Yeah, my surveyor friends all miss the Collins machetes. That 24" is a beast to swing all day.

Heh heh... yeah... glad I am beyond that now... that is a young man's game... my men would wish for a Cat D-9 ... now that will clear some line.... well.. maybe not without mud tracks in the swamps though...

Doc

All this machete talk has got me thinking about getting one. I am thinking about an 18 inch blade, or maybe even a 12 incher. I don't NEED one, but many times I might need to cut a limb about 1/2 inch or so thick and my lainhart just seems sort of overkill. Considering I don't have any "brush" to go through, what would you guys recommend I get. Ontario, martindale...etc and as I have said I am STRONGLY considering an 18 inch blade.

Tanks

The BWM is an interesting blade. The Le and CG are really two completely different designs. The CG is, relatively, thin, making it a better cutter, has a convexed grind, and is lighter. The Le has a saber grind, which is usually a compromise to increase the toughness of a blade, and a thinker overall profile. In my experience this combination is preferred only for splitting. It seems the Le is being for collectors to use very infrequently, if at all, and more so as another gem to add to their jewelry box. Ooooh, shiny!.

To me one of the biggest benefits of higher grade steel is the ability to make lighter and thinner stock knives for more efficiently tools without sacrificing toughness or edge retention. It seems that most Busse knives, and Scrap Yards for that matter, are designed in such a way as to not benefit from the high quality steel they are made of. Adding thickness to a blade stock used to be a way to get around the steel not being very good. But I guess if there customer base wants overly thick blades of these supper steels then I certainly cannot fault them for making what sells.

I would love to see a 3/16" convexed dogfather. SR77 should certainly be as tough as the, currently, thinner RTAK, Becker BK9, or Ranger 9. With the Res-C handles on this knife there would be no stopping it.

Eh, I'm not sure I buy this with INFI.


The whole selling point of INFI is that it rolls before it chips. Now you can do some fancy stuff with materials to combine favorable features, but at the end of the day, you still have to obey the laws of physics. To roll before chipping, INFI has to be more malleable than comparable steels which would chip. That malleability means the thinner you get with INFI, the more likely it's gonna be to roll like crazy - much more so than a stiffer, more brittle steel in the same thickness.


No, what makes INFI a "super steel" is that it is somehow able to maintain excellent edge retention while still being so malleable. But you have to make some sacrifices to get that sort of combination - one of those sacrifices being that the steel doesn't work all that well for razor thin blades. There's a reason "bony" knives from Busse are still thicker than "normal" blades from other companies.

"Super steel" can mean a lot of things - it's a combination of wear resistance, edge stability, lateral toughness, stain resistance, etc etc etc... It does NOT have to mean that you can make a strong blade out of thin stock.






On the other hand, many of the other alloys Busse and kin use, since they are essentially modified versions of popular knife steels, might very well work in a thinner geometry. OR, you could produce an INFI knife but give it a higher RC hardness, so the edge is more stable against rolling, sacrificing toughness in the process. That said, when your warranty is "break it and we replace it", thinner knives don't make very good business sense <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

We are all used to seeing these really thick bowies. In the total world of cutlery, including chopping tools, 3/16" is not that thin. That Busse will be plenty tough.

If INFI is actually tougher than 1095, as it is certainly claimed to be, than it should be able to be more roll resistant at the same hardness, thickness and length as the 1095 RTAK. If it must be thicker to maintain those properties then it is not as tough.

Most INFI blades are produced at a claimed Rc 59-60, with some specialty knives that are supposed to be thin slicers at even higher hardness. I have read no reports of failure with the Skinny ASH and by the laws of physics (for all but chopping and even in chopping it will bite deeper) it will be the more efficient knife than the 0.32" CG ASH-1.

A 3/16" SR77 dogfather should be more than tough enough and should be at least as tough as 1095 RTAK at the same hardness and lenght. INFI should be about as tough as S7, or it least it is claimed to be.

I do not remember 'strong' being a technical term for knives. I will have to look it up to make sure my memory really sucks with the amount of pain I am in.

Hum perhaps I am misusing my terms.

My appologies, I should say, I have misused the team.

This is from the Busse website, not sure if this helps the discussion much:

[quote]
Flexibility
In one of our performance tests, we bend a Battle Mistress 35 degrees in a vise and it springs back to true. Why would we do this? What does it prove? What is the benefit to the customer? Not only does this test demonstrate the enormous toughness and lateral strength of an INFI blade but, because our hardness is homogenous and not differential, it demonstrates the amount of lateral strength and "spring" of INFI all the way to the edge. That means that edge of the blade will possess this same toughness. INFI is the only knife steel ever tested that has achieved such high levels of lateral strength with a homogenous hardness of 58 - 60 Rc. No other steel has even neared this performance level.[quote]

"Toughness" is a specific engineering term. It is defined as the resistance to fracture when stressed. Notice that I did NOT say it is defined as the resistance to rolling. In a materials science sense, toughness is defined as the area under the stress versus strain curve. This curve, however, is not usually a simple linear relationship, and we are well outside the elastic regime, so you apply a strain, and the material can bend in a manner that's not simple to understand. That doesn't mean it's fractured, just that it's bending. That bending, in a knife sense, is usually thought to be something like flexing a blade in a vise, bending it rather than breaking it, but it could also be thought of as flexing the edge of a blade, rolling it rather than chipping it.

In other words, the material science definition of "toughness" as a material quality, doesn't really tell you in simple terms what the roll resistance will be for a given thickness, hardness, and length


Another engineering term - RC hardness is a specific way to test the resistance of a blade to compression. However, in real world applications, knives don't really ever encounter significant compression forces - they encounter shear by the boatload. Normally, for well defined, isotropic Hookean materials, the RC hardness tells you something about the overall material properties and you can infer something about the edge retention or resistance to rolling or chipping, but these inferences are NOT robust, and when materials stray away from the familiar regimes, these assumptions can easily break down.

In other words, RC hardness often tells you something about edge retention and resistance to chipping/rolling, but it's far from a complete picture of the whole story.


A skinny ASH is still not thin by most knife makers' standards, and I agree that it's a much more efficient deign than the CG ASH1.


SR77 doesn't have the same "roll before chipping" tendency that INFI has, so it would be a much more fair comparison to 1095. 1095 probably has better wear resistance at comparable RC hardnesses, meaning it would hold an edge a little better, but SR77 does indeed have better "toughness" in the engineering sense, so it would be a tradeoff I'd be willing to make. Again, 3/16 isn't really all that thin by knife maker's standards, though.