Speaking of knives. I picked up the Magpul Rigger. Pretty innovative design. It has a secondary lock designed to mimic the safety of a .1911. Also picked up three customs since the new year. Anso Neo, Brown Cortex, and the Edgar Cole Chimera.
Always does, which is why I took the opportunity to lighten my ammo stockpile and unloaded 10 cases. I don't shoot every weekend like I use to.
Yeah, prices things are going for is insane. I didn't sell to make money though, I just wanted to lighten my load and it seemed like the perfect time to do it. There was definitely a you're not prepared tax to pay, but nowhere near the gouging that's taking place. If I bought caliber X for $10 a box I sold it for $12 or $13 a box. Only catch was you had to buy a case, not wasting my time with onesie twosies.
I stopped buying guns about 8 years ago and started going to knife shows. It’s always been a passion, but then I started buying customs. Then I bought enough they started inviting to their shops to make knives with them. I’ve made a huge mistake.
I’m pretty boring. If I could do anything for a living I’d quit and make slip joints for paw paws to sit on the front porch and whittle with.
