Ouch, sorry to hear that, Hacksaw.

I would have expected such a deep grind to be a little more delicate, but clearly something's amiss.

I thought they were giving you a flat grind. A hollow grind could easily make the blade too thin.

Hope things work out.

Hummm... Interesting response. I've personally never heard of them saying anything along the lines of the response you posted.

I've also never heard of a knife that can't be used on hard surfaces (assuming your referring to wood...).

I've never own any of their non-kitchen knives (even though went through cubs and scouts 40 mins from there), but i've used their chef knives a lot. If I didn't already have a nice selection of Wusthof and Henkel, i'd get a complete set of theirs.

I highly recommend their filet knives.

Wish you good luck with this and hope there is a solution that you can live with.

You took you blackberry camping? come-on man, that's blasphemy.
How can you get away from it all when you take it with you?

The Army issued ones have weak tips for some "Army" work and the wooden handles have been known to split, but they otherwise are good little knives if you keep the jobs in par to what the knife was intended. I don't know the steel type, but I know you can chop branches with them easily without the blade edge bending.

Of course, if I break it I simply walk it over to the QM and get a brand new one in exchange so I tend to take less care of it as I would if I paid for it out of my own pocket.

Do you think it was the steel or the grind, or a combo of both? Hope it works out for you.

I take the Blackberry everywhere. I was actually in the process of stashing it in my glove box when I noticed there were bars so I figured what the hell, I'll send them an email about it and get it off my chest so I can enjoy my weekend sans belt knife.

I have a theory about what might have happened...

When I was phoned to be told it was ready, they mentioned how long it took the production manager to get it right. I can't help but wonder if the grinding overheated the metal and it lost it's temper...it's so thin that it would heat up easily. There's no reason the edge should bend laterally under pressure from my (very soft) fingernail...that's just not right now matter how thin.

Unfortunately my research on C70 steel has only come up with it's use in forged piston connecting rods so I can't confirm that as a possibility.

If they just fix the edge and send it back, I'll likely grind it down to a compound bevel like an off the shelf knife and consider it the equivalent to a custom bird and trout knife...chalking the extra expense up to a valuable life lesson.

If this was a custom, what grind/edge geometry did you ask for? A thin hollow grind is not what you want for a GP survival blade.

That is too bad Hacksaw. A very thin scandi can sometimes be to thin. I have rolled edges on knive I took to a zero grind but nothing at all like yours.

You may want to see about exchanging for a flat ground that one I think they do have worked out.

A scandi grind is preferable for wood working not food prep skinning etc so their reasoning is not quite on the mark. I hope they make it right for you.

Good luck....it sure looked good.

I asked for a traditional scandinavian single bevel grind but with the handle and blade shape of a traditional Grohmann #1 knife. I provided them with more than enough information, pictures, and references to create an accurate representation.

The stock is 1/8" thick which is thicker than many scandi knives so a properly angled grind should have been possible.

Now that I think about it more, I think what they did was take an off the shelf 'sabre grind' #1 knife and ground down the primary bevel until it was the only bevel. On nearly any knife this would leave an edge which was too thin...if it weren't, there would be no such thing as a compound bevel grind IMO.

It's also possible that the grind is not too thin...just too thin for the characteristics of the steel they use...I'm not in a position to say definitively on that one however.

Just an FYI for anybody following this thread.

I finally got my hands on some proper measuring tools and calculated the angle of the bevels.

The total flat to flat angle is 11 degrees...or 5.5 degrees per side.

That is very very acute. 15 deg is considered a delicate carving angle by the fellow I buy my wood working knives from. I am not sure that could hold up no matter what the steel etc.

My Skookum tools are in the 12 degree range but are true scandi ground not a hollow. That is about as small an angle as I would like to have on a working tool.

5.5 per side is fine if the knife is hard enough, but the range you are specifying isn't there. I would take the 5.5 if it were at 65 or 66 HRC, otherwise, I'd put a small microbevel in it.

Here's what happens when you get D2 too thin. This is a Queen 4180 that I took down to about 12 deg. This damage was caused by cutting fuzz sticks in pine - not a terribly demanding task. Up until this point, I thought this was the be-all end-all combination, as it would slice cardboard all day.

On the bright side, it's thin enough that I removed 95% of the damage with a small micro bevel on a DMT blue in about 3 minutes. It doesn't cut quite as well with the microbevel, but is still miles ahead of lots of other knives in my collection. And it resists damage quite well now.

I chalked it up to learning the limits of D2...

http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q203/sodak_photos/queen_4180.jpg