Damascus blades are sharpest knives in drawer
Posted on Sunday, November 16, 2008
Next to a good rifle, a good knife is a deer hunter’s most important piece of equipment.
Hunters use knives for many things, but the main purpose is for cleaning, skinning and butchering deer. For those tasks, a knife must have an ergonomic handle and a stout, but lithe blade. Its shape must facilitate nimbleness, to the extent that it becomes almost like a sixth digit. Most of all, it must be sharp, and it must stay sharp.
On opening day, I watched a member of my deer club skin and quarter a buck he killed with a cheap, discount-store knife. It was too small for the job, and he had to sharpen it every five minutes. This made a tough job a lot more tedious than it needed to be.
Like any other piece of highquality equipment, a good knife is expensive, but if you choose wisely, it’ll be money well spent. A good knife will last a lifetime, and probably a lifetime or two beyond.
I’ve lost track of the knives I’ve owned over the past 30 years, but I don’t miss the ones I’ve lost or broken because they were pure junk. I’ve had off brands and name brands, including top-of-the-line Bucks and Schrades. The tips broke off those two, and none of the others held an edge for very long, nor did they ever seem to get very sharp.
Ron Duncan, a custom knife maker from Cairo, Mo., said the reason for that is the quality of the steel used in mass production knives. Those blades, he explained, are stamped from a sheet of low-quality stainless steel, or steel with low carbon content. The carbon content is also universal throughout the blade, making the edge just as hard as the middle and top. Too much carbon will make a blade brittle. Too little carbon won’t hold an edge.
The best knives are made of layered steel, better known as Damascus steel. Damascus blades contain a blend of steels exhibiting high nickel content and high carbon content. To get these characteristics, knife makers like Duncan get their steel from an array of sources, such as old automobile leaf springs, used saw blades and even old woven steel cable. Duncan “recycles” discarded steel into wafers of high-nickel and highcarbon steel.
Duncan, a journeyman bladesmith who credits the legendary Jerry Fisk of Lockesburg as both a mentor and inspiration, starts by making a steel billet. For this, he stacks, alternately, 10 highnickel and high-carbon wafers and welds a handle to one end. Then, he shoves the square into an oven until it reaches 2, 300 degrees, or welding temperature. At that temperature, the steel is nearly molten, and the molecules from the different layers bond.
Duncan removes the billet from the oven and uses a hydraulic press to fold and reheat the billet again and again. Each fold doubles the number of layers until your original 10 layers become hundreds of layers.
“The more layers you have, the better it is from both a visual perspective and for strength,” Duncan said. “But you want to see the layers when you etch it, so I stop at around 300-400 layers. People like that because it’s pleasing to the eye. Personally, I like my billets to have about 300 layers to get the effect I want.”
In 2003, I spent a day with Duncan in his shop for a magazine article when Duncan was just starting to establish his name as a bladesmith. He demonstrated the entire process, from stacking the wafers to welding to folding and hammering the billet, to cutting, grinding, tempering and acid etching the blade. I still have the old flannel shirt I wore that day, mottled with holes from molten flux. Duncan attached a handle made of burled Missouri walnut to that blade, and it is one of my most prized possessions. It also represents the final stop in my quest for the perfect knife. It is, and I will never need another.
“A good knife should be able to field dress three or four elk without resharpening,” Duncan said. “You can do that with the knives I make.”
You can do that with a Damascus knife made by any of many fine Arkansas bladesmiths, too. For a complete list of Arkansas knife makers, visit the Arkansas Knifemakers Association Web site at www. arkansasknifemakers. com.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
