Recently, someone sent me a video of the cold steel test and asked if the knife in the craftsman's workshop could reach this level. I know that Leng Gang has many loyal fans in China, and they are impressed by those who "cut off the head of the bull with one knife" and "connected 10 water bottles". But I have to tell you a discouraging fact, the vast majority of the violence tests in the cold steel video can be completed with an ordinary household cutting knife or an agricultural firewood knife. You think it's hard to do it simply because you lack the professional training to be up to the test of this performative nature.
Craftsman workshop Damascus knife
A good knife must be durable while remaining sharp, comfortable to use, and try to avoid situations that affect the use and even threaten the safety of users in extreme cases such as breaking and cracking. High-end knives will also pursue the beauty of the appearance, reflecting its craftsmanship and artistic value.
The vast majority of so-called violence tests that are common online are just tricks. True brute force testing must presuppose the destruction of the knife. For example, the Rockwell hardness test is an indicator of the hardness of a blade by applying pressure to it until a dent appears. Today, when steel technology has entered the nano era, it is very common to choose a good piece of steel and make a large knife that can cut the bone of the cow and cut the grass mat. The reason why some knife manufacturers are keen to shoot violent test videos and show everyone the basic functions that ordinary knives can do in an exaggerated form is mainly for entertainment effects, which can be summed up in four words: it looks very cool. Because customers will feel cool and pay for this cool feeling.
Damascus knife test
Simply showing the sharpness of the Damascus knife does not explain anything. For tools, sharpness must be evaluated in conjunction with retention and toughness in order to have practical value. We all know that sharpness mainly depends on the hardness of the edge and the angle of the cutting edge, and a thin blade can be achieved by opening a thin edge with a very high hardness steel. If the edge is opened to the nanometer level, it is even easy to cut stones and steel plates. However, if a knife only has sharpness and does not have good retention and toughness, it is still very garbage in actual use.
There is an easy way to test the sharpness of the tool as well as its retention and toughness. The blade used first split dozens of pieces of wood, then cut off a dozen iron nails, then did not wipe and grind, and then cut a few pieces of paper. If a knife can complete the above tests continuously, it means that it can cope with many scenarios in the actual user without disappointing you. The Craftsman Workshop once shot a similar test video, and although it didn't look as cool as cutting off an entire animal with a knife, it was actually much more difficult than the butcher-style test.
Many people will decide to buy because they see beautiful knife photos and test videos on the Internet, but in fact, a good knife in hand often needs to be touched to understand. Its handle feel, whether the center of gravity is reasonable, whether it is easy to loosen, these involve ergonomic details, it is difficult to make accurate judgments through photos or videos, and when you pick up the knife to do a few simple actions, you can often feel whether it is handy to use.
When appreciating high-end knives, people are often attracted by its beautiful shapes, expensive materials, strange inlays and carvings, and ignore a high-end knife as the most valuable place in the work of art: the completion of the knife. In the field of missiles and aviation, there is a very important category of positions, responsible for the processing and grinding of some extremely delicate parts. They were able to reduce the errors of these parts to the limits that human beings could reach, and these people were called real great craftsmen. There is a passage on the Internet that Apple sent the shell of their IPOD products to Japan, and asked Japan's best handmade knife factory to mirror the IPOD back cover. These examples seek the ultimate degree of completion.
What is the completion of the knife? It includes many details that can be felt as soon as you get started, such as the flat V-surface, the shape is not correct, whether the drawing is uniform, the number of eyes is not fine, whether the back finger groove of the knife is not chamfered round, the handle taper, the knife face pattern of the Damascus knife is concave and convex, whether the center of gravity is reasonable, whether the overall thinning is smooth, whether the mirror surface is perfect, whether it is liquid or bright, whether the opening edge is strictly symmetrical, and whether the edge line is uniform. If you make a rough comparison between the two knives, it will be difficult to notice the difference in these details. And a knife worth tens of thousands of dollars and a knife that costs hundreds of dollars, most of its cost is reflected in the degree of completion. People like to pursue perfection, and it is precisely perfection that is the hardest to achieve.
Author: Daniel Zhang, founder of the craftsman workshop, handmade knife maker, hand folding forging Damascus knife craft inheritor.