8th week of continuous carryI have folded over the feather edge cutting rose stems (moderately tough to cut stuff), resharpened the knife edge with finer stones and it seems to have a more stable non-feathered edge now.
The edge is as sharp as and is as durable as my stainless chief's knives (German made) but not as sharp nor as durable as my Japanese built non-stainless high carbon steel cooking knives.
This is not bad, really. This is a $4.13 knife from Amazon, so it exceeds my expectations for a really cheap knife and comparing it to hundred dollar chief's knives is really a complement to the pocket knife's steel and edge.
The centering of the pocket knife's blade in the steel lined handle is good (and is adjustable if ever needs to be adjusted).
The single hand one finger tip opening action is always nice and smooth with no slop developing in blade lock up or centering so far.
Pocket knives do see abuse as a part of their standard diet so we will see how it handles what comes with daily use.
I spent less than $9 for the two knives I have now, so I cannot complain that they are not affordable. I have seen knives that cost 3 times that much not do as well, so comparatively these are certainly RELATIVELY GOOD KNIVES for the price.
These are not gummy soft Chinese stainless blades, they are tough and likely meet all the improved heat treat criteria that make the
https://knifeuser.com/3cr13-stainless-steel-knife-review/ such good but inexpensive steel for chief's knife blades.
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Cutting the safety seal off of pill bottles constitutes the most consistently dulling use case I have seen so far.You know, very tip of knife goes under the seal and you twist it with some force to break the band edge and then you force the blade tip to cut upwards to separate the relatively hard and stiff heat shrunk plastic band in two.
Surely, a very odd thing to get rated as the "most blade dulling cutting job", huh?
I don't know what shrunk cellophane like stuff is made of (PVC pre-stretched plastic that gets heat shrunk around the twist lid) but it is made of volume reduced heat shrunk HARD and abrasive plastic and that stuff will dull a knife tip up with only opening up a pill bottle or two.
You can see it at the very tip end of your blade, going back only like 1/16" up the blade .......
This cutting load is all localized in a tiny area and it involves some twisting force to get it started, so I can see where it is hard on a blade tip & the short edge just above the tip. This is where your blade is weakest physically anyway, and it is where the steel of the blade got the hottest (got most annealed) during the factory grinding & processing stages.
Sharpening the blade enough to remove this particular dulling is laborious and if you did it often enough you would change the form of the tip of the blade.
I have chosen to ignore it going forward, as it comes back with the very next set of pill bottles .......
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BLADE ABUSE
Use it some and it will roll the edge and dull on a variety of common cutting tasks. 11
o is too fine of an angle for this blade steel, but that was known going in.
I wanted to see what I wound up with over time,
what actually worked well in my real world.
I have been "quick edge sharpening" the blade edges, removing roll over burrs and blunted zones as they happen. This has gradually moved the edge form away from the 11
o full blade straight taper to more of a blunted "v" form, but functional edge durability has gone up considerably.
The body is still straight tapered at less than 16
o but the edge itself (last 1/16" by the edge) is closer to 20
o.
For a $4.13 Amazon knife, this isn't bad service, no not bad at all ........
I inadvertently try to cut cyclone fence sometimes when cutting off small hedge branches growing through the fence. Yes, stupid stuff like that means time to re-edge the blade.