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Showing 1 of 10 conversations about:
ChinaBAMA
13
Oct 26, 2020
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a steel upgrade will make it more attractive for me... perhaps a micarta scales with m-390 steel will be awesome. or even just s35vn will be much attractive than the standard vg-10.
DPoto
46
Oct 28, 2020
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ChinaBAMAsure, let make a knife cost 3 times more for absolutely no reason. steel upgrade??????....VG10 is more than sufficient for fidget spinning your knife and taking pics of it for instagram. What do you need a better steel for on a gentlemans knife? So you can tell your buddies its supersteel while you slice paper and arm hair? BTW, the "standard vg10" you refer to, will outlive you and your kids. A few years ago, VG10 WAS supersteel. so sick of fan boys claiming knives need to be xyz supersteels. m390......meh!
Motorrad
2898
Oct 28, 2020
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DPotohahaha. you just know that this guy has huge bald patches on his arm...
Peccavi101
23
Nov 1, 2020
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DPotoSteel snobs have to have "super" steels, never mind what most of humanity managed quite well with....frankly, if it's reasonably corrosion resistant, maintains an edge for a reasonable period between sharpening , AND can be EASILY resharpened, that's all I need.
If you're all about super steels, but don't do any hard use and haven't resharpened from factory edge YOURSELF, then please stand down....
reswright
3850
Nov 1, 2020
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DPotoWhat do you need a better steel for on a gentlemans knife? So you can tell your buddies its supersteel while you slice paper and arm hair?
"What do you need that Corvette for when a Honda Civic can drive on all the same roads? What, so you can speed and feel like a cool badass? You're just going to drive it to the store and back, you know"
Yeah, and Corvettes are uncomfortable with a hard ride and shit gas mileage and they're cop magnets and jealous people key them in parking lots and yet, people pay over sticker to buy Corvettes. Because they're people.
If you want to shake people and go 'Buy stuff for its merit, not its exclusivity, and don't make everything more expensive for the rest of us just so you can indulge yourself'? Dude I get it - but you gotta realize that's one hell of a can of worms and you just drew a bead on most of Western civilization. Most of us play this game at one time or another, most of us own something a little more bougie than it needs to be, most of us want items that cost more than we really need to pay for them. I mean, we're at Drop -- hankering after prestigious items and wanting to buy them is kinda why people come here, it ain't a soup kitchen. Is that shallow? Kinda! But it applies to most of us in some way, not just easy targets who say they're more interested in knives made out of the hottest bougie materials on the market right now.
EDC's the same thing. EDC is an exercise in portable exclusivity, nobody needs titanium anything or carbon fiber anything or hip designer designed anything, these people aren't climbing cliff faces or getting trapped in the jungle and standard materials don't cut it. They seek out and pay a premium for something deliberately more exclusive than that, and they pay for it to advertise they are people of means.... and ALSO to have these things on hand if they ever need them but we know they usually don't. And in OP's defense he didn't say he NEEDED a better steel, or his life required one, or VG-10 sucks, he just said the knife would be more attractive to him with bougie steel and handle stock. Does he need something better than VG-10? He doesn't even need VG-10. Truth be told, neither do you or I, and your argument is a bit of a slippery slope that turns around and applies to the both of us if we're being relentlessly honest with each other and not just applying it to the newbie with 0 likes.
I mean, I buy shit I don't need. Don't you? (Shrug) Sure it's shallow, but I don't know that anyone here is above it. Food for thought.
Evshrug
3772
Community
Dec 6, 2020
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reswrightI’ve definitely seen the “bougie” shopper on Drop, and I think Drop targets them more, but for some reason they’re outnumbered by the deal hunters who are primarily motivated by the highest discount.
Where do I fall on that spectrum? Well, I don’t know, I think I lean towards coming here for the bespoke items. I mean, I own more than one pocket knife yet only carry one at a time, what’s practical about that?! But at the same time, my enthusiasm for super steels has cooled, probably helped by the fact that I use my 8Cr13MoV Spyderco Byrd Meadowlark more than any other blade in the house, because it sits in the kitchen.
