Tag: pocket knife

April 25, 2024 – Familiar is Comfort and Comfort is Best

April 25, 2024 / / 0 Comments

For some reason, my son thinks I need more knives. He made me a cleaver for my birthday and he recently bought me an assisted opening knife while on a trip. I have never had one of those before. It is kind of a fun novelty to continuously click it open while I am sitting and staring into space.

I live in the knife capitol of the world. Gerber, Leatherman, Benchmade, Kershaw and CRKT are all headquartered here. As a result, I have some unique opportunities like the annual seconds sale at Kershaw. There are fifty dollar knives that sell for $5. Some of them are defected while others are models that just didn’t sell. It has been a number of years since I went to the sale. The truth is I can only use so many knives. I love the idea of buying a deal and getting something cool but why…? Besides that, a lot of the knives I have have been given to me. Like the two below in the picture.

These are my two newest folding knives. Both of them were given to me. The gray one is the one I was saying that my son gave to me. The old fashioned one I was awarded by the local state representative that I was helping with his trap fundraiser. When I got it, I thought, what am I going to do with this? I keep it in my office to open boxes and packaging. The truth is, it is not a locking blade and so I am leery of putting it to real, hard work.

I have often thought that I want to buy a real barbeque show piece. I can afford it and I should have a heavy-duty tactical knife for the zombie apocalypse. But then I think about how torn I am to surrender the $15 Leatherman at TSA and I think not a chance I would carry around a $400 knife to possibly lose it.

The knife that I carry 99% of the time is the same knife I bought in middle school. I like it, it is comfortable. (read more about it october-22-2020-tacticool-thursday) It is not the best steel, it is scraped to heck back on my first amateur attempts to sharpen and it doesn’t even have a pocket clip. Those were just being invented at that time in the 1980s. My brother bought one about a year later that did have a clip. But, it does lock.

I think one of the things that I do like is that it doesn’t have a clip. That makes it slim to fit in my pocket and doesn’t catch on other things when I pull it out. I would be very, very sad if I lost it (wouldn’t be the first time). This always gets me thinking about buying a replacement Everyday Carry knife. Each time I do, I find myself going back to what is familiar and comfortable.

The only knives I have lost since becoming an adult have been because they were taken from me at the airport. However, as a kid I lost track of the number of knives that I have lost. I think two Swiss Army knives, a Boy Scouts branded folder and an Opinel given to my from our French exchange student we hosted are amongst the list. Part of the reason this is true is that it is carried every day so I always know where it is.

One time I bought a very nice looking, titanium clad knife and I carried it a while. It turns out that I hated using it because the pocket clip bit into my hand while using it. Another time I bought an expensive (for the time) knife off of e-bay. When it showed up, I was in shock. It was tiny. It is also uncomfortable to use. This was about the time I was learning that I needed to see things before buying them because the dimensions provided did not translate well in my head.

End Your Programming Routine: I probably will switch over to this new knife for a while. I don’t have the same emotional attachment to it so I am less worried about whether I will lose it or ding it up doing things it wasn’t designed to do. I doubt too that this will be the last one either. But, don’t be surprised if I go back to my old faithful either.

October 22, 2020 – ‘Tacticool’ Thursday

October 22, 2020 /

Can you believe another week is almost over? I sure cannot. It seems like I was just writing about a range trip that I thought was going to happen but hasn’t yet. It’s that time of week again to talk about tacticool! I thought that I would write about an old friend, my Gerber 400 lock blade pocket knife.

Before I get started with that, I wanted to talk about the company Gerber and what it has to do with todays knife landscape. According to Wikipedia, the company was started in 1939 in Portland, Oregon. Unrelated to Gerber, Leatherman also began in Portland, Oregon in 1983. Between the two of them they have created a knife mecca spawning CRKT, Benchmade and the US headquarters of KAI/Kershaw knives as well.

This one was the one that stuck with me. Believe it or not, by the time I was fourteen this was my fourth pocketknife (and the first one I didn’t lose). My first knife was a really cheap knife that one of the scales (sides) fell off. The blade was poor metal and the blades didn’t lock causing several cuts. That one I think was ultimately thrown away. My second was a Boy Scout branded Schrade knife that was much more durable but it was lost within a few months after a beach trip. My third knife was a swiss army knife. model ‘Camper’. That one also got lost at the beach which is when I bought the Gerber.

This knife has been my constant companion ever since. It has been to Mexico, Canada, Europe and Asia. It skinned my first deer. It has helped me eat lunch when I needed to eat around bad spots in fruit or forgot the steak knife or butter knife. There have been times when it was the only knife for dinner, or the picnic cheese plate. It has opened countless packages, cut hose, twine and rope, scraped rust off, cleaned fish, popped balloons for clean-up, splinter scalpel and used as a second rate screwdriver to name a few functions.

I have other knives, but I like this one. It is light and slim with no clip to get in the way. I am not in love with knife clips. I am not convinced that they even make you knife more accessible. They certainly scrape things up when you rub the clip against furniture, the wall or your upholstery. Even though clips are ubiquitous, they are the first give away that you are armed.

Another reason I like this knife is that it was inexpensive. I paid less than $20 in the late 1980s for this knife. Because of that, it hasn’t gotten babied. I have other much more expensive knives that largely stay home to keep them protected – it sounds silly when you write about it. I have cut steel wire and opened paint cans with this blade. Don’t get me wrong, I am not intentionally abusing it, it just happens to be the only tool I have at the time.

The mirror finish, or chrome plating or whatever makes the blade shiny was gouged on the first sharpening. Largely because I didn’t hold the knife properly and didn’t know what I was doing when I attempted to sharpen the knife. Those marks are still there, I don’t think about them often but when I do it takes me right back to being at summer camp. Part and parcel with that is how much life has changed since then and how much more skilled I am than when I was a young teenager.

One of the things that really impressed me when I first got this knife was how well the blade and lock mechanism fit together. I thought that was precision craftsmanship. It still may be because when I look at the fit of most knives today, those parts are almost always rounded to prevent extra fitting needed.

I will also point out that over the years, the parts have worn. Everything still locks up tight, but just from this picture you can see some of the gap that has developed from over thirty years of daily carry in the scales. So, it is not quite as impressive as it used to be but it is always something I thought was special about it.

I am always on the lookout for the replacement of this knife. In my head I am thinking that I should carry and upgrade. I am thinking about the Buck 722 right now even though I think that one is about the same category. But I always come back to – why? I have at times carried two knives under the ‘two is one and one is none’ idea, but I get tired of my pants falling down with all the weight.

“Beware the man with one gun, he probably knows how to use it”. I think you could substitute knife in that spot. If you run into me, I will likely have this knife on my person. It was my first piece of EDC gear and it is my most consistently carried piece of gear. I have had it longer than any key on my key chain or wallet or item in my wallet.