a salad with my Dodge.
The right tool for the job. Add good technique and there's nothing you can't do.
A little story. We had to throw out a 8' x 12' rug. It was all rolled up and tied by the time I realized that NY's Strongest (sanitation dept) wouldn't take something that big. While I went upstairs to get a knife, my 95 year old Pop went in the garage, got his rip saw and cut the roll in half without untying it.
Don't expect a tool to do it all for you. You do it all, including selecting the right tool for the job.
: polite rant off :
 
In regards to the materials used for testing knives - I run 3 sorts of tests:

1. Firstly, out of the box test I use - 3/8" Manilla Rope, Saddlery Leather, 1/2" hardwood dowel, cardboard, carrots and chicken legs;

2. Secondly, sharpened to the knifes optimum I use - the manilla rope, saddlery leather, the dowel and cardboard; and

3. Lastly, the field tests (where applicable) I use - depending on the type of knife green eucalyptus branches, dried eucalyptus branches, garden bushes and shrubs, kangaroos, rabbits, foxes, sheepskin, electrical wire, hose pipe and polypipe.

For tests 1 and 2 I keep a stock of most of the materials so that there is as much consistency as I can get. For the field tests it depends on the knife, time of year and the environment (normally the farm). I would describe the majority of my tests as slicing and cutting types, I only chop with a knife that is designed to be used for chopping.
 
Unfortunately tests by humans have too many variables to be applicable across time and different knives. For example, as you gain experience, you will get better at tasks, thus your first tests will be different than your last. In a Knives Illustrated article awhile back about the ABS tests, one knifemaker noted how his knife couldn't make it for one of the tests. He gave it to another more successful knifemaker, and simply the difference in technique resulted in a passing blade. Even if you standardize on materials such as a 4x4 of a particular species of wood, the moisture content, the processing, etc. can give you a 2x4 that will be the same for today's test but not in a year.

The only "scientific" method is by machinery to take out the human element. Unfortunately these machines are controlled by manufacturer's and nobody publishes the results of scientific tests. They are too scared of the bad results. My dream was that one of these blow-hard knife magazines would have bought Schrade's testing equipment and done some real testing. However, this would probably have resulted in a severe loss of advertisers after the results were published and the poor performers were identified.
 
brownshoe said:
For example, as you gain experience, you will get better at tasks, thus your first tests will be different than your last.
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This is why you better use benchmarks. You can then check your performance on them and adjust accordingly, but even then man you better by *really* careful when you compare a current knife to a past one.

Controlling materials also leads to really poor conclusions for the reason Joe noted. They then don't actually apply to how the knife would perform if a person used it. It is trivial to get a knife for example that cuts through standard 2x4's trivially, then take it out on a real piece of wood and it gets mangled. If you are doing this then be very aware of exactly what it is that you are really testing.

If you are just looking at an aspect of cutting ability, a stock 2x4 is fine, they are however not even close to being consistent, they will vary in terms of density by massive amounts even if you get the same grade of the same type of lumber from the same place. Even the same piece of wood from the same tree will vary massively along its length.

If you really want to see the wild effects this can make live watch the Timbersports series. The last time I caught it, the organizer made a huge deal about how the stock rounds they were using were all from the exact same tree. The guys cutting them complained endless about the variation. You could see it in the chops, some axes sailed through it like butter, the others just rang in the wood (same axes, all similar guys).

One of the funniest had to be when Dave Jewett was cutting a block, again same type of stock wood, and his axe would not only not penetrate but bounced right out of the wood. He gave it a couple of chops, the axe rang hard and he stepped off it, refused to cut the block as it was too hard and would ruin his $500 axe. It was funny because I had just spent the day cutting wood and it just struck me how my brother would respond if I said that to him when we were lot clearing.

Even some materials which you would assume are consistent like hemp ropes are not. I have some ropes which cut at ~20 lbs and another roll cuts at ~30 lbs, huge differences, same brand from the same store on the same day. I started random sampling on at least always 12 different rolls to reduce these variances and wood is *WAY* more variable than that.

I bought a dozen basswood dowels for carving comparisons, same wood, same brand, same store. Some are massively harder than others, I later bought dozens more and now again random sample through the lot adding new rods as the sample gets used up, and I don't feel reasonably confident until I have cut a dozen dowels over the period couple of weeks with a few sessions.

I have done chopping comparisons on wood with two blades with hundreds of trial runs, it will eventually go normal, but man do you need a hell of a lot of trials, and I mean a lot, like dozens before you even get a solid well formed peak. You can get a rough feel with just a single chop of course, but if you really want to rank a blade the blades be prepared for a lot of work.

On top of materials you also have the influence of user sharpening. You can't just do one run like that either, if you really want reasonable confidence you have to repeat full sharpenings a few times with each blade to make sure that you are not getting a bias there. This isn't the extent of it either, it is a pretty complicated process if you want to start really being comparative. For example be aware of enviroment, doing a rope comparison in the dead of summer isn't the same as winter, chopping is even more so.

In anything so user dependent you also should be specific, so talk about how you are chopping because method will change the results from user to user, and as well be specific about things like depth of chop so the reader can estimate his strength vs yours and consider that and quantify the geometry of the knife as much as possible to eliminate a huge bias from a blade with a edge that was way thinner or thicker than the factory norm.

Before you start going into detail about what should be done, ask yourself this very important question, exactly what do I want to look at, and what precison do I want to obtain. The latter is the critical part because it determines what you need to do to get your results repeatible. Bottom line though, unless you are a maker using this to promote your work, you better enjoy it as otherwise you are not going to keep doing it for any length of time.

