Edge retention, real use, edge damage

[Pelagic]

There's also strength to consider, which is one of the biggest things Shawn has stressed to knife users. Strength is more valuable than toughness in the vast majority of scenarios. A steel that is tough but not strong will roll or bend easily. No one wants that.

[Cambertree]

I guess one of the cool things about Spyderco is the full smorgasbord of steels they offer which can be optimised for users’ different applications and tastes.

I do sharpen and touch up my knives frequently.

The most need I’ve had for wear resistant steels was doing warehouse work at a place that was very poorly managed, so pallets needed to be wrapped and strapped by hand, boxes constantly needed to be cut down to size, or modified, and when I inspected outgoing shipments, they often had the wrong paperwork or items, so they had to be neatly cut open and corrected, before despatch.

I mostly used the ZDP189 Dragonfly. Usually when I got home in the evening, I’d clean the sticky tape gunk off the knife with acetone, and spend about a minute getting the edge hair popping again. Sometimes I’d go maybe three days between touch ups.

I like a predictably sharp edge. After a day or two of heavy use, ZDP189, K390, HAP40, etc are by no means anywhere near dull, but I can still feel the difference to a freshly honed edge.

My other need for high wear resistance is when field dressing deer or butchering a hung carcass into cuts. There’s no bag limit on introduced Sambar deer in Australia, so it’s not unusual to deck three or more deer in a weekends hound hunting.

Again, you can feel the edge deterioration with S30V, PSF27, HAP40 etc after a deer or two.

The edge is still plenty sharp, probably ‘razor sharp’ to the average non-knife person, but I just like my knives at that freshly sharpened level.

I guess what I’m saying is while I do appreciate those high wear resistance steels, in my normal uses I’ll get just as much satisfaction out of steels like 1095, Superblue, AEB-L, VG10 etc, given the way I like to sharpen.

When you compare those high carbide steels to less wear resistant steels in tests which run all the way to dulling the edge, there can be quite large differences.

When you compare them at a very high sharpness level, down to say ‘not popping hair easily’, the difference in fine edge holding is much closer in my experience.

I think the community is becoming more conscious of ‘balanced properties’ in knife steels, rather than just categorising the highest wear resistance and alloy content as the be-all and end-all.

In addition to what Vivi said about sharpening skill improving any steels performance, the way you use a knife also has quite a significant effect on edge retention.

I mean you could set two people with identical knives to the exact same task, and the edges could look significantly different after they finished.

[Baron Mind]

Nah, I'll always pay more money for more edge Retention.

Durability?

Just beef up the edge to 30dps

Invincibility unlocked.

But that you'll get tired of the reduced cutting ability and come to the light. Just can't have it both ways.


You should give k390 a whirl

Nah, I only use reground box cutters at 1dps/0.0001" bte, it's an absolute laser. Geometry cuts. But only a grand master knife expert like myself is capable of using it properly. The price I pay for performance......

I just don't understand the anti perfomance crowd. You guys just like having to put a ton of extra force into your cuts? You're in it for the upper body workout?

Or you're just hung up on the concept of toughness and durability, but the thing is, most people taking this stance haven't actually tested knives by incrementally increasing the primary grind (reducing the behind the edge thickness) or incrementally decreasing the secondary grind angle (more acute edge geometry, although this is more common than the former), they just assume that the current geometries on their favorite knives are 100% optimized and that changing the primary or secondary grind angle would make them too delicate. And they are very confident about those assumptions. Then when someone like BBB comes along and actually puts in all the work and says, "hey guys, my testing has shown that you can reduce the behind the edge thickness by half, and as long as you maintain a 30 inclusive edge angle you don't lose any edge durability, but you greatly increase the cutting ability" they say "I don't think that's a good idea, I don't want to sacrifice durability".

I just don't get it.

You're right Haha, you don't get it. I wasn't making fun of the performance crowd. I was mildly poking fun at Shawn's posts (which may seem repetitive to some,but I'm glad he hammers in the knowledge on the community, because in all honesty, it's necessary) and he responded perfectly and I gave him respect. I actually really value performance, trust me. I'm a sharpener and I've been doing it for over 25 years. And yes, I actually have noticed that high end kitchen knives perform well. I just don't feel EVERY folder should be ground that way. So if that puts me in the group "hung up on toughness and durability", I'm fine with that.

Maybe that clears my joke post up.

Ah, the old internet sarcasm continuum, gotcha :)