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?Are MORA Knives Easy to Sharpen? Good EDC? Good for Beginners?

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Mora knives are easy to sharpen. Mora knives are good beginner knives. Mora knives are good carry knives. These are common assertions that beg for some qualification, but rarely are accompanied by it. I offer my brief, but considerable opinion after at least 25 years of owning and using them in multiple models.

The Mora Classic #1. I like this one better than any others I've used, except the little detail knives, but they are a different animal altogether. The next size up, #2 is okay, but it's too long in my opinion to be a good carving knife. http://amzn.to/2vDk9kt

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It is often stated that mora knives are easy to sharpen. What is meant by that is that it is easy to maintain the bevel on the scandinavian grind when sharpening the knife because the bevel is wide. It is much harder to maintain a flat bevel on a knife with narrow bevels and most knives are more in the neighborhood of 1/16" and down. However, moras take a relatively long time to sharpen, because the scandi bevel is so wide that a lot of steel must be removed. So, while they can be good for beginners to learn sharpening, because of the ease of holding the bevel, many may lack the patience to finish the job well. This problem is exacerbated by beginners having to proceed slowly and methodically.

The geometry of a scandi grind that these Mora knives come with from the factory is excellent for working in wood. The combination of the very acute edge and the wide bevels makes for a controlled cut. I think of them as a high performance wood knife. A long time ago, I used them for everything, but the edge of my knife and everyone's Mora knives around me, were continually becoming damaged. In the end, I decided that they sucked as multi-use carry knives, at least in my part of the world, where very hard woods are common. Beginners are especially likely to be hard on Mora knife edges, and damaged edges require even more time to restore, exacerbating the already slow sharpening issue.

I was around the Primitive Skills scene when Mors Kochanski first showed up and popularized Mora knives. I've watched them go from very uncommon in the United States, to very popular in certain circles. As far as I know, that is 90+% Mors. I know a LOT of people that carry them, as an every day multi purpose knife (EDC) including some very skilled, legitimate people, the most well known of which is probably Cody Lundin, who also picked them up from Mors. I"m not sure how they make it work for them, if it's the same constant hassle of edge damage, they change the bevels, or they tiptoe around the fragile edge. It may be largely a matter of style.

I drank the coolaid for a while and tried to fit my world around the delicate Mora configuration, but it was always a poor fit. Now I use them for wood working mostly and try not to carry them as an only knife, because I know the inevitable outcome. Even when using them for wood working only, the edge is frequently damaged when encountering our hard local woods and ubiquitous hickory handles. I would recommend owning one for anyone interested in Bushcraft, carving, primitive skills, woodcraft, survival, prepping, etc., but primarily as a wood working tool. If you change the bevel, they might make a more acceptable EDC knife, but I figured out a couple of decades ago that cheating the intended bevel means losing the magic of that geometry that makes it work so well for carving in wood. If the delicate geometry wasn't really useful, no one would use it. I've decided to start doing an informal survey. I asked my friend Daniel when he was visiting if his Mora edge got messed up very often and with any hesitation he said "all the time, all the time".

?Are MORA Knives Easy to Sharpen? Good EDC? Good for Beginners?

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