Frosts of Sweden (makers of Mora) themselves recommend a 20 degree secondary micro-bevel on any of their blades that are used as general purpose knives. They only recommend the zero degree bevel if the knife is used EXCLUSIVELY for wood working. I put a 20 degree micro-bevel on my Mora knives with my Work Sharp after working a new blade's primary bevel on a flat stone.
That wide bevel is for ease of sharpening more than anything. It's really a built in angle guide. If you're out when it's -40F and have to sharpen your blade, you're really relying more on gross motor skills instead of fine motor skills, it's much easier to hold that bevel flat on a stone and maintain it than it is to try and hold 20 or 25 degrees on a smaller bevel.
I'll go along with both things you are saying there.
Not only does it make sense to change the edge angle if you find it isn't tough enough for the material you are working but also from accounts I have seen of natives the practice is commonplace beyond Moras. Of three sabre grinds from that region for different uses, utility, hunting, woodworking, that we tend to lazily bucket categorize as Scandi, only the woodworking ones tend to be whetted through rather than having the extra bevel.
And for what you say about an advantage of the whetted through one being that it has a built in angle guide for sharpening I figure that may be plausible too. It's not something I'd find advantageous but it would be egocentric of me to dismiss the idea that others couldn't make use of that. However, it is one of the reasons I dismiss that type of grind. I don't judge a cars performance by how easy it is to put air in the tyres or fuel in the tank, and similarly I have yet to need to judge a knife with how hard it is to sharpen as a factor. But I digress.
What I trying to follow up on as the subject has come up is not whether one should stick an extra bevel on a
Scandi but what are the consequences of doing so relative to other types of grind, in this case full flat. Obviously if your knife isn't holding up to the task short of ditching it for something else you don't really have any option. And I don't find that peculiar to
Scandis, I'd increase the edge angle of a convex that wasn't holding up for the same reason.
My personal belief is that
Scandis, even the whetted through ones, don't necessarily cut anything better than other sorts of grinds. I've had humble flat ground knives that'll cut a just as well as a
Scandi even on wood, and I've long suspected a SNAFU with the way people often interpret correlations.
Scandis tend to be thin, and therein lay the genius behind the cutting power, not because they are sabre ground, whetted through or not. For the moment though I'm trying to suspend my understanding of that so I can play along.
In order to play along I'm going to take a position I don't naturally hold, and I'm going to suppose there is something magikal about the performance of the whetted through
Scandi. So, for the next ten minutes I'm going to suppose there is something special about the way they work wood. I'm going accept there is truth in the often asserted tale that it is not only in sharpening that there is an advantage but there also something great about the way the grind can be positioned against a twig to be cut. On that, supposedly having given away that ground, what next. If those have the advantage against a full flat what if you add an extra bevel? Now to my mind that is a step too far. Any supposed advantage I have conceded above is totally lost now. I've come across a large number of other people that agree with that, even
Scandi [whetted through] lovers. In fact, if memory serves well a good example here would be the testimony of Brian Andrews. He certainly had a fifteen minutes of fame on this forum making those types of knives. As I recall it even he said that if you need to add a secondary bevel you'd be better served with a full flat. As I see it a consideration of the sectional geometry of both supports that.
In conclusion I'm thinking that if there is a whetted through
Scandi you are adamant on retaining that isn't up to the cutting tasks you put it to adding a bevel is your only solution. But if you aren't determined to retain that knife you'd do well to consider the consequences of that against other grinds if maximizing cutting power is important to you.
I do like how they just melt through wood but the delicate edge was aggravating.
