Jim March
Knifemaker / Craftsman / Service Provider
- Joined
- Oct 7, 1998
- Messages
- 3,018
Ahhh, grocery shopping. Not my fave chore...but finding a deal is always cool. Half a buck for a coconut looked good, ain't et one 'o those in a while. Shaking revealed wet inside like it's supposed to be.
Cool. Get it home, set it on the chopping block, ponder. Get evil gleam in eye...
TEST #1: Knife as drill bit.
Drill the holes out to drain or the female roomie will try and kill me. The soft outer husk was already off, all that was left was this round rock. The three eye-holes are fairly soft though, and The Outsider's outermost 1/2" of blade tip is actually very fine, moreso than most daggers including the classic F/S commando types. Turns out the area of tip before it gets fat is plenty skinny enough to drill out the eyeholes.
Kewl. Drain into a glass, bottoms up.
Score: Outsider 1, coconut 0
TEST #2: Open up!
Time to get hardcore.
The Outsider was made for massive overhead smashes. Time to see how well that works! Line the sucker up on the board, whack the hell out of it trying to catch it cleanly with the "spike". Barsturd wanted to roll, but a few good slams had it in several nice pieces. Unlike the stabbing tip, the spike comes together at a 90degree angle for an *extremely* tough tip totally unaffected by slamming it into a large nut. NO, not me! Some hits were glancing due to me not hitting dead center and a rolling action setting in, but even that chipped large chunks off. Hitting something with more overall weight and less tendency to roll (like, say, human skull) would be...whoa. Highly impolite.
Score: Outsider 2, Coconut 1
Test #3: Pry the meat out.
The meat of a coconut does NOT want to stop clinging to the shell frags. Heavy prying with the very tip is needed, and as you pry in where the curvature of the hard shell hits it gets worse.
Here that very fine forward tip had a problem. The outermost millimeter or so bent about 15 degrees due to the prying; this had no effect on combat or any other sort of functionality; a few minutes with coarse and fine Spyderco ceramic rods cleaned it all up looking as good as Harald ground it, if infintesimally blunter. You can't tell without seeing before and after, and if anything it's now a bit tougher.
This was the tradeoff in doing a tip that fine; I'm comfortable with that tradeoff because the best chance this tip structure has of stabbing is to get an "initial grip" with the fine lead tip and then ram that "arrowhead" monster in after it.
Score: Outsider 2.5, coconut .5
Next test: in a week or so I'm buying a turkey. Prior to cooking I'm gonna use the breast meat as a stab test medium...and if the roomies don't like funky tenderized bird they can go buy their own!
Jim March
[This message has been edited by Jim March (edited 18 December 1998).]
Cool. Get it home, set it on the chopping block, ponder. Get evil gleam in eye...
TEST #1: Knife as drill bit.
Drill the holes out to drain or the female roomie will try and kill me. The soft outer husk was already off, all that was left was this round rock. The three eye-holes are fairly soft though, and The Outsider's outermost 1/2" of blade tip is actually very fine, moreso than most daggers including the classic F/S commando types. Turns out the area of tip before it gets fat is plenty skinny enough to drill out the eyeholes.
Kewl. Drain into a glass, bottoms up.
Score: Outsider 1, coconut 0
TEST #2: Open up!
Time to get hardcore.
The Outsider was made for massive overhead smashes. Time to see how well that works! Line the sucker up on the board, whack the hell out of it trying to catch it cleanly with the "spike". Barsturd wanted to roll, but a few good slams had it in several nice pieces. Unlike the stabbing tip, the spike comes together at a 90degree angle for an *extremely* tough tip totally unaffected by slamming it into a large nut. NO, not me! Some hits were glancing due to me not hitting dead center and a rolling action setting in, but even that chipped large chunks off. Hitting something with more overall weight and less tendency to roll (like, say, human skull) would be...whoa. Highly impolite.
Score: Outsider 2, Coconut 1
Test #3: Pry the meat out.
The meat of a coconut does NOT want to stop clinging to the shell frags. Heavy prying with the very tip is needed, and as you pry in where the curvature of the hard shell hits it gets worse.
Here that very fine forward tip had a problem. The outermost millimeter or so bent about 15 degrees due to the prying; this had no effect on combat or any other sort of functionality; a few minutes with coarse and fine Spyderco ceramic rods cleaned it all up looking as good as Harald ground it, if infintesimally blunter. You can't tell without seeing before and after, and if anything it's now a bit tougher.
This was the tradeoff in doing a tip that fine; I'm comfortable with that tradeoff because the best chance this tip structure has of stabbing is to get an "initial grip" with the fine lead tip and then ram that "arrowhead" monster in after it.
Score: Outsider 2.5, coconut .5
Next test: in a week or so I'm buying a turkey. Prior to cooking I'm gonna use the breast meat as a stab test medium...and if the roomies don't like funky tenderized bird they can go buy their own!
Jim March
[This message has been edited by Jim March (edited 18 December 1998).]
-RadarMan-(<