bone chopping

R

rctk1

Joined
Mar 5, 2005
Messages
963
i once used a gerber camp axe to chop through some cattle bone that one of my friends was butchering, after the whole ordeal i noticed that the edge of the axe was so chipped it looked like a serrated steak knife. i just recently purchased several large knives a busse bm and a siegel hoodlum can anyone tell me how well this knives would fare against large dense bones? i undersatand that there are better tools for the job like a bone saw, but i am just curious to see if there are knives that can handle such abuse. thanks
 
I keep hearing from other folks that bone is, surprisingly, one of the more knife abusing materials to hack through.
 
Why surprisingly? Unlike a bleached old skull lying in the desert sun for years, fresh bone not only has a high mineral content, it is also fibrous.

A good, big, high carbon blade should do pretty well. Some knives have "bone-breakers" on the back of the blade, to save the cutting edge. The bone-breaker edge is ground at a more obtuse angle.
 
Is this the knife you have? If so it will chop bone without any trouble. This is a test Ron Hood does for edge strength and as you can see the frozen elk leg was easy for Bill's knife.
The knife in my sig passed the same test.:D
Scott
 
I think a H:I: Kukuuri would have little problem lopping/chopping bone . They are amazingly tough well designed knives with a convex grind that rarely needs sharpening . I think a skilled wielder would sever a leg bone with one swing with power to spare . If I come across a beef leg bone in my travels I,ll give it a try . Anyone else who wants to try should do so with a bone that is freshly butchered as it has been pointed out, bone changes over time . .
 
rctk1 said:
... i am just curious to see if there are knives that can handle such abuse.
Click to expand...

It isn't abuse for a decent tool steel, you want an edge angle of 15+ degrees per side and an edge thickness of 0.025"+. How you cut the bone makes a major influence as well. You should chop it just as if you were chopping wood, you don't slam straight down into the bone, you come in at an angle, have the bone well supported and try to minimize any loading of the edge laterally from the bone moving or the blade twisting.

-Cliff
 
You can get knives for the very heavy butcher work. Most of the ones I see are about 4lbs in weight with a thick edge. My normal suggestion for home use is to get a kukri that they feel comfatable with as it's got more uses.
 
I am surprised that you had that big a problem with a hatchet. Using a hatchet to cut through bone is fairly common. They make things just for the purpose, called cleavers. They are not as heavily constructed as a hatchet. Generally they are made of simple carbon steel such as 1095.

I did some chopping tests with hunting knives on beef rib bones. If you have a good steel the blade doesn't have to be terribly heavy duty in design. For example I tried a Buck Master Series Vanguard with a hollow ground BG42 alloy blade and it showed no damage from chopping into the edge of rib bones. You might have bigger problems chopping into the flats. You do want a somewhat high edge hardness to avoid rolling over. Somewhere in the 58 to 60 RC area.
 
rctk1- same thing happened to my knife once.

I lent my Uncle Henry 2 blade folding hunter (225 UH) to my pal after he downed a deer in a gully in MT, and when I went down to help him drag it up, he handed me my knife which he said was junk because both blades chipped as described above in the 1st post. What a sore lesson to learn, it was my 1st hunter with alot of sentimental value as it was given to me for my 11th bday in 1977. It took alot of honing on a coarse stone to get it cleaned up, but it regained it's usefulness eventually and is my favorite 2 blade folder even though I have 11 or15 of them now. I would use a thicker work-beveled edge for that task if I was to hack through a brisket in the future.
Funny, the knife was so sharp before he took it, I could really lean into it and just cut through the chest with ripping pulls when ever I gutted deer.
It is razor sharp again and will not be lent out anymore!
Best-MC
 
I wrecked the edge on a good Iltis ax trying to chop out the antlers of a moose. Took a long tip to file the chips out. Since then I use a chainsaw :D . On the other hand, I've had no problems with chopping off legs at the joints (well supported, as Cliff notes), opening the brisket, severing the pelvis, and cutting ribs free.
 
This is a sore subject for me tonight, I can tell you what not to use. I got home tonight and found out that my wife had chopped a ham bone in half to split it among the dogs. I asked her how she did it - she used a kitchen knife, put it straight on the bone, and hammered the spine with a rock. I asked her which knife it was, and she was not too keen to tell me. Turns out it was the knife I favor most in the kitchen, an Old Hickory chef's knife. I like it so much because it has a very fine edge, which also makes it an unsuitable bone chopper. It took a little work to get the damage out, the damage wasn't too bad, but the fact that she chose that one over a whole drawer full of others that are better suited, and doesn't care at all that she used the wrong one, that has me upset. Needless to say, my favorites are no longer in the kitchen knife drawer.
 
If your Old Hickory was carbon steel it probably survived much better than any of the stainless steel knives in the house. Many of those would have broken in half or would have lost half inch deep scallops of blade in the process. It is an interesting story though. Most women wouldn't bring a rock into the kitchen. Did she do this outside on a porch or deck? Have you looked to see what happened to the woodwork where she did this deed?

My wife took a knew Spyderco kitchen knife and used it to scrape a sticker off her windshield. That was not a big deal. The problem was that she left the knife on her car hood and drove to the store. I found the knife about a half mile from home in the middle of the street. It was quite scratched up and I had to grind off part of the heal of the blade. Naturally this was one of everybodies favorite kitchen knives, that's why she grabbed it.
 
I would not consider what you did with the Gerber abusive. My first suspicions are that the hatchet you used had been sharpened on a motorized grinder and that it got burned pretty good on the edge; enough to change the hardness of the steel to make it brittle. Normally a chopping tool is going to perform that task quite easily. I've used my Marbles Hunter for this same job and it is a smallish knife.
 
Jeff - Yes, the knife fared better than many of my stainless blades would have, it did much better than I feared when I first found out.

She keeps a nice river-smoothed rock (that I got for her where we camp with her family on the Mokelumne River) in a kitchen drawer that she uses to smash garlic. She uses a lot of garlic, and this rock is used a lot. So when she decided to hammer a knife through the ham bone, the obvious choice was her favorite garlic rock.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top