Unfortunately we can't ask Mr. Cox exactly what his thoughts were on that saw, but I find it highly improbable that he intended it to be a "chopping saw," whatever that may be or entail. Certainly possible, but it looks more to me like he is doing his version of Randall's saw on that one. Chopping with a thinned out portion of the blade that is heavily notched is generally considered a bad idea, given the concept of stress risers.
Sam
There are several peculiar things that make it very different from the Randall sawback, and he has used that same pattern on a lot of his various models, always with
all the following features: 1-The cross-section of the saw is a very thin hollow grind, but with a pronounced and deliberate convex grind sitting on top of the deep hollow grind, like a hollow grind axe head ending with a thin convex edge. 2-The top of each saw teeth has a fairly long straight edge portion with a final V-edge applied to full sharpness: So the cross-section is 1-Main grind: Deep Hollow Grind 2- Near edge: Deep Convex 3: Actual tooth edge: V-edge(!)
The 2-4 mm edge length sitting on top of each tooth means the tooth loses a lot of pulling-stroke aggression, because the tooth top is no longer pointy in profile...
Because of the way the teeth are done, they are very strong and would certainly not break while chopping: The loss of efficiency for chopping compared to a plain edge would be large however, because the spacing between each "teeth top edge" is large... On the other hand, the chopping might be less noisy...
Notice I say a 2-4 mm edge, because if you look at all the knives he has done this way, the spacing of the teeth is deliberately uneven: It is the most peculiar thing about all the teeth he has done this way...: They are
never even, and yet the rest of the knife is
very precisely done...: The teeth are wildly uneven, and this certainly hurts the cosmetic appeal of these knives... In my view, it is too pronounced to be unintentional, especially with this consistent effect across several models...
Maybe he found that unevenly spaced teeth progressed faster?
In any case, I can tell you the knife is made by someone who really believed all the way in everything that he did with it...: The two Liles I have are nowhere near the ballpark in the care exhibited, like for instance the trueness of every flat surface (before the re-grinding of the Sly II by Josh at least!)... The thinness and aggressivity of the point geometry, and the edge, is really all that could be accomplished with this basic design... Without any round trip to Josh, this burly ungainly-looking whale-knife might be the sharpest "as is" big knife I have ever owned, and by far the sharpest over nine inches...
As to the sense of putting a rope-cutting serrated edge on the back, like on the Al Mar SF-10 -which is one of the best examples of this- the reason this makes sense on a Survival Knife is that an aggressive serrated rope cutting edge, like on the Al Mar, can be
brutally used without sharpening for very long periods: Unless very thin to begin with, a conventional edge eventually becomes quite dangerous to the user from the high effort, and this in a surprisingly short time...
But a serrated rope edge will retain a useable sharpness for many, many multiples of this continuous use without sharpening, and a serrated edge can still be applied to all sorts of conventional uses: I test I read once was done on "survival knives" to build shelters (if memory serves, one of the knives was of the old "pilot survival" type), and only one had the rope-cutting back: The tester said that he was surprised how long the serrated rope cutting back remained useful after both the conventional edges were completely gone...
I would own the Al Mar SF-10 for that reason alone if the blade had not been made in 3/16" stock, which I feel crosses a kind of boundary for me for that size of blade...: I Just feel 3/16" is wrong for such a large blade...
Gaston
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