As for why pry, hammer, etc., because if you were not doing that then we would all be using knives which looked like Alvin's. If you are just cutting soft woods and clear materials, and never pry or bang on a knife, there is no reason to use anything but steels like M2, CMP-15V, etc., differential tempers are a waste of time, run the steels full hard, ~66 HRC, and run the edges down to nothing, with a tiny microbevel at ~10 degrees per side.

You elimate this type of work and suddenly all those tactical knives, the heavy duty knives, emergency / survival, etc., all of those have their entire scope of work cut out from under them. That is a horribly biased perspective and just as bad as taking a Mora and just doing really rough work with it and showing poor performance throughout the whole review.

The thing about durability is that it is also *WAY* harder to compare. Take two knives and cut woods and one edge fails and the other doesn't. However that same blade could have cut a hundred sections without fail, it just happened to twist the wrong way. It takes a lot of work here to get reasonable confidence. Note even then be really careful what you actually conclude, it may not be the steel's problem, it could be the geometry of the edge, or even the influence of the handle.

I have been doing this for 10 years and I am still constantly changing how I do it, and constantly updating the older reviews fixing part where the conclusions need to be adjusted because of more extensive work which change the way I interpret the older work. Some times they get harsh comments like "Hey, this method described here has some pretty serious problems such as XXX, check a more recent review such as YYY for a better idea."

Talk to the maker, see what the knife is designed to do, do that if possible or if not something similar, discuss this as well. Now look at other knives you are comparing it to, talk to those makers. Talk to the users who are buying those knives and see what they are interested in. Ask yourself are you doing a review to promote a makers work, or to actually provide information to a discriminating user.

Lastly, provide some method of feedback in your reviews. There should be some way for people to comment and for other people to read it and you should *NOT* have the ability to alter their comments, rec.knives is a great place for this but it has a low readership.

The maker should also be guaranteed the ability for a direct quote, or at least a direct link to a direct quote. Again this assumes you are interested in presenting an unbiased perspective and not just a personal soapbox. If you want to do that, that's fine, but that's a rant not a review.

-Cliff
 
Because a fresh carrot will give you an idea of how the blade will perform in the kitchen as far as slicing goes. If you take a blade with a slim profile like the Calypso Jr E.G. it will slice straight through the carrot at the thick end. Conversely if you take a knife with a thick profile E.G. the Buck Mini-Strider it will start to split the carrot before completing the cut.
 
Knives have always been used for other purposes than strictly slicing cuts, including stabbing and hacking....sure, some specialized knives like skinners are born to slice, and sure, some knives like Ka-Bars are not really the best to pry with....and folk in the military know that, which is why they want a knife that won't break easy if pried with....and makers go to no ends to promise hard-use, rough-duty, knives that can hold up to prying and chopping, promising the world of performance....but one thing I have seen in my short tenure here on this site, is an awful lot of crawfishing by major players in the knife world by them labeling realistic field use of a field knife as "abuse"....if it's supposed to be a field knife, then it needs to run with the big dogs, or it needs to stay on the porch....you makers that are playing the "abuse" card surely and happily take some poor private's months pay for a blade advertised as hard core, and then have the gall to call someone abusive if they pry and break a blade, or chop and break a blade, or chop and chip a blade...if you sell a "hard core" knife to a soldier, then you better be ready for him to take it to the limit and beyond, whether he is jamming it in a rock face for a handhold or hacking open a 55gal drum....and if it can't pull that duty without breaking, then I respectfully submit that you back off all your hooplah advertising and stick to making kitchen knives that will never touch bone.....I have had some real tough knives while in the Army, and most of 'em cost half what these prima donnas are selling, and from what I see, are tougher by far....a knife that breaks is USELESS to a soldier, and if you can't sell him a real knife, then don't sell him anything...go steal from little old ladies instead of kids.....
 
It's too late! Thread down, thread down!
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:D

Tomatoes, well....

Edge geometry, sharpness, stain resistance and overall geometry.

Those are what first pop to mind. Not being real comprehinsive mind you just running stuff over pretty quickly.
 
You can break anything if you load enough crap on it. Test your skill and ajust to what your useing. A base line knife sounds like the best suggestion in this thread.
 
Cutting tomatoes would not allow any evaluation of geometry as they can't exert any wedging force on a blade, they only examine sharpness. A carrot would show the influence of geometry as it is stiff enough to exert wedging forces on a blade. Materials and use are not independent, you can't discuss proper materials without noting scope of work. restricting the materials you would use to review a fillet knife as the same as that for an emergency/survival knife is hardly sensible, just as the opposite is true.


-Cliff
 
The real benefit of tomato slicing is that tomatos complement a sandwich to a much greater degree than do carrots. And everybody likes sandwiches.
 
After you slice up the carrots thinly, fry them with a decent amount of butter (real butter not something made from a vegetable oil and called butter, but something which actually came from a cow) and ginger, then add a decent amount of heat with your favorite hot pepper powder. They go well with most meats, my favorite is a chilli based sandwitch, with the fried carrots, and a generous amount of real sour cream, and a nice sharp cheese.

-Cliff
 
Incidentally, one of the most binding materials I've cut is butternut squash. It has enough fibers to resist splitting from the wedging effect of the blade and the raw flesh is hard and not very juicy. It takes quite a bit of force to push a blade through with regular kitchen knives.
 
Squash fries up really well too, no ginger there though, still cook in lots of butter and serve with a little maple syrup and some heavy cream, I add hot pepper as well, but I eat that with almost everything anyway.

-Cliff
 
Cliff wrote - "I add hot pepper as well, but I eat that with almost everything anyway."

Ah, you're just an endorphin junky. :D
 
We get snow when we go camping on May 24, it is either eat a lot of spicy foods or you get *really* friendly with the local seal population.

-Cliff
 
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