How to Choose the Right Knife

In today's show we discussed knives! Yep. The most versatile and useful tool you'll need whether you are building a bug out plan, you go hunting or fishing, ... endless uses. Though there is SO MANY OPTIONS! We'll try to organize the thinking process to chose the "RIGHT" knife.

The Atomic Bear Show Episode 4 - REPLAY 

This is the SWAT Knife by The Atomic Bear. This is a mission versatile practical and tactical knife. The blade is made of 420 Stainless Steel. 

To learn more about this knife or buy it CLICK HERE

In these notes, you can find useful infographics where terms are defined!

1) Get a great tour in the World of Knives! From bladehq.com

2) The blade metal of a EDC, tactical or survival knife is key. It will define what the knife is good for! And for how long...

We suggest that you read the full article from Knife Informer (URL: https://knifeinformer.com/discovering-the-best-knife-steel/) This is the best blog post we have found on the subject. We report from this blog post the main points:

Here are few definitions:

Ultimately, the different types of steel used in knife blades each exhibit varying degrees of these five key properties (Thanks to Knife Informer!)

Hardness

 Hardness is the ability to resist deforming when subject to stress and applied forces.   Hardness in knife steels is directly correlated to strength and is generally measured using the Rockwell C scale (aka “HRC”).

Toughness

 Toughness is the ability to resist damage like cracks or chips when subject to impact or “sudden loads”.  Chipping is a knife’s worst enemy and never easy to fix.   There are a number of different ways to measure toughness (i.e. Charpy, Izod) thus it’s less standardized than hardness when it comes to knives. In general, the harder the steel the less tough it’s likely to be.

Wear Resistance

 Wear resistance is the steel’s ability to withstand damage from both abrasive and adhesive wear.  Abrasive wear occurs when harder particles pass over a softer surface.  Adhesive wear occurs when debris is dislodged from one surface and attaches to the other.  Wear resistance generally correlates with the steel’s hardness but is also heavily influenced by the specific chemistry of the steel.  In steels of equal hardness, the steel with larger carbides (think microscopic, hard, wear resistant particles) will typically resist wear better.  However, carbides can become brittle and crack, thus decreasing toughness.

Corrosion Resistance

 Corrosion resistance is the ability to resist corrosion such as rust caused by external elements like humidity, moisture and salt.  Note that a high resistance to corrosion does involve a sacrifice in the overall edge performance.

Edge Retention

 Edge Retention represents how long the blade will retain its sharpness when subject to periods of use.  It’s what everyone talks about these days but unfortunately, the measurement of edge retention lacks any defined set of standards and so much of the data is subjective.  For me, edge retention is a combination of wear resistance and an edge that resists deformation.

And here is a graph showing the index for different metal alloy for each of the properties (10 is great 1 is poor).

This image summarizes to compromises betweendifferent blade steel 

3) There are several options for the handle material. See a list of pros and cons below

4) We discussed The Ultimate Edge Knife also... from my friends Adam and John. You can have a peek at their kickstarter campaign that went super well... and you can see Jeff cutting tomatoes...  What?? Tomatoes? LOL In his testimonial video LOL

See the official video here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ultimatedgeknives/the-ultimatedge-knife-the-sharpest-knife-on-the-pl

 There are all episodes of The Atomic Bear Show.