Gosh I keep having posts disappear..
Surely you must be talking about some serious angle on those secondary bevels if its stopping the knife from cutting?
By secondary bevel I'm NOT referring to something a monkey used a concrete step to sharpen it to a 90 degree edge.
Basically people have had real problems with expensive knives around here. I did too in the early days, too which I attributed to lack of skills. Then I began to use Scandi knives which worked. Admittedly I put lots of work into my (mostly) cheap Scandis. Then it became the craze to have thick knives and even gather wood by prying. So I got a set of Falknivens, and even a Benchmade. They arrived paper slicing sharp so off I went to give them a try. They all failed miserably, but I had a little Mora in my pack and it worked fine.
I'm a pretty stubborn person which only increases with age, so I chose the H1 and A1 to work with, and with big diamond stone and drywall sanding pad loaded with emery I would go and spend time on our coast trail trying my prying skills and honing. Neither went well but I'd started with the idea of seeing if I could match all the stories of prying - and the H1 and A1 are certainly strong enough. Apparently damp wood is as hard to pry apart as it is hard to make fine enough fuzzies to light fires with. I'm certain of that since when all else failed I took along a 5' railway pry bar - same result. I do follow things to the end. I kept honing and trying the H1 until it came into shape. That took some time, and now it's a proper Scandi with precise bevels - but it does work as well as a Mora. The problem is that the factory grinding isn't that great so using a small belt sander on it will just accentuate that. As I used large flat abrasives on it, it became apparent that the bevels had first been finished on some large round stone, then finished with a belt grinder - neither with precision. So when flat honed scratches are left in the middle section which is still slightly concave. Even semi properly finished though, it worked as well as any Scandi (because it has a continuous curve of edge), and surprised me by how well it split with a baton. Since it is thicker, if it is made into a better wedge then it opens a crack wider than a Mora and so is much more effective. Properly finished ones are now popular with some guides for those reasons. The A1 had even worse grind issues than the H1 and is bigger. It took me two years of occasional honing to get it finished. Now it's a big Mora with well finished bevels it works well, but it did not begin to work well until it was almost finished. Same batonning potential as H1. Then I put it away since a Norlund hatchet beats it in utility for the same weight but a lesson was well learned. I put a wide bevel on the WM1 but then gave up with it and the F1 for the following reasoning..
Sometimes many years of experience lead us to conclusions which are wrong. I tried machetes here for clearing and with some stuff they bounced off no matter how sharp, and where they did work, the edge was reduced to being like a saw in short order. I tried fine honing coarse honing and various angles. I gave up and moved to goloks which worked great on everything. Years went by and then I was told by a friend that if I flattened the (what looked) flat sides of a machete and then put on an acute convex at the edge, that the machete would then cut and the edge last. And it worked despite seeming impossible to me. I've since tried it on flat ground knives to uniform the sides, and seen a dramatic improvement. Just how the tiny top shoulder of a V secondary bevel could have such an effect has to be tried to be believed. The F1 and WM1 would involve too much removal of metal to be worthwhile, and in any case wouldn't be acute enough. What surprised me was the effect on a blade acutely convexed at the edge, since there isn't much apparent shoulder.
So in this damp place, if I put on an acute V edge - really precisely using a jig, then it wouldn't work. I bet you can guess how I know that. But it could well be that with a huge amount of work on the rest of the knife it could. I know that it sounds ridiculous that tiny top shoulders can influence bevels but experience tends to show that it does.
A neat kitchen experiment, if you watch the video at the bottom of this page:
http://www.chefknivestogo.com/cckcleaver1.html
Yep slicing an onion. The horizontal cuts are the dangerous ones. How well does your kitchen knife do that, with secondary bevels?
Iv got some long days ahead!
