What to do?

[Dave Martell]

If you want to know what has to be done to transform an Artifex into a decent blade:

http://www.This Site Not Allowed Hereforum.com/post17150.html#p

This link shows how thick these knives are when new (VERY thick) but it also shows us how not to grind the shoulders off of bevels. To me the idea is to thin and blend without transforming an originally symmetric wedgey knife into an asymmetrical mess. Good idea - poor execution.

 

[panda]

what's wrong with that execution? i've never tried a blade with the shoulders ground off like that before, so curious as to the performance implications here.

does asymmetric edge on a symmetric grind blade cause steering?

 

[Dave Martell]

what's wrong with that execution? i've never tried a blade with the shoulders ground off like that before, so curious as to the performance implications here.

does asymmetric edge on a symmetric grind blade cause steering?

It can.

 

[Twistington]

Turning my phone upside-down sitting on the can and being a hair drunk: it looks(atleast to me) that the edge is off center on this, as I understand it 50/50 knife?

(Knife in the link a few posts up)

 

[Benuser]

I must admit in all humility I haven't ever handled an American blade. Is this kind of axe-like grinding considered as normal by American customers?

 

[olpappy]

Link doesn't work, " this site not allowed here " is not a valid URL.

 

[Benuser]

Here is the first pic

http://postimg.org/image/cma6nezdv/

 

[Benuser]

And here the second one

http://postimg.org/image/dgxh1xclz/

 

[K-Fed]

The second pic doesn't look terrible. The first one however. Yikes.

 

[stevenStefano]

In the first pic it looks like one of those Pakistani damascus blades

 

[schanop]

hard work, ehh? That's an understatement.

 

[mhlee]

hard work, ehh? That's an understatement.

These pictures reminded me of this quote by our dear friend, Ken:

"Some makers who only recently began to know how to cut out a knife from a blank or just get a blank handed to them to sharpen, put a handle on it and grind it down . . . ."

Ken. I'd like to introduce you to the Artifex, made by a certain Mr. Richmond.

 

[clayton]

I wonder if they trained at Wildfire cutlery.

 

[Dave Martell]

These pictures reminded me of this quote by our dear friend, Ken:

"Some makers who only recently began to know how to cut out a knife from a blank or just get a blank handed to them to sharpen, put a handle on it and grind it down . . . ."

Ken. I'd like to introduce you to the Artifex, made by a certain Mr. Richmond.

:thumbsup:

 

[Dave Martell]

You guys must be bad sharpeners because this guy can get his "Richmond ArtifLex M390 Go..Toe" to "zip zap and go through anything"...must be the stones he's using. LOL

[video=youtube;ddDOSgw4X5Y]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDOSgw4X5Y[/video]

 

[hutchla]

If a hole shows up I think MR should take it back, then auction it off as the prototype Richmond Chop.

 

[sudsy9977]

I've had a ton of knives that could zip thru stuff but have never been able to get one sharp enough to zap thru something....ryan

 

[panda]

squished onion squirting juices all over the board, zippity zap!

 

[panda]

live action artiflex, just absolutely awesome!!

 

[pumbaa]

live action artiflex, just absolutely awesome!!

that guy lives in huntersville, he is actually a pretty cool guy but him and MR are good friends so the bias is strong with this one. and yeah i gave my artifex away to a line cook it was a tragic knife. the aeb-l as knerd can be witness to had rust stains. it felt like rubber sharpening it. glad its gone. i loved it at first since all i knew was shun and such but after getting a hold of hattori and others they are pretty MEH at best.

 

[mzer]

It may just be me, and I have had fine experiences with CKTG for minor things, but n-u-b-a-t-a-m-a sounds like NAMBLA for the 21st century.

 

[Dave Martell]

.....but n-u-b-a-t-a-m-a sounds like NAMBLA for the 21st century.

