After many years of wondering, I finally got my hands on a Friction Forged blade. This one is the Alpha, a small hunting knife with a 2.75" long blade that is just over 0.1" thick. I'm mostly interested in the blade steel and processing, but I'll include an all around review in stages as I do some work with it.
Initial impressions:
This is a nice looking knife. The stag handles are polished and the mosaic pins are quite striking. I'm not necessarily a fan of stag, but I don't dislike it either. The friction forging leaves a strip about 3/8" wide along the edge that is hardened. The polishing of the blade shows this area as mirror polished, while the rest is more subdued, leaving a clear line between the different sections. The blade is flat ground from the spine and there is jimping on the spine near the handle and near the tip. This blade was obtained used, so I cannot comment on the initial sharpness. The sheath is a pouch type made of leather with an insert to protect the leather from damage. There is also a snap style keeper strap that goes around the handle. The only complaint I have about the sheath is that it has no retention ability without the strap fastened. The knife will quite easily just slide out.
After using the knife was used in the kitchen for a week or so as a paring knife, some cosmetic issues started to show up. First is the grinding on each side of the knife is not quite even. It's only really evident around the plunge lines, as one has the plunge corner broken/eased, while the other side is still square. This is minor and literally took about a week to notice.
Another issue is the handle has spots of epoxy on it in several places, particularly around the pins. It appears as though it was an attempt to fill/smooth some of the grooves in the stag around the pins. As it was second or third hand, I cannot say whether it was like this when new. If it was, it would be very disappointing for a knife that costs well over $300.
The final issue with the knife is the polished section is not even on each side of the knife, perhaps indicating that the friction forged section is not even. One side is slightly narrower than the other.
Now, the above issues are only cosmetic, and don't affect function in any way I've been able to detect yet.
A few things about the friction forged steel, for those not familiar with it. The base steel is standard D2 steel. From my reading on these knives, the base D2 is heat treated in the normal fashion and given a pretty soft temper at around 42-45 HRc. Then the edge portion is, for lack of a better word, stirred using a mandrel revolving at high speed. This mandrel is spun up to speed, the steel clamped in place, and the mandrel pushed through the steel in a path matching the future edge silhouette.
My understanding is the friction is enough to heat the steel to very high temperatures, from which it air cools and hardens to around 66-68. While having such a high hardness would normally cause a brittle blade, the stirring of the friction forged blades causes an exceedingly fine grain size, off the scale of the ASTM standard sizes that range from 1 (very large grains) to 15 (ultrafine grains).
Even though I haven't used the blade for much, I decided I'd rebevel the blade to match my other knives for some comparisons. Still working on that. While rebeveling, I noticed the edge of this knife is kind of thick. Measured at the top of the edge bevel, it is 0.03" thick. Now granted that's not much, but it's thicker than any other folding knife I have, as well as some rather large fixed blades with 12" chopping blades. In fact, my favorite chopper is about half that thick at the top of the bevel, 0.015 to 0.018 inches. The exception of edge thickness is my Delica, which is about 0.04" at the top of the edge bevel. Now this Delica has led a rough life as a work knife and has been resharpened A LOT, many times on a belt sander. In other words, it's pretty worn down. So, I say all that to say I'll have to finish rebeveling before I make any cutting comparisons with my other knives.
Initial impressions:
This is a nice looking knife. The stag handles are polished and the mosaic pins are quite striking. I'm not necessarily a fan of stag, but I don't dislike it either. The friction forging leaves a strip about 3/8" wide along the edge that is hardened. The polishing of the blade shows this area as mirror polished, while the rest is more subdued, leaving a clear line between the different sections. The blade is flat ground from the spine and there is jimping on the spine near the handle and near the tip. This blade was obtained used, so I cannot comment on the initial sharpness. The sheath is a pouch type made of leather with an insert to protect the leather from damage. There is also a snap style keeper strap that goes around the handle. The only complaint I have about the sheath is that it has no retention ability without the strap fastened. The knife will quite easily just slide out.
After using the knife was used in the kitchen for a week or so as a paring knife, some cosmetic issues started to show up. First is the grinding on each side of the knife is not quite even. It's only really evident around the plunge lines, as one has the plunge corner broken/eased, while the other side is still square. This is minor and literally took about a week to notice.
Another issue is the handle has spots of epoxy on it in several places, particularly around the pins. It appears as though it was an attempt to fill/smooth some of the grooves in the stag around the pins. As it was second or third hand, I cannot say whether it was like this when new. If it was, it would be very disappointing for a knife that costs well over $300.
The final issue with the knife is the polished section is not even on each side of the knife, perhaps indicating that the friction forged section is not even. One side is slightly narrower than the other.
Now, the above issues are only cosmetic, and don't affect function in any way I've been able to detect yet.
A few things about the friction forged steel, for those not familiar with it. The base steel is standard D2 steel. From my reading on these knives, the base D2 is heat treated in the normal fashion and given a pretty soft temper at around 42-45 HRc. Then the edge portion is, for lack of a better word, stirred using a mandrel revolving at high speed. This mandrel is spun up to speed, the steel clamped in place, and the mandrel pushed through the steel in a path matching the future edge silhouette.
My understanding is the friction is enough to heat the steel to very high temperatures, from which it air cools and hardens to around 66-68. While having such a high hardness would normally cause a brittle blade, the stirring of the friction forged blades causes an exceedingly fine grain size, off the scale of the ASTM standard sizes that range from 1 (very large grains) to 15 (ultrafine grains).
Even though I haven't used the blade for much, I decided I'd rebevel the blade to match my other knives for some comparisons. Still working on that. While rebeveling, I noticed the edge of this knife is kind of thick. Measured at the top of the edge bevel, it is 0.03" thick. Now granted that's not much, but it's thicker than any other folding knife I have, as well as some rather large fixed blades with 12" chopping blades. In fact, my favorite chopper is about half that thick at the top of the bevel, 0.015 to 0.018 inches. The exception of edge thickness is my Delica, which is about 0.04" at the top of the edge bevel. Now this Delica has led a rough life as a work knife and has been resharpened A LOT, many times on a belt sander. In other words, it's pretty worn down. So, I say all that to say I'll have to finish rebeveling before I make any cutting comparisons with my other knives.