It fares excellently as a pairing knife, and much of the time my full-size Victorinox kitchen knife just feels like too much knife for the job. After four years of kitchen service, the Meadowlark was only sharpened once, just to test my sharpening system and see just how keen I could make it (wicked keen!), and it still cuts my food with ease. Because it’s a food knife, I rinse it with water and a dab of soap after every use, making sure to whipe it dry, and I only ever saw one mark of rust which came “off” with a bit of sponge scrubbing. Hard to ask anything more from the steel, though maybe less square handle ergonomics and a longer blade could be nice.
So, I see a blade like this, and I notice the Micarta, titanium, blade length, ergonomics for the hand and pocket, price. I’m satisfied with the fairly corrosion resistant VG-10 steel, which has been “clean” on my Dragonfly, better than the 440C on my two Ganzo. I’d rather a $99 VG-10 version of this than a $129 version of the same knife with S35VN, but thinking back... maybe the Drop exclusive S35VN blackout blade version was very well-priced too? I forgot.
reswright
3850
Dec 6, 2020
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EvshrugI’ve definitely seen the “bougie” shopper on Drop, and I think Drop targets them more, but for some reason they’re outnumbered by the deal hunters who are primarily motivated by the highest discount.
I think it's a little complex because both factors are usually at play to some degree and for a lot of folks it boils down to what's going on at the moment. Bougie's a word that make certain people feel targeted and others smug but very few of us escape it one way or another and I figure it's just worth owning up to it -- it's not something I manage to escape myself, so it's not really a concept I use in judgment of others. More 'rueful self awareness' if you will.
There are the people who came to Drop because of the concept of product drops, and there are people who came to Drop because Drop sells certain things, right? Of the people who came for drops, some are more motivated by the idea that they can get a discount by shopping drops, and others are more motivated by the exclusivity that's implied by the drop model... but that also plays into it for the people who are thinking of these knife purchases as investments or something they can flip for cash, which many do, so they're either trying to lock in their money when they buy low, or are trying to pick things that will eventually sell high. Of the people who come because certain things are sold, the same ends up being true -- some folks are more looking at the items and going 'ok this is an exclusive so I like it' or 'This is exclusive so it should have enhanced resale value, I'm in' and others are going 'Yo, don't even bother me about this again unless it's a better price' which sounds like it's being economically responsible but no small amount of that latter category are just using the good price as a justification to buy something they want and don't really need, they're just covering up with the fact that it was a good deal. How many times have you blown your roll saving money on good deals on something you didn't set out shopping to buy, deals just too good to pass up even though you didn't, strictly speaking, need the item? We all do that and it makes approximately no sense whatsoever. In the end we're getting that little consumerist hit one way or the other. To me it's just something to own and recognize and try not to get too far wrapped around my own axle trying to figure out if it makes me good or bad. :)
But at the same time, my enthusiasm for super steels has cooled, probably helped by the fact that I use my 8Cr13MoV Spyderco Byrd Meadowlark more than any other blade in the house, because it sits in the kitchen.
I like hearing that, even though I'm someone who has about zero use cases for a folding knife in the kitchen -- that's the natural domain of the fixed blade. If you aren't using actual kitchen knives in the kitchen, or you are but don't want to mess up the edges doing utility work, do yourself the favor and try a Morakniv out in that location instead. Good for pretty much all occasions, Moras, as well as being dirt cheap. Just two cents - nothing against the Byrd, those are excellent budget knives, and as much shit as 8Cr steels catch, when given the proper treatment they can punch above their weight class and Spyderco probably does a better job on 8Cr13MoV than any other production knife company around.
As to me - what do I think between supersteel and budget steel? I think the natural thing to do as you learn more about knives and steel that your preference will end up waxing and waning, alternating between the two extremes.
For me it went something like 'budget steel is fine, expensive steel is nerd bait' to going 'ok, I see the differences in super steel now and really like them' to going 'shit I can't put an edge on this' and having to learn how to sharpen better and in the meantime getting back to the budget steel that I can throw a razor edge on with a few passes on a stone. Then I got better at sharpening and started seeing the applicability again for a super high hardness knife blade -- sharpen that right and it'll do stuff budget steel just can't -- so I started gravitating back to super steels. Then you buy a couple super steel knives that really underwhelm you because the materials are better than the manufacturing techniques and you're right back with the Sandvik again. Then you pick up some diamond honing rods and suddenly you can reprofile your super steel with ease and you become enthusiastic again. Then one day you need the sharpest knife you have in the house and guess what, you're probably grabbing a budget knife and stropping up that edge. Then you learn about how certain high hardness low alloy steels can take a tremendously keen cutting edge angle that cheap steels just can't sustain and there you are again with the expensive steel. It's a cycle, and moreover that's how we learn, so it's just fine that it's a cycle. Whatever side of the cycle you're on boils down to what was the last thing you really taught yourself using your knives, or the last unfortunate lesson one of them taught you when you were trying to use it, because steel ends up being rock paper scissors, there's no one steel to rule them all. At least, not yet.
