There Are Pandas, and Then There Are Pandas.
And this isn't either of them! The Pandas we're talking about here, are watches, not bears. And what got me thinking about them (again) was a link posted this morning by @cm.rook who pointed a few of us to the very attractive (and not terribly priced) Yema "Rallygraph" Panda which, in it's most traditional arrangement, looks like the one on the left, but can also be had in the version on the right: The model on the left is a true Panda, while the model on the right is called a reverse Panda. The reason for that distinction is clear--Panda bears, only come in the first arrangement. Now at this point, everyone should be thinking about the most well-know Panda, The Rolex Panda, which is actually a Daytona, and among Rolex Daytonas, the most famous of which is the Paul Newman Daytona, which was famous first, because it was Paul's, and second because it sold at auction for $17.8 million (US Dollars). The story of that auction is well-known so I'll only...
Nov 8, 2019
- Those with a lot of money who fill a safe full of "safe queens", and,
- Those who carry a knife and use it for whatever needs doing, and need to depend on it's reliability 100%. I am in the second group. As I said in a separate post, I use my knives (all of them) to slice, cut, and stick. I have no "safe queens".
What people who don't use their knives on a daily basis don't understand is that, when a blade fails, your personal probability just went to 100%. I have used the spine of a (closed) folder to knock out takedown slide stop pins on FUBAR'd polymer semiautomatic pistols. Ditto with the butt of the grip, which is why I find any knife with a pointy or "glass breaker" butt on the grip a useless selling "feature". That design flaw also negates the ability to "palm" the blade and push the entire knife, handle and all into an object for maximum penetration. We probably disagree, and that's O.K., but the majority of overpriced knives here on MassDrop are artistic expressions, not working tools. Handles with sharp angles, exposed liner edges may look impressive, but when you start using that knife for actual cutting of dense or resistant materials, you start losing skin from your hands and your personal effectiveness using that particular knife deteriorates rapidly. Just to let you know where I am coming from, my first job as a teenager was working in a slaughterhouse / meat packing plant. In those harder, less gentle days the way we killed hogs was by shackling their rear hooves and stringing them up by their rear hooves while still alive and kicking from a conveyor belt from the ceiling. My specific job was to first, stick the live hog in the throat and slice across the hog's throat. Particularly challenging if it was an older boar with tusks. My second task was to slice open the hog from anus to throat and pull out all of the intestines WITHOUT piercing the intestines and ruining the meat - while the hog was still moving and the conveyor belt was still moving. Pigskin is a very dense, tough hide to pierce, and my blades could not fail in mid-cut. I know that my experience is not the norm for those subscribed to the Blades Forum, but I still judge every blade by the same criteria - will it work or fail for what I need to do with it, and will the handle design injure my hand under hard use? What the knife looks like is of no importance to me. Just my $0.02.