Carl Levitian
member
They say if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your front door.
Maybe I'm becoming one of those old guys people call a cumudgeon. Like that puppet Walter, always seeing the worst case senerio, and being kind of a grouch about life in general. But it also seems to me that there is this trend in knives, like alot of things, to make it more complicated than it has to be.
A knife is to cut. Pretty simple a task, and man has been making knives for thousands of years. Flint, bronze, iron, and steel. We've been using steel for a couple thousand years, and over that time, man has made plenty of weapons from it as well. In fact, man being a war like creature, has tried just about every blade shape you can think of in an effort to make his steel blade more deadly. The slim stilleto, Bowie knife, Roman Gladius, rapier, cutless, claymore, trench knife.
With 2000 years of steel blade designed for letting out the other guys blood, I don't ever recall seeing any of the designs I see now gracing the covers of th collective knife magazines. Swoopy recurve blades, weird tip shapes, serations, and stuff that looks more like a Holliweird Kingon fantacy thing than a usable knife.
Has the knife world gone over the top in a quest to artificially stimulate sales, even to the extent of marketing almost useless designed knives?
I'm thinking of older times where a man's life depended on a good blade and his skill in using it. World wide, exept for Japan, the blade developed into a pretty strait forward thing of simple design. Oh, they got dressed up according to the owners status, but the overall design was simple. A strait blade with a pointy tip. None of the "stuff" one sees in the pages of publications calling themselves knife magazines.
Rope cutting? Serrations?
I don't know of anyone who would need a good rope cutter more than the old seamen on the square rigged sailing ships rounding the horn. Yet when I look at the display of sailors clasp knives at the cutlery museum, not a single seration in sight. British or American knives. I would think with Sheffield being the capital of knife making of the 1800's, their sailors would have had the most up to date knives available.
With life being still somewhat primitive in the 1800's in some places, knives should have been more advanced. The old mountain men who went into the wlderness of the rocky moontains for months of winter on end, should have something more effective than a plain looking butcher knife that was the Russells Green River Knife. I recall the remark of one young guy who is a devoted disiple of the knife rags, and buys anything they say is the knife of the month. I invited him on a fishing trip with some of my friends thinking the education may do him some good. When I pulled out an Old Hickory butcher knife to clean fish with, he asked what I was going to do with that old s--t knife. I invited him to cut away with his tanto tipped, thick wedge ground tactical wonder knife. It wouldn't cut a fish belly. I handed him the Old Hickory and he couldn't understand why it sliced so deep, so easy. The old sodbuster only confused him more. He got an education that weekend.
Is it just me, or does anyone else thing knives have gotten a bit too far out in the design department. ?
Maybe I'm becoming one of those old guys people call a cumudgeon. Like that puppet Walter, always seeing the worst case senerio, and being kind of a grouch about life in general. But it also seems to me that there is this trend in knives, like alot of things, to make it more complicated than it has to be.
A knife is to cut. Pretty simple a task, and man has been making knives for thousands of years. Flint, bronze, iron, and steel. We've been using steel for a couple thousand years, and over that time, man has made plenty of weapons from it as well. In fact, man being a war like creature, has tried just about every blade shape you can think of in an effort to make his steel blade more deadly. The slim stilleto, Bowie knife, Roman Gladius, rapier, cutless, claymore, trench knife.
With 2000 years of steel blade designed for letting out the other guys blood, I don't ever recall seeing any of the designs I see now gracing the covers of th collective knife magazines. Swoopy recurve blades, weird tip shapes, serations, and stuff that looks more like a Holliweird Kingon fantacy thing than a usable knife.
Has the knife world gone over the top in a quest to artificially stimulate sales, even to the extent of marketing almost useless designed knives?
I'm thinking of older times where a man's life depended on a good blade and his skill in using it. World wide, exept for Japan, the blade developed into a pretty strait forward thing of simple design. Oh, they got dressed up according to the owners status, but the overall design was simple. A strait blade with a pointy tip. None of the "stuff" one sees in the pages of publications calling themselves knife magazines.
Rope cutting? Serrations?
I don't know of anyone who would need a good rope cutter more than the old seamen on the square rigged sailing ships rounding the horn. Yet when I look at the display of sailors clasp knives at the cutlery museum, not a single seration in sight. British or American knives. I would think with Sheffield being the capital of knife making of the 1800's, their sailors would have had the most up to date knives available.
With life being still somewhat primitive in the 1800's in some places, knives should have been more advanced. The old mountain men who went into the wlderness of the rocky moontains for months of winter on end, should have something more effective than a plain looking butcher knife that was the Russells Green River Knife. I recall the remark of one young guy who is a devoted disiple of the knife rags, and buys anything they say is the knife of the month. I invited him on a fishing trip with some of my friends thinking the education may do him some good. When I pulled out an Old Hickory butcher knife to clean fish with, he asked what I was going to do with that old s--t knife. I invited him to cut away with his tanto tipped, thick wedge ground tactical wonder knife. It wouldn't cut a fish belly. I handed him the Old Hickory and he couldn't understand why it sliced so deep, so easy. The old sodbuster only confused him more. He got an education that weekend.
Is it just me, or does anyone else thing knives have gotten a bit too far out in the design department. ?
A knife is a wedge, so you have to put lipstick on that pig. More do-dads, more sales.