Knife makers will often go on about people pay too damn much attention to knife steel instead of other aspects of the build, and they're right, but... they're the ones bringing in the super steel and they know damn well why they do it.
I see a blade like this, and I notice the Micarta, titanium, blade length, ergonomics for the hand and pocket, price. I’m satisfied with the fairly corrosion resistant VG-10 steel, which has been “clean” on my Dragonfly, better than the 440C on my two Ganzo. I’d rather a $99 VG-10 version of this than a $129 version of the same knife with S35VN
That all seems sound to me and I think it's safe to say that I, too, would not be dropping $30 more just to go from VG-10 to S35VN. I wish the manufacturers were engaging in a similar debate going 'ok, should we put S35VN in this puppy instead? Alas, for the manufacturer, that decision is usually made well beforehand, driven by the need to protect the profit margin. It's only the consumer that's engaging in such thoughts. Of course, the manufacturers are starting from the price point they want to hit and then are selecting materials which will allow them the profit margin they find most acceptable while still preserving their good name as knifemakers, insofar as they care.
Maybe I've spent too much time analyzing this market but when people get excited when they see an expensive steel in an inexpensive knife; I tend to worry, and that's setting aside the question as to whether the steel is really what it's claimed to be. Why? Unless it's some kind of crazy promotional giveaway to capture some market share, I know the manufacturer at the very least was under pressure to cut corners in order to lower costs elsewhere to make the overall deal palatable to the shareholders. That means that if the company has signed off on an inexpensive knife made with an expensive steel, that expensive material ate a lot of the project budget up, and now you have to worry about the completeness of the heat treat, or the fit and finishing, or the quality of the other materials, because I absolutely guarantee you that somewhere, pennies were pinched to sweeten the deal for someone. My two cents here is that shareholders are bad for quality in the round because their natural emphasis is always less on business building and more on profit making than the people who own the business itself and have to live with the outcomes of their business decisions in the long term -- this is actually one of the fundamental tensions in Western style capitalism if you ask me, that opening your company to shareholders will increase your available capital but damage several aspects of your business with that emphasis on ROI over all else. Definitely not a free lunch.
(Edited)
Evshrug
3772
Community
Dec 7, 2020
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reswrightTotally agree with each of your statements, especially at the end where you’re saying you put a critical eye on a product priced low but featuring expensive steel...
In my “world,” with headphones, I think people expect too much from $100 and less Bluetooth headphones. The cost of manufacture has to take care of a Bluetooth receiver, DSP/Decoder, DAC, and Amp (usually all that on a system on a chip, but the best implementations are a bit more compartmentalized and specialized) before they even get to sound quality. A Bluetooth Gaming headset has to additionally absorb the cost of licensing from Dolby, Sony, Microsoft, etc.
Now, there’s something to be said for an amp with the power matched to the needs of the headphone, by the headphone maker. Is there any equivalent to that in the knife world? An “all in one” ready to go option with everything you need? Would that be like a fixed blade with a honing surface, or something?
reswright
3850
Dec 7, 2020
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EvshrugThere's a few examples of knife and sharpener setups where the knife is meant to suffice for just about any task life could throw at you and the means to sharpen it is incorporated and sold along with the knife in some singular fashion. Some of which are new, like combat knives with ceramic sharpener rods in the sheathes, and some of which are extremely old, like the kukri -- a Nepalese peasant knife with a pronounced bend in its large blade, useful as both work and fighting knives. The Gurkhas (the Royal Gurkha Rifles) are famous for bearing them in combat to great and genuinely fearsome effect but Nepalese peasants just as famously use their kukris all day long to do everything from dig holes and chop wood to harvest and prepare food. They traditionally come with two much smaller knives also tucked into the same sheath (either wood or thick rawhide). One of which can be used for work that the kukri blade is too large to do, and the other of which is unsharpened and has a very hard quench to it, that ends up being used to sharpen the edge of the kukri so you sort of get the complete package that way.
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