Carving Knives: A Growing Interest?

[JD Spydo]

One of my favorite outdoor magazines that I never miss an issue of is called "The Backwoodsman". Here in the past few issues they have been advertising carving knives of all things. As many knives as I've played with in the past 20 years or so I must be honest and admit that I know very little about "carving knives".

The ones that the Backwoodsman magazine really likes are made by Flexcut. They also market a very impressive looking strop as well that I actually plan on purchasing soon. But with all that aside I was wanting to pick the brains of you all who may know something about carving knives and who makes a good one or a super high quality piece?

Now I have done a lot of woodworking in my days and I've used knives that are meant for woodworking but I've never had my dad or anyone else ever refer to them as carving knives. So let's chat about Carving Knives and things associated with them. There appears to be many styles and many different designs and blade geometries. It also seems like the majority of them are carbon steel instead of stainless.

[yablanowitz]

Not sure how much I can say on the subject. Woodcarving knives (as opposed to meat carving knives) tend to have large, hand filling handles and small, controllable blades. I think the prevalence of carbon steel is partly due to tradition and partly because people tend to value ease of sharpening over edge retention. Personally, I rather like S30V for woodwork, but that may be because our near desert climate and constant wind makes out trees hard and gnarly.

Flexcut makes good entry level carvers. Check out Pinewood Forge for something a bit better.

[awa54]

As far as stainless vs. carbon, my impression is that the ability to go past 60rc. while retaining apex stability and avoiding excessive brittleness is a major reason for using carbon, as well as quick touch-ups to the edge being less work. The Scandinavians all produce excellent carving knives if you want bigger types, check out Japanese knives as well, many makers produce chip carving patterns in Hitachi white or blue steel laminates. Japan Woodworker is a good place to start for Japanese tools, Ragweed forge has nice selection and pricing on Scandi knives.

http://www.japanwoodworker.com/category ... tools.aspx their search interface is lousy, but the products are great!

http://www.ragweedforge.com/ down at the bottom of the page are links to individual knife makers, the woodworking stuff is just mixed in with the rest.

[SpyderEdgeForever]

Some woodcarvers have told me they will only use or nearly only use Mora knives, the carbon steel carving-specific ones. Do other wood carvers here prefer Moras?

As you mentioned, Awa, they have the Moras at Ragweed Forge.

[awa54]

different tools for different styles... the Mora knives are great values (as are many Scandinavian carvers), but the patterns are much different from chip carving knives (though they can be used for many of the same final results). The push knives are different as well. All designed to work best for specific techniques.

I'm no precision carver, but use both Swede and Japanese carving knives to rough out knife handles. I'd think that detail carvers would favor chip or push knives over Scandi pattern knives.

The Mora laminated blades are run hard enough that the core steel is actually fairly brittle and as a consequence they do chip out fairly easily if you twist at all in a cut (or hit hard grain changes). The mono steel Finnish knives are a bit more rugged, but finding ones with a delicate tip is also harder. Even the stainless blades are passable carvers (especially for softwood), the Norwegians, Swedes and Finns are all able to coax very decent performance out of Sandvik 12C27.

Remember to keep the Scandi grind on your knives that come that way, a secondary bevel defeats the purpose of that edge geometry!

[SpyderEdgeForever]

JD and awa, question about this: Would you use a different steel blade for a particular type of wood, or that doesn't matter much? Example: Say you wanted to carve utensils from a hardwood like redwood, or a bowl and spoon from pine, would you vary the type of steel carver with each various type of wood, or would you use the same carver on a range of woods?

[awa54]

I would say that some carving blades are too delicate for roughing out the hardest woods (also wood with very convoluted grain patterns), but with care light blades *can* be used on hard woods, just don't try to work too fast.

A knife that can only handle softwood isn't much of a carving knife IMO.

Now ebony, lignum vitae and other extremely hard woods are another story all together, chisels and push knives (or power tools) are best for those, and ones with tool steel (as opposed to simple steel) blades will keep their edges for a useful length of time rather than just a few cuts.

[JD Spydo]

JD and awa, question about this: Would you use a different steel blade for a particular type of wood, or that doesn't matter much? Example: Say you wanted to carve utensils from a hardwood like redwood, or a bowl and spoon from pine, would you vary the type of steel carver with each various type of wood, or would you use the same carver on a range of woods?

I truly would be curious as to how well some of these newer supersteels would perform with carving knife blades? Some woods that I've woodworked with in the past like Pecan, Hickory, Osage Orange, Black Locust and desert Ironwood all tend to be rough on most of your older carbon steel blades. I'm willing to bet that M390, S90V, and XHP for instance would make dandy carving blades. I'm sure if Cliff Stamp were to chime in he could recommend quite a few others that would be ideal for such jobs.

Some of my wood chisels I had were made of that Hitachi Superblue steel which seemed to be a very hard steel when sharpening it. I don't know for sure but I'm also wondering if blades made for wood carving have a higher Rockwell Hardness rating as a general rule>> it sure seemed to be that way with wood chisels.

[awa54]

Some of my wood chisels I had were made of that Hitachi Superblue steel which seemed to be a very hard steel when sharpening it. I don't know for sure but I'm also wondering if blades made for wood carving have a higher Rockwell Hardness rating as a general rule>> it sure seemed to be that way with wood chisels.

Most Japanese chisels are either white or blue paper steel, though the majority use blue or white #1 or #2, rather than blue super. Some are made with other proprietary alloys as well, but the bulk use Hitachi steels from what I have seen.

Average hardness is between 63 and 65 Rockwell C. This holds true for carving knives and plane blades as well.

Western woodworking tools tend to be hardened in the high 50s.

** I guess I ought to qualify that initial statement; most **high quality Japanese chisels destined for sale on the US retail market** are Hitachi blue or white steel laminate. There are less prestigious HC alloys used in many Japanese laminate blades and there are homogeneous steel blades as well, but those are commonly confined to budget tools, which it seems don't really make it to the US market in any numbers.