W. T. :
I will have to check out the Golok and Valiant knives.
I have an evaluation Golok piece from Martindale you can have if you are interested, I have some work left to do (about a week), and can drop it in the mail then. Drop me an email if you are interested. It is nothing fancy, but it a solid work knife for brush work and if it doesn't suit you, you have lost nothing and will know much better what you want in any case.
Normark :
Titanium on a primary field blade in my opinion is a waste of time..Especially if its going to be used hard...(i.e. Chopping and such) The Edge just won't hold up to that...
Having used a MPK-Ti, for much chopping and splitting my experience is different. I even drastically slimmed down the NIB profile and it still handled the most robust wood work without harm :
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=184219&perpage=20
The only reservation I would make is that the serrations will be prone to impact damage, you can see some impaction on splitting knotty wood, however they are very acute (~15 degrees included), and few bush blades have edges that are this thin. Secondly, if you attempt to cut very hard material (hardned steel), you can grind the serrations off so be careful of reinforced belted tubing and the like.
Glockman, in regards to the sharpness, in Ron's own words :
The Tigershark does come with a bit more of a blunt edge ...
The standards that have been described *by Ron* for SOG as the expected performance are much lower than what is to be expected from the Swamp Rat line (and lots of others like Cold Steel, Spyderco). To be specific, after cutting 1000+ pieces of hemp rope, a Busse knife is still as sharp as the SOG can be expected to be NIB. Again, from Ron's own words. Ref :
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=203367
To be complete, Ron isn't the only one who has this view of sharpness. As I said it is a common knife myth. It can be disproven with basic physical and engineering principles, as well as it has been studied in great detail, mainly by woodworkers, see Lee's book on sharpening.
As for the other problems, they can be seen in the above link in detail. Performance is of course relative, but compare a SOG to a knife in its price range like the Swamp Rats, or even something far cheaper like the Camillus CU/7 and CU/9, and a large difference in performance can be seen. What you are seeing is mainly the difference due to the clean functional utility based design of the Swamp Rats, CU/7 (lots of others of course not just those two) etc. .
As a short summary, I would echo much of Chad's comments about the SEAL :
I had a co-worker bring me one to sharpen, it really is not an optimal design for any task. The primary grind was very obtuse, as was the edge bevel. The knife lacked the weight or balance to chop and was not suitable for slicing. The edge on this one was rolled in several places, had some light chiping from hitting a concrete subfloor and was extremely dull from cutting carpet. I removed a fair amount of metal using a DMT edge aligner and finishing up on a spyderco 204. I could not set the edge bevel at an acute enough level to compensate for the obtuse primary grind because the steel was not durable enough, a result of its softness. This is not a knife I would ever buy, and if I was given one would trade or give it away in short order.... Although 440A is very corrosion resistant, this aspect is somewhat muted by the bead blasted finish, which I have found to have a large impact on a steel's relative oxidization rate... The grip was rather square, the handle material was akin to Cold Steel's Kraton which I particularly dislike.... I don't mind giving up some area of performance for a larger gain in another, but it is silly to design a knife that offers poor performance in every category except that it looks cool.....
I would add though, that you can make a decent knife out of the SEAL. I put a full convex grind on mine, and it works much better now for wood work and general cutting. No durability problems on splitting knotty wood, and a much higher level of cutting ability. The other low performance aspects are still there though like the squarish handle, upper swedge etc. . Of course, different people have different expectations, so you have to take user experienced and perspective into account. In particular, the level of cutting ability that Chad would find acceptable (based on past comments), is much higher than average, as are his general expectations on use as his experience is high.
-Cliff
I remember seeing those and drooling. I really like A2 and they sure looked good to me.
