Spyderco Forums

Just wanted to put this question out there to the group -
Which edge do you find most preferred when dressing your wild game?

I ask this because I used the Dragonfly2 H1 plain edge this deer season and it worked great - but I took a gobbler opening morning here Saturday, and while breasting the fat bird - the plain edge just didn't "grab" the super slick fat while trimming and made it a little more difficult. BTW the blade was, and is sticky shaving sharp - weird.

I've dressed and skinned many deer and turkey with a PE with no problem - and it's still not a real issue - but now I notice these things (thanks to my blade OCD and the forum :D ).

Would a SpyderEdge be a more suitable blade?
I don't have one - but a Salt 1 SE looks like it may be the ticket if that's the consensus.
Only a little concerned about the sharpening process with a SE - just learned how to make a PE pop within the past year or so.

Any comments?

I would you go with a coarse edge.

I tried gutting and skinning a deer once with a spyder edge with terrible results. The hair kept getting caught in the teeth. Now I will say that I don't rmember exactly how sharp it was but since I have never been able to get spyderedge as sharp as plain edge I have always gone plain. My grandpa was a butcher in his youth and a cook in the Army. He always said that for cutting meat or fileting fish a "toothier" plain edge was better in his opinion over the polished edges I like on my knives. Just my experience.

The steel in use will have a drastic effect , I've heard H1 is a compromise in sharpness I maybe wrong though.
Also the fine edge will have different bites (my knowledge is limited).
Eg I have a Elmax mule which will pop hairs , cut paper much finer than my RWL skinner.
But the RWL has much more bite and will with less cutting pressure grab and slice leather and materials much better than the sharper Elmax.
Maybe somebody cliff stamp perhaps could explain in a more educated manner.

I bet if you tried sharpening the pe H1 with just a coarse stone it would have bit into slick skin.

I think its the carbides in the steel that give the bite I was referring too .
But as said I'm a novice where technicalities are concerned .
There seems to be no ceiling to the learning of the properties and behaviours of steel.
That its constantly evolving and just being an end user I decided not to swot up :lol: .

I have a good friend about to use one of my Serratas on a deer hunt down South...two deer await his well aimed bullets... :eek:

He has used it on deer before, but I might have to remind him NOT to sharpen the knife after every tenth cut...it does not need it as often as he thinks it does...ingrained habits die hard... :eek:

I have asked him to use a MAXIMUM 400 grit diamond grit to touch up the edge before he uses it...any finer and the carbides get confused... :D

I use a DMT Blue Diamond Folding sharpener...medium, I believe?

He should have no problems doing both deer, skinning and quartering, without any need to touch up the edge... :)

I have used my own Serratas on wild pig, deer and rabbits...it was a steep learning curve... :cool:

There you go can't get much more of a qualified opinion than stu looking forward to the release of the serrata .

The factory edge on my Dialex Junior did a fantastic job on a pig I shot (with a bow) a few weeks ago. The only thing my Bushcraft did better was "zipping" up the front when gutting, because the angle near the tip was better for that; but the belly on the Junior rocked for the rest.

The last deer I skinned I used my trusty Spyderco Temperance 1 model with the Plain edge and VG-10 steel. Needless to say I had no problems at all. One critter I skinned with the Temp 1 was an American Snapping Turtle about 4 years ago. I used the Temp 1 PE & SE both on it and I'm here to tell you that it was one of the more challenging jobs I had with a knife in many years. But the 2 Temp 1 models made it possible and the old farmer that helped me said that the blades did an excellent job.

On the PE version I had sharpened it with my set of Spyderco 302 Benchstones and they did an excellent job as they really put a nice edge that really bit well. I always use my Spyderco 701 Profiles on all my Spyderedged ( serrated) blades and have excellent success.

To answer your initial question as to what type of edge is advantageous to skin wild game animals I guess it just boils down to what suits you the best for most of your cutting jobs. But I can tell you that if you have the medium, fine and Ultra-fine Spyderco 302 Benchstones you won't go wrong at all. Those benchstones create an edge that grabs and bites like you won't believe.

