- Joined
- Oct 16, 1998
- Messages
- 2,395
Alarion:
The problem with extreme testing is scale and range. Taking your corrosion resistance test as the scenario, there are steels that are highly corrosion resistant, those that are pretty corrosion resistant, and those that rust aggressively. A test such as you suggest will give data in hours that it takes a certain blade to rust, but the only really useful information to a user is whether his blade can be neglected completely, a little bit, or not at all. Seat of the pants evaluation can tell you that. In fact, a steel alloy is a steel alloy, and you can get a fair idea about corrosion resistance just based on the steel's composition and reputation and not have to do any testing at all. One knife made out of ATS-34 will perform, very roughly, like another. That will hold true except in cases where there are wide variations in heat treatment, and blade finish, which only goes further to nullify "objective" testing because those variable factors are difficult to standardize or control on actual knives.
The same is true of strength or durability testing. Comparing two blades of the same steel is pretty uninteresting. There are significant differences in edge durability between knives, but generally, a good steel, well heat treated, provides a good cutting tool. There are differences between heat treatments, primarily between factory and hand made blades, but again, seat of the pants evaluation will tell you if a blade edge is holding up to par or not. Testing two D-2 blades and quantifying the edge durability on blade A as 98.754 and the durability on blade B is 98.391 is not important. All you need is a seat of the pants test to be sure that the edge durability is in the high 90's somewhere, where you expect a D-2 edge to be.
I believe that the ultimate differences in performance between premium knives is relatively small. You can quickly learn what the limits of a good knife are, and quickly determine if a given knife is or is not up to snuff. This is why design is so much more important to me than steel type. As long as a maker is using a premium steel that fits the application, and has done enough of his own evaluating to know he is doing a good job of heat treating, then the grind and shape of the knife are much greater factors in the "performance" than anything else, and those are almost impossible to quantify.
The problem with extreme testing is scale and range. Taking your corrosion resistance test as the scenario, there are steels that are highly corrosion resistant, those that are pretty corrosion resistant, and those that rust aggressively. A test such as you suggest will give data in hours that it takes a certain blade to rust, but the only really useful information to a user is whether his blade can be neglected completely, a little bit, or not at all. Seat of the pants evaluation can tell you that. In fact, a steel alloy is a steel alloy, and you can get a fair idea about corrosion resistance just based on the steel's composition and reputation and not have to do any testing at all. One knife made out of ATS-34 will perform, very roughly, like another. That will hold true except in cases where there are wide variations in heat treatment, and blade finish, which only goes further to nullify "objective" testing because those variable factors are difficult to standardize or control on actual knives.
The same is true of strength or durability testing. Comparing two blades of the same steel is pretty uninteresting. There are significant differences in edge durability between knives, but generally, a good steel, well heat treated, provides a good cutting tool. There are differences between heat treatments, primarily between factory and hand made blades, but again, seat of the pants evaluation will tell you if a blade edge is holding up to par or not. Testing two D-2 blades and quantifying the edge durability on blade A as 98.754 and the durability on blade B is 98.391 is not important. All you need is a seat of the pants test to be sure that the edge durability is in the high 90's somewhere, where you expect a D-2 edge to be.
I believe that the ultimate differences in performance between premium knives is relatively small. You can quickly learn what the limits of a good knife are, and quickly determine if a given knife is or is not up to snuff. This is why design is so much more important to me than steel type. As long as a maker is using a premium steel that fits the application, and has done enough of his own evaluating to know he is doing a good job of heat treating, then the grind and shape of the knife are much greater factors in the "performance" than anything else, and those are almost impossible to quantify.
