Giygas wrote: ↑Sun Jul 17, 2022 6:21 am
I've only used LC200N in 1 model (Spydiechef) but I've owned 3 of them and my experience with all of them was underwhelming and basically in line with yours.
For the inevitable "knives aren't meant to cut open bags of cement" comments,
I opened 38 bags with an s45vn Inkosi before any significant edge damage occured. Not saying that to compare s45vn to LC200N, that would be crazy. Just saying it to point out that plenty of steels can handle opening cement.
This is interesting, because it's helpful to illustrate that CATRA - which now informs everyone's world - is more of a rough outline of a given steel's real world performance for a given end user.
IME, H1 and LC200N are worthless for opening bags of cement - which involves cutting what is essentially silicate impregnated paper. A few bags and the edge is a butter knife. However, M4 can open a few bags and still shave - and several, if not dozens of bags before sustaining damage. These results are vastly different that one would think at surface level - does CATRA show 15x times edge holding for M4 compared to LC200N? Nope.
Later, I had occasion to cut a ton of wet cardboard and carpet - the LC200N performed significantly better than M4 - especially as the day wore on and the cuts became less frequent and the knives spent more time in my humid pocket, I suspect the M4 started suffering from corrosion which reduced the useable lifespan of the edge. Not a concern with LC200N.
This is all part of current trend of over-reliance on third party quantitative metrics that are more of a conceptual framework than a direct path to real world performance. This is not meant to be a slight against anyone, an observation instead. I see and have seen a lot of people who don't want to try things because they're "bad" based on a misunderstanding of how things work.
LC200N has lower edge retention than 440A.
I don't think this is accurate. Nobody is making top tier 440A, the vast majority (possibly all) mass market 440A knives will perform significantly worse than any current LC200N knife.