Brittle Edge?

[nick681]

I recently recieved a new Natural Outlaw. I was doing some training and decided to test the chopping performance. After chopping on some two to three inch diameter frozen pine logs and a couple of old stumps, all of which I pretty much destoyed in short order,I noticed some dings on the edge. I had my sharpmaker with me and tried some light strokes to take the dings out (they were pretty tiny, only a millimeter or so). I did not have much success after a few strokes so I did not proceed any further. Besides the dings the rest of the edge will still shave. I am really happy with the NO other than this. It is the perfect knife for carrying on my LBV and doing any task I need.
I remember recently a thread concerning the laser cutting of the blanks for Busse knives and possible problems with the edge being brittle. Could this be what happened to me or just bad luck?
I am going to the field on Monday and will be taking the knife with me as is. I plan on more chopping and nuclear mayhem. Should I send it back to Jerry or just wait until I get my Edge pro and try to take care of the probelm myself. I really would like to keep the asymmetrical edge.
Any thoughts from Jerry or any of my fellow Busse owners would be appreciated.


Nick

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Arguing with a GRUNT is like wrestling with a pig. Everyone gets dirty and the little pig loves it.

The reason the U.S. Army is so successful in combat is that war is chaos; and the Army practices chaos on a daily basis

 

[Bronco]

Nick,
You mentioned that you currently have an Edge Pro inbound. Based on this, and your present location, I'd recommend waiting for the Edge Pro to arrive and then do the sharpening yourself. If you use the Edge Pro to sharpen the flat bevel, and then strop the opposite convex bevel, you should be able to take care of any little dings and maintain the asymmetric edge without any problem.

And should you run into any further complications, you can always send it back to Jerry to have all made right again, under warranty, of course. So, what have you got to lose doing it yourself?

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Semper Fi

-Bill

 

[Cliff Stamp]

Brittle failure will be shown by chips, the Busse Combat blades are designed to dent and not chip when overstressed so before I wrote the blade off as being less than 100% I would inspect the wood that was chopped to see if it contained any debris that could be expected to cause such damage. Unless you are chopping freshly baked lumber this is a fact of life. As well if the stumps etc., don't show any signs of inclusions, you could have knocked them free or chopped them out anyway. The best thing to do is to sharpen the blade to take the dings out if you are so inclinded and repeat the work on some wood after inspecting if to make sure it is free of nails, rocks etc. .

In regards to the dings, for heavier use blades, in time as they are used they will accumulate such damage. My BM usually has about 2-4 small (sub mm) along the edge from contacts with hardened metal and/or rock. It is not possible to avoid this unless you carefully inspect and/or clean all the material you are going to cut, or you are very selective about what you use it on. It is a large waste of material in my mind, to grind the entire edge back to remove such a localized bit of damage. For blades used for finer work, then I would do it, but they are rarely damaged anyway.

-Cliff