NAMBLA-tama :lol2::lol2::lol2::lol2::lol2::lol2::lol2:

 

[CompE]

This link shows how thick these knives are when new (VERY thick) but it also shows us how not to grind the shoulders off of bevels. To me the idea is to thin and blend without transforming an originally symmetric wedgey knife into an asymmetrical mess. Good idea - poor execution.

I've been trying to figure out specifically and objectively what's wrong with the geometry of both the before and after photo's of this Artifex. This is what I see, correct me if I'm wrong:

The original blade is a fairly fat wedge, with both faces completely flat, which then has a bevel at the edge. The edge looks very slightly asymmetrical, maybe 55/45, but not apparently intentionally asymmetrical. When I compare this to my kitchen knives, a kitchen knife shouldn't be symmetrical, and the faces shouldn't be flat. For a righty, the left face should be relatively flat, and the right face should be relatively convex. i.e. A good kitchen knife isn't a wedge with an edge. This knife is. Also, this knife looks very thick at the shoulders of the edge bevel.

Then we move on to the "fixed" blade that had the shoulders ground off. The problem that I see is that they didn't consider what the overall geometry of a knife should be. They focused on grinding off the shoulders and blending it into the faces, as a result it looks like they only hit at most 20% of the knife's faces, but more of it needed to be thinned. They also shouldn't have ground the faces all the way down to the edge. By doing that, they left it so thin that it will never hold an edge. Once they get a bevel on it with enough steel behind it that the edge won't just chip off, they will be left with a slightly shorter knife that has a slightly (if at all) improved geometry. It probably won't be quite as thick behind the edge, but it will get thick quickly.

As far as "an asymmetrical mess" goes, it looks to me that they (unintentionally) left the right face slightly flatter than the left, but still not the ideal geometry for a lefty. I would guess that they intended to make it symmetrical, but didn't get it quite right.

Am I on the right track here, or is there something else that's horribly wrong with this knife that I'm just not seeing?

 

[labor of love]

As far as i can tell, in the first pic there is barely a grind at all to speak of. The knife looks like a blank. Im not sure what you mean when you say the faces shouldn't have been ground all the way to the edge. A thinner edge is a more delicate edge for sure but it shouldn't effect edge retention.

 

[Dave Martell]

I've been trying to figure out specifically and objectively what's wrong with the geometry of both the before and after photo's of this Artifex. This is what I see, correct me if I'm wrong:

The original blade is a fairly fat wedge, with both faces completely flat, which then has a bevel at the edge. The edge looks very slightly asymmetrical, maybe 55/45, but not apparently intentionally asymmetrical. When I compare this to my kitchen knives, a kitchen knife shouldn't be symmetrical, and the faces shouldn't be flat. For a righty, the left face should be relatively flat, and the right face should be relatively convex. i.e. A good kitchen knife isn't a wedge with an edge. This knife is. Also, this knife looks very thick at the shoulders of the edge bevel.

Then we move on to the "fixed" blade that had the shoulders ground off. The problem that I see is that they didn't consider what the overall geometry of a knife should be. They focused on grinding off the shoulders and blending it into the faces, as a result it looks like they only hit at most 20% of the knife's faces, but more of it needed to be thinned.......It probably won't be quite as thick behind the edge, but it will get thick quickly.

As far as "an asymmetrical mess" goes, it looks to me that they (unintentionally) left the right face slightly flatter than the left, but still not the ideal geometry for a lefty. I would guess that they intended to make it symmetrical, but didn't get it quite right.

Am I on the right track here, or is there something else that's horribly wrong with this knife that I'm just not seeing?

You nailed my thoughts on this and I may have overstated the asymmetrical mess part, maybe it's not a mess, yet I do believe that a knifemaker should be able to do a lot better in thinning while keeping an symmetrical knife symmetrical. Of course it's always possible that the owner of the knife asked for an asymmetrical mess, I have no info on that.

 

[CompE]

As far as i can tell, in the first pic there is barely a grind at all to speak of. The knife looks like a blank. Im not sure what you mean when you say the faces shouldn't have been ground all the way to the edge. A thinner edge is a more delicate edge for sure but it shouldn't effect edge retention.

