A micro fold is not a failure or a indication of bad material. Micro folds happen when the edge rolls during use. It's not a defect. A better indication of a defect or poor heat treat would be chipping or a breakage under "normal" use conditions.
Several years ago I went to S!K knives with some of my GSO that needed sharpening. Guy showed me the micro folds in the knives and explained what they were. He then sharpened them for me and had NO concerns. Believe me he would have simply given me a new knife if he thought the blade was compromised. One of the knives I brought to Guy is in the pictures that start this thread, my 7/7 that I bought over 2 years ago. I've put my 7/7 to hard use, batoning, chopping, carving and cutting mostly wood that is very hard and it's never had a chip or a failure. It's had it's share of micro folds but I simply stroped them out or it was sent back to S!K for re-sharpening (at least 3 other times). This is the same with my ALL of my GSOs and to that matter all of my Busses, Fallknivens, Battle Horse Knives, LT Wright Knives, Vipers, etc..
Also, and I should have put this at the start of the thread, I believe chopping is harder or is at least as hard on a blade as batoning. I would take odds that chopping puts as much or more lateral stress on the blade edge than batoning. I've seen more videos of blade failures due to chopping than anything else that would be considered "normal" use and I've never seen one video of a failure due to batoning.
And that is how you discriminate for quality: At one end you get chipping from too much fragility/brittleness in the material (as apparently some Fallkniven have), at the other end you get micro folds from chopping into non-hard woods... Discriminating for quality is finding a knife that will sneak its way in between these two types of failures... My Neeley SA9 for instance was on the micro-chipping side, my Chris Reeve Jereboam was on the micro-fold side, until I sharpened it through the machining-burned layers after ten-twenty sharpenings or so (same for my RJ Martin "Blackbird").
Micro folds mean the edge material could not hold in check momentary lateral forces, and the bending also means the edge material is now weaker at its most fragile point, even if you straighten it out.
I have knives with thousand of chops in years-old dead dried Maple, very hard stuff, and they have never shown any micro-folds despite the hits sometimes leaning the blade. My Randall Model 12 will do hundreds or even thousands of chops in dried wood with no visible damage. The edge is an extremely thin 0.020" behind the edge, with around 10 degrees per side.
I've often wondered how Busse achieved their legendary toughness, and I always suspected this was achieved with a tendency to do micro-folds and poor edge-holding. What you say about Busses commonly getting micro-folds in wood confirms what I suspected all along: It is sub-standard steel.
This is all the more egregious when you consider that I get no micro-folds in my Randalls in hundreds of chops at 0.020" and 10 degrees per side, when the Busse edges you mention apparently do get them at something like 0.060" and 15-20 degrees per side... Amazing...
Sure you can straighten micro-folds and get them to say put for quite a bit of use: Most cutting in history was probably done with wire edges... But that doesn't mean this qualifies as "good"...
I had a $2000 RJ Martin in S30V that after twenty sharpenings it finally stopped doing micro-folds, even at the later much thinner angles: This indicates micro-folding on wood is not normal, even at very thin angles, and that the metal can do better if it is fine steel and given a chance to wear beyond the machine-burned layer...
If Busses/S!K etc get micro-folds while chopping wood, perhaps you should consider getting back to quality 440B or C, or sharpening them a lot until you get through the burned-out machining layer...
If the micro-folds occur only from the batoning process, and not from chopping, then batoning is a dumb idea.
The idea you can get to a pristine "dry" inner wood from large rotten trunks lying on the ground is beyond absurd: In a real forest, anything really big on the ground (over 4") that is rotten on the outside will be unuseable altogether... This is because big logs soak up a lot of humidity in the shadows of the forest, so much so that they don't have time to fully dry before getting soaked again. That is why most of the really dry stuff that is dead is the smaller diameter stuff, and usually under 3", like the lower dead branches mentioned above. This is the reality of real woods where everything is in the shadows.
Another thing is, in the woods near where I live, there is not a single square inch of straight level ground anywhere either, which makes any batoning a rather tiresome proposition...: Just finding a suitable un-rotten baton and shaping it would be a major ordeal...
Though I'll admit I've never tried batoning because the woods I saw seem so incredibly batoning-adverse. I can't wait to see if my benchmark Randall Model 12 develops micro-fold wire edges from it...
If it does, I think batoning fans would be better advised to confine their survival activities to the desert, or their backyards...
Gaston
Last edited: