Spyderco Forums

What is your Maggie Mule performance? I just got my two this morning and will have to scale up and put to the gauntlet. Mine came pretty sharp, enough to shave but not pop arm
hair cleanly. Will have to strop and see results. The first one I opened looked good but the secondary bevel grind was off, so this will be the beater one.

My two are coming today.

Guess I need to step up my sharpening game..

I don't have any sharpening system other than old basic "V" rods from AG Russell.

My MagnaMule just showed up. Mine was also not super sharp out of the box- had to give it a touch-up. Using my Sharpmaker, I was able to put a razor edge on it with very little effort (about the same as LC200N). Plan on using it for all the food preparation tonight.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to have these blades. Factory edge is just a start. As we all know, the whole idea is that we use and test these steels so the factory edge is just a data point. We will probably see the best results after a few sharpenings when we play with the sharpening methods and angles. I want to go pretty acute at the secondary edge and convex. That will be my sweet spot I hypothesize.

Not my video



Not my video but shows good promise at 64 hrc and such a thin edge.

Fireman wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 13, 2021 10:24 am

What is your Maggie Mule performance? I just got my two this morning and will have to scale up and put to the gauntlet. Mine came pretty sharp, enough to shave but not pop arm
hair cleanly. Will have to strop and see results. The first one I opened looked good but the secondary bevel grind was off, so this will be the beater one.

Mine arrived just short of clean shaving but with a few passes on the strop it was there. The grind was closer to Seki than Golden in terms of evenness from heel to tip but a few passes on the 220 plate @ 17° cleaned it up. I took it to 1500 and stropped and I really like the feel of the cut in paper and cardboard.
I'll be using it in the kitchen for the near future to better evaluate it. It sharpened like a midrange stainless and came up with a nice crisp burr, although the feel on my diamond plates was much smoother than anything I can recall.

i’ve been working the out of the box edge, which was sharp but not shaving sharp.
so far: printer paper test cuts for a baseline.
broke down 14 large cardboard boxes & about 30 medium plastic cartons.
printer paper test - same as baseline.
10 more cardboard boxes and about a dozen plastic food type containers from the recycling.
printer paper test - same as baseline.
broke down a turkey and a standing rib roast.
sharpened my pencils and opened some amazon boxes.
printer paper test - same as baseline!

parked it in the butcher block, my mule is now on kitchen duty until its sheath arrives - lol

That's a promising report, Rashman.

Super impressed with my magnacut mule. Over the course of 2 days I had been feathersticking pine, oak, manzanita and fatwood. Decided to coarse grind the spine with my diamond stone as to strike a ferro rod. Used my coarsely ground spine to make "fur" from some of my dry wood I had lightly batoned. Sparks galore, and I'm happy to say it doesn't seem like the rough burr had diminished from the spine. Successful fire and very fortunate that my edge had not diminished in the least since I had received my mule. I was very aggressive in the task of feather sticking and thought that I would at least see some loss of edge sharpness from my seasoned manzanita. I am looking forward to testing magnacut in many different aspects and am already pleased with its performance.

I am curious to see what others do to "push" the limits of this particular mule model though I can't help but think there will be those that will "push" beyond the limitations of what a knife is supposed to be used for. It is the beyond extreme torture testing coupled with outrageous expectations of a knife and negative reviews that leave me dumbfounded regarding how knife enthusiasts lack realistic thought process. Yes we are in a time where we have access to the most advanced steels ever offered, but for me it doesn't take away from the idea of caring for the tool your life may depend on.

I am already excited and ecstatic about the performance I have seen from my magnacut mule and have good feelings toward the future of me and my mule. I feel that this knife is very versatile given its size and particular attributes of magnacut. Only time will tell

Thank You Larrin and Sal

Finally got a little bit of time with mine this morning. Nothing super intensive, but made a few dozen cardboard cuts. Edge seems relatively unaffected by that.

Like Rashman, just using the factory edge so far, which was barely scrape shaving sharp.

The Mule as a work knife is pretty wonderful! Stabby and ergonomic.

this is my first mule - man, the geometry is pretty awesome.
we have a local bakery that makes baguette's with a very tough crust - one and a half baguettes deep had to change from push cuts to draw cuts. still cutting printer paper without a problem, the cuts are not as pretty and i’m getting a little drag. looking forward to more kitchen work with onions and fruit!
thinking when its time, i will strop the edge back and see how that plays out.
very curious what angles and grits folks will be putting on their edges

So far I have used my Mule to cut cardboard, Onions, chicken and some branches. I have still not worn down the factory edge and can still shave my arm with it. The edge retention is already better than LC200N and 8CR13MOV . Here are some images of the branches I cut. I cut a handful of each of these types. I live in the Northeast (for plant context) so I was doing a winter trim of my raspberry bushes and gooseberry bushes. I have still not noticed any impact to the edge. I had similar experiences with S30v, 20cv and S90V which all maintained edges through similar use and time.

Still on factory edge, this thing cuts through raw carrots like a dream.

undajonc wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 16, 2021 7:20 pm

I am curious to see what others do to "push" the limits of this particular mule model though I can't help but think there will be those that will "push" beyond the limitations of what a knife is supposed to be used for. It is the beyond extreme torture testing coupled with outrageous expectations of a knife and negative reviews that leave me dumbfounded regarding how knife enthusiasts lack realistic thought process. Yes we are in a time where we have access to the most advanced steels ever offered, but for me it doesn't take away from the idea of caring for the tool your life may depend on.

Fortunately we have at least a few accounts of custom blades that have been pushed to the limits and broken "for science", so I'm not sure there's much value in doing so with a mule. It may tell us a little about Spyderco's heat treat but will also tell us more about how the mule itself is ground vs whatever custom blades are destroyed. I think it's good to know the limits but I guess what I'm trying to say is they've sort of already been established.

Hi NCJohn, Undajonc,

Welcome to our forum.

sal

its strop time. I got an amazing amount of life out of the stock edge. still slices the printer paper and is goin thru cardboard with ease - but you can feel when the edge slows down. the food prep / meat / kitchen duty was the most aggressive work I've done on the edge so far. watch out for stale baguettes - lol

Broke down a few cardboard boxes and trimmed some bushes with no damage to the edge. Then, I cut up some onions for a sandwich for lunch. It peeled and cut potatoes for dinner and I used it as a steak knife (and let my wife use it too). The edge was fine even after cutting on a ceramic plate (though it's not like I aggressively cut the steak or anything). I then re-profiled to 15° per side using a combination of sharpeners (Work Sharp Ken Onion w/ Blade Grinder, Wicked Edge, and the Sharpmaker). I think the factory edge was steeper at the tip area because I had some difficulty there, but otherwise sharpening it hasn't been bad. I wasn't satisfied with how the 15° turned out, so I used my Work Sharp again. It's now sitting at 12° per side, as I planned originally.

Seems like there are already a couple threads about this, I'm not even sure where to post and it doesn't seem like enough for my own thread so here goes.


Just a typical box break down, but it was a big double wall office chair box with about another box worth of packing panels inside. Well over 1000 cuts. In the end the edge was plenty dull and reflecting light but was still cutting, albeit a little fizzy and was basically cutting on edge geometry alone.

Before

After



You couldn't really see with the naked eye but there were some very fine micro chipping and/or rolling, I couldn't tell which even by looking at the edge through a 10x loupe taped to my cell camera set to macro (both at 10x and 20x magnification on top of the loupe) but I think it was chipping more than rolling.

Hard as heck to get a decent pic with this ghetto setup.



Whole edge reflecting light



Ghetto macro setup. I can do basically 60x magnification but the viewing area is so small you only see little tiny sections of edge.




But this is after sharpening it up on the Sharpmaker, CBN/medium/fine/UF/little strop with red polishing compound. Nice crisp edge. This is about 30x total magnification.





So anyway. Not endless mind bending edge retention, but for over 1000 cuts and most of them through double wall corrugated, I think that's pretty dang good. People often obsess over how steels hold an edge or how they sharpen, but so far I'm most impressed with how this steel dulls. I'm deliberately using my Sharpmaker for routine sharpening because it's a common sharpening tool that everyone has access to, those results will definitely vary with different sharpening media and edge grit finishes. The edge used was the same as I sharpened it back up to, so essentially a "polished" apex up to the ultra fines, I don't think I strop enough to do any significant polishing beyond that.

Mine are sitting in the boxes. They aren't misbehaving in any way. I should evict my Zmax mule from my handle with screws and put the Magnacut in its place so I can play with it. That is generally what I do with a new mule, namely rotate it into the scales I bought some years back. The Zmax is a treasure though, and right up alongside the PMA11 mule in my esteem.

Evil D that seems to mirror my edge performance and sharpening of my Magnacut mule. I had a few chips just like that and sharpening this stuff is really easy.