What I meant was that I believe that when thinning the faces of the knife, they should have left some of the original bevel intact, even 1 mm probably would have been enough. The angle of the edge could then be lowered if desired without appreciably reducing the height of the knife. By grinding the faces all the way down to a very acute edge, when an edge bevel is added it will shorten the knife more than it would have if they left just 1mm of the original bevel. Even a 15 degree included angle put on that edge will shorten the height of that blade by 2-3mm at least. Maybe it's just me, but I find the lower the bevel, the larger my micro-bevel needs to be or else the entire micro bevel will chip off.

 

[Benuser]

Excuse my ignorance, but could you explain how building a 15 degree inclusive edge may cost 2-3mm blade width?

 

[CompE]

Excuse my ignorance, but could you explain how building a 15 degree inclusive edge may cost 2-3mm blade width?

The knife that we were looking at had an extremely low angle, under 5 degrees I'd say at the very tip, but let's stick with 5 degrees for the estimate. Say that you want to put a 15 degree micro bevel on it, and make the thickness at the point where you transition from 15 to 5 degrees 1mm thick (this is to make the math easier, I know that's thicker than necessary). Imagine that your tip is an isosceles triangle with the top point 5 degrees. tangent (5/2 degrees) ~= .0437, so your triangle with a 1mm base is 1/.0437 * (1mm/2) ~= 11.5mm tall. Now you want to draw a triangle with a 15 degree tip but a 1mm base on top of that. tangent (15/2) degress ~= .131, so that triangle would have a height of only 3.8mm tall. So, to put a 15 degree bevel on a 5 degree wedge with a 1mm base, you'd have to shave 11.5-3.8mm off your knife or ~7.7mm.

The above were just estimates to make the point. Sure, you could make the steel behind the edge less than 0.5mm thick, but maybe that bevel is less than 5 degrees. You'd have to leave only 0.26mm thickness behind the bevel if you want to take off only 2mm from the blade's height. I think that the estimate that 2-3mm will come off that knife isn't way out there. That could have been avoided if, when thinning, just a little bit (1mm or less) of the original 30 degree edge was left of the blade when it was thinned.

 

[Benuser]

Thank you, CompE, after some playing with pencil and calculator I got your point!

 

[Squilliam]

The knife that we were looking at had an extremely low angle, under 5 degrees I'd say at the very tip, but let's stick with 5 degrees for the estimate. Say that you want to put a 15 degree micro bevel on it, and make the thickness at the point where you transition from 15 to 5 degrees 1mm thick (this is to make the math easier, I know that's thicker than necessary). Imagine that your tip is an isosceles triangle with the top point 5 degrees. tangent (5/2 degrees) ~= .0437, so your triangle with a 1mm base is 1/.0437 * (1mm/2) ~= 11.5mm tall. Now you want to draw a triangle with a 15 degree tip but a 1mm base on top of that. tangent (15/2) degress ~= .131, so that triangle would have a height of only 3.8mm tall. So, to put a 15 degree bevel on a 5 degree wedge with a 1mm base, you'd have to shave 11.5-3.8mm off your knife or ~7.7mm.

The above were just estimates to make the point. Sure, you could make the steel behind the edge less than 0.5mm thick, but maybe that bevel is less than 5 degrees. You'd have to leave only 0.26mm thickness behind the bevel if you want to take off only 2mm from the blade's height. I think that the estimate that 2-3mm will come off that knife isn't way out there. That could have been avoided if, when thinning, just a little bit (1mm or less) of the original 30 degree edge was left of the blade when it was thinned.

I don't know why you would be wanting anything near a 1mm base. It's fine to grind the face of the knife to a 'zero edge' at 5 degrees per side. In fact I have done that and then made a pass or two at 15 degrees on an 8k stone. The base of that bevel is 20 microns, and is strong enough to cut wood without plastic deformation. There is barely any loss of blade height, maybe 100 microns at the most, which won't be missed.