Hello,

I just thought I'd share some of my home testing of my JS test knives. I'm hoping to meet a MS this spring or early summer to do the JS performance test. 

This was the first prototype.

original stock is 3/16 x 1.5 x 12 inch 1095. Blade is just shy of 10 inches.

Edge came out perfect. It cut the rope with little issue a couple times. It made it through a 2x4 3 times with no issues.

I used a rotary platen to set the final bevel, which gave it a slight convex to the cutting edge. I sharpened to 220, then stropped. Didn't need to do too much grinding.

I wasn't happy with the temper. It bent closer to the handle than I wanted it to, which tells me the spine on the forward half of the knife wasn't drawn soft enough.

After checking the bend test, I put it back in the other way and pulled until it broke so I could check the grain. Grain looked nice and tight. So I'm happy with the normalization process at least.

Also, I'm going to use something different to pad the vice jaws. The wood crushing in them didn't give an accurate depiction of the actual bend angle. I tried marking it in white so you can see what I mean.

Thanks for looking,

Nick