Trends in spine thickness

IMO thick is good in a general purpose knife as long as it's a high saber or full flat grind and it's ground thin at the edge. I think the edge thickness is often the problem. My last Busse kin knife's edge from the factory was 0.040" and it was sharpened at anywhere between 20-35 degrees per side. Compare that to the cheap Ontario I have. Both are 0.25" thick, about the same width, but the Ontario has a full flat grind with edge about 0.025" and sharpened to 12-15 degrees per side. There's a huge performance difference between the two and stock thickness is the same so it's not a factor.

So yeah, IMO the stock thickness by itself isn't a big deal.
 
I think the stock thickness is a huge deal, almost as important as the edge thickness. You said "stock thickness by itself," which leads me to believe that you would agree there are more geometry issues to be concerned with. James made great points and identified that the purpose should reflect the design. Numbers is on target as well. We could all make full flat axe head to a zero edge, but that would be a crap tool.

Back to the original poster, IMO, a bushcrafter with a spine wider wider than 1/8 is getting heavy. 5/32 is fine and thick enough but I would not go wider at the spine unless someone gave me a good reason.

EA
 
Hmmm...I think I'm getting it now :confused:...A thin blade is a great slicer but a thicker spine is tougher and meant for heavier task. So it must be the consensus that a 3/16 thick bushcrafter with a distal taper is the perfect bushcraft knife? :D Thin at the end and thick at the heel!!! See how easy it was to design the perfect bushcraft knife. Now we can all stop trying...;) :applouse: :cool:

Seriously though, for most of my camping and hunting needs, I prefer a thinner slicing blade with 1/8th to 5/32nd spine. Here lately it seems I keep grinding my blades thinner and thinner. I've also caught myself wondering how a .100 blade would perform! Having said that, I still won't give up a couple of my 3/16 knives!
 
I believe that thicker knives are safer for wood processing. It takes force to break wood fiber, you can't just cut through it with a straight edge. You can either accomplish that force through mass or by acceleration, or both. An axe uses both mass and a fast moving head making it a very efficient chopping tool. A machete relies more on acceleration, while a thick camp is slower and depends primarily on mass. Neither of the latter tools are particularly efficient for wood chopping, but the camp knife is more likely to stay within the arc of the swing, while the machete's flexibility can develop a lot of bounce which can be dangerous.

n2s
 
Mudbug007 said:
Hmmm...I think I'm getting it now :confused:...A thin blade is a great slicer but a thicker spine is tougher and meant for heavier task. So it must be the consensus that a 3/16 thick bushcrafter with a distal taper is the perfect bushcraft knife? :D Thin at the end and thick at the heel!!! See how easy it was to design the perfect bushcraft knife. Now we can all stop trying...;) :applouse: :cool:

Seriously though, for most of my camping and hunting needs, I prefer a thinner slicing blade with 1/8th to 5/32nd spine. Here lately it seems I keep grinding my blades thinner and thinner. I've also caught myself wondering how a .100 blade would perform! Having said that, I still won't give up a couple of my 3/16 knives!
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Too funny and yes that does seem at times to be the thought process on bushys. I Agree with you I am progressively getting thinner and thinner spines and am looking forward to giving them a try in 1/8. Its also not the thickness of the spine but also the progression of my skill that lets me make smaller mistakes that can still be fixed or cleaned up on thinner stock as well.
 
If by bushcraft knife we're talking about the typical 4" to 5" blade with a scandi grid, I think 1/8" is on the thick side. My Enzo Trapper is about 1/8 thick. It does well at making shallow cuts for whittling, and it batons fairly well. But some tasks are impossible, like cutting wedges out of an apple- the abrubt increase in thickness from zero to 1/8" over less than half an inch of blade width forces the apple apart too rapidly and it just crumbles (depends I guess on the consistency of the apple). Also making a plunge cut straight into wood across the grain, like a stop cut for a notch, the thickness reduces penetration.

I think for a scandi grind it works better with the stock thickness of a mora (closer to 1/16). That will still retain some deep slicing ability. In a ~4" blade there are no issues with the small amount of flex. The thickness is sufficient to baton anything its blade length will handle.

Probably the dimension that really matters is not the stock thickness per se, but the aspect ratio. I would define that as the width where the primary grind begins divided by the height of the primary grind. I'll multiply that result by 100 to make the numbers not so tiny. For a full flat grind with 5/16 stock and a 2" wide blade this would be about 16. For my Enzo trapper it would be 25 (.125 / .5 , x 100 ). For a chef's knife with a 1/16 thick 1.5" wide full flat ground blade this would be 4.2. This number should roughly correspond to the amount of material that has to be push aside per unit of depth (penetration). Of course this doesn't take into account edge thickness or angle, but it should show that its possible for a 5/16" blade to slice better than a 1/8" thick blade if the grind on the former is higher. This is a pretty obvious conclusion, and of course the aspect ratio is just a function of the primary grind angle, which will obviously be less for a FFG than a scandi.

This line of reasoning leads to another conclusion, which is that scandi grinds are not very ideal from a performance standpoint. A FFG lets you use thicker stock for the same weight and that will increase the lateral strength and improve batoning ability, all while being able to slice deeper (assuming the edge on the FFG is not a cold chisel). The scandis do have a couple of advantages, and overall I do like them, but if I'm intent on using one I'd like it to be under 1/8".
 
We are not talking grinds just the thickness of spines in a lot of the current popular models sold as woodcraft knives but I do agree with you.
 
I guess my point is the grind means a lot with regards to whether or not a certain spine thickness is good or bad.

If the discussion is limited to scandi grinds then I am in the thin-stock camp for sure.
 
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