thoughts on testing an unknown knife- ran the test today

[bdmicarta]

About 15 years ago I was buying a lot of custom hunters. I bought a knife shows, over the net, ebay, whatever. Buying a custom knife you take for granted that you get the steel that is stated, and that any competent maker somehow achieves a proper heat treat. I believe in that era there was more integrity among sellers than there is now. These days there are lots of sellers that would misrepresent their products, lots of imported blades with questionable heat treat, etc. Years ago I managed to buy at least one knife with questionable material, so I started thinking about how I could test it to determine its usability.

Well I've read some threads recently about knife tests involving cutting lots of rope and/or cardboard. Just for fun the other day I did some cutting of some boxes from my wife's purchases. I did the cutting with Spyderco's in M4 and S110V. I started thinking that I could sharpen up this questionable blade then start cutting cardboard with it. For some uses all I need to know is how much cardboard it will cut compared to some of my other knives. Obviously this won't tell me about the toughness or corrosion resistance, but for some knives this isn't so important.

 

[bdmicarta]

I sharpened the little knife last night and did some testing today. In the process of sharpening it I reprofiled it to 30 degrees inclusive. The first clue was that it took quite a bit of work to reprofile using my DMT diamond stones. And BTW this little knife is about the size of a Bark River Mini Fox River, but the blade is a bit thinner.

Then I used some cardboard from a furniture box that my wife had. The cardboard is double layers of corrugations, 5 total layers of paper to cut plus some reinforcing fibers here and there. I test my sharpening by cutting the thin slick paper of newspaper inserts. I cut 30 linear feet of this cardboard and I could still cut the thin newspaper. I cut another 10 feet and it would cut the thin newspaper but not very well. I cut another 10 feet and it wouldn't cut the thin newspaper but could still cut typing paper if you were careful. My S110V Manix 2 with factory edge managed to cut 120 linear feet of this cardboard.

I still don't know what the blade steel is but at least there is some utility to it.