Also I've got a really good friend of mine who is a fanatic about diamond benchstones and he has a super set that he got from DMT company. Those diamond stones really produce a very toothy edge which opens up animal hides with ease. Either way will do you fine.

What you will find on this issue is that there are two directly opposite camps and both of them are fairly large and consist of experienced knife makers and users :

1) Those that prefer a low grit edge, a norton fine india is very common

2) Those that prefer an extremely high grit edge, all the way up to 0.5 micron and higher

The reason for the difference comes down to how they are cutting, and this once understood answers the same question regardless of what material is being cut.

If you are slicing/drawing the blade through the cut then lower grit edges will have a higher efficiency as they will cut deeper on a given draw.

If you are just pushing the blade through the material then higher grit edges will cut with less force.

In both ways the edge retention is also directly improved in the same manner.

In both ways if you swap the grits the performance is extremely low (i.e. push cut with low grit edges, slice with extremely high polishes).

The only general rule, which is a very general one, the lower the edge thickness and angle, the less of a benefit you will see to low grit edges for slicing. The reason this happens is that at some point the cutting ability will be so high you don't actually slice at all, you just push right through the material.

When I first saw the title to this thread I thought that it said
Best way to undressed wild dame. Oh well.

I prefer a full polished edge, just because it just doesn't seen "right" to drag a nice fresh edge over a coarser grit to get a toothier edge. I understand the how and why, even experienced it, but I still prefer a fine polished edge. :o

Simple Man wrote:I prefer a full polished edge, just because it just doesn't seen "right" to drag a nice fresh edge over a coarser grit to get a toothier edge.

I don't know why you would do that. If you wanted to have a lower grit edge you just stop at that point, you don't go to full polish and then reverse.

So far I have only tried plain edge for field dressing. I am particularly fond of the FB01 Bill Moran Featherweight with the upswept tip. I use a non-fresh 120 grit belt to create a burr and then polish the burr away with a paper wheel at the start of the season. Any touch ups are done with the bird duckfoot and a set of 701 Profile stones in the field.

In the early days of Spyderco I know for large game it was recommended to get a Spyderedge version of the "Hunter" model for increased edge retention and cutting surface.

This year my buddy skinned two deer with my centofante3. Worked great same for fish.

As an aside, since it was being discussed and has been noted before, the claims of "carbides" causing cutting/aggression is a long standing one, but it has issues. The primary one is that carbides are far too large to act like "teeth" in the edge.

A sharpened edge is between 0.1 to 1 micron in thickness depending on what you want to call sharp. Primary carbide aggregates are generally between 5 to 100 microns in size, they are far too large to provide the kind of effect people are claiming.

Beyond this, the carbides get cut just like the rest of the steel itself when you sharpen a knife hence if you compare :

-S90V at 0.5 micron
-1045 ad 50 micron

The second blade has much higher slicing aggression.

This has been shown in a number of published work to dispute this claim which also has been claimed for Damascus and also has been shown to be false.

Now the question as to why do people keep saying this :

a) It is a conception bias, they see what they think they should see.

b) high carbide steels take more work to get to a high polish so they feel "rougher" simply because they are not fully polished, i.e., the coarse scratches remain

c) lower carbide steels are often used on cheaper knives and thus are left with a much weaker micro-structure, this means the edge is much more likely to roll/round during power buffing/stropping

Now amid all of this there is a reality as to the effect of a high carbide volume. If you use knives down to a very low sharpness, < 5% of optimal then low carbide steels tend to wear smooth, high carbide steels don't, they fracture around the carbides, the carbides themselves fracture, etc. and it leaves a more coarse surface which is still capable of slicing.

However again you are at a very low sharpness by this point, you could get a knife sharper than this if you took a rock and accidentally just moved the knife and the rock around each other.

Getting under the skin and making the first skin cuts-- KIWI

Once I dressed an elk with a ladybug. Did everything but ribs. plevis and anus.
For me it is wht ever knife I have handy. I carry a SS Robin in the hunting pack, Native in the pocket and what ever EDC small knife.
Tried using a Resuce for bigger cuts-- Fail