I brought 3 knives out last week for some testing: Two of them hollow handle big choppers, a Lile and a Voorhis, and a Gerber Guardian dagger (for trying out making a spear):
Both the choppers were essentially similar in edge geometry. The Voorhis had a 0.020" base with 12 degrees per side, slightly convexed, and the Lile had a slightly thicker base of 0.028", but with much taller bevels of 9-10 degrees per side, and no convexing. I would have guessed, because of the slight convexing, that the more open-edged Voorhis edge would turn out to be stronger... It had performed OK in edge retention with my hand applied edge of about 12 per side on a base of 0.040" (this below was also a 12 per side REK edge, but on a thinner 0.020" edge base, a thickness standard I derived from my Randalls)...
The steel on the Voorhis should be 5160, and the Lile is probably D-2 (although 440C is an outside possibility).
This photo below shows the drastic difference in the ability to take thin edges: The Lile had two small chips, but that was because I was initially careless: It never chipped again in hundreds of hits after my first few careless chops (the way you pull out the blade from the wood is critical)... The Voorhis showed it could not take this thinness at all: It warped and wobbled all over the place, but I will test it again with a slightly more open angle and no convexing. Edge holding of the initial fine edge was amazing on the Lile, despite the two chips, obviously very poor on the Voorhis...:
Other than that, Full flat grinds perform well in pure brawn, but I realize now that, when ground very thin on very broad blades, they are more vulnerable to side loads than just as thin hollow grinds edges that have narrower blades (like Randalls): The deeper you go into the wood on a single stroke, the more tightly "pinched" the edge is just above the secondary bevel... Hollow ground edges don't grow thicker immediately above the edge, so they are less tightly "pinched"... In effect the high performance of very wide Full Flat Grinds works against the edge stability... I would say when the blade gets wider than two inches you cannot afford edges as thin as on a Randall blade that is hollow ground and 1.5 inches wide...
The Voorhis still outperformed the Lile in chopping, and its sawback was especially impressive...: The Voorhis sawback is by far the best I have ever tried, the only sawback I have seen that can fully go through 3" limbs or more with complete ease...: If the regular main edge later holds up at thicker angles, I figure it will be salvageable as a rough "user", although the Lile "Mission" will be a user as well, since I like better and will keep aside the smaller Sly II...
The Lile being put to work making a spear shaft for the Gerber Guardian:
Most daggers have a handle "swell" that makes it easier to align the blade with the shaft by carving a slight hollow. Note the sawback made useful notches to help stabilize the whole thing.
In five minutes the rough tie up was "rigid" enough to use, but a big drawback with hasty tie-ups is that you can't really practice with them, as the impact will
inevitably loosen the dagger... It would take much more than five minutes to do a better tie up...
Compare how neat and easy this five minute lash-up was, and how little tie-up material was required, compared to this:
Another huge advantage of the dagger is that it is light enough for the spear to be thrown, which is simply out of the question with a full size chopper...
Throwing a spear is a lot more intuitive than throwing a knife, and my very first throw from 30+ feet scored a good hit:
Imagine how far a full size survival knife would fly compared to this...
I have stood closer than twenty feet to deer in the wild before, so hitting one like this is not quite science-fiction...
The knife also buried itself with a lot of force, nearly 2", so much deeper than any thrown knife.
The trouble is, this sub 7" blade is way too small to prevent miles of tracking: The deer would probably run or die miles away, never to be found again... I have an 8.75" Blackjack Tartan Dirk that might do a little better, and is just as light, but it is still very marginal given that hitting anywhere on the body is about all the accuracy you can expect out of this...
Still, it was a fun outing trying this out
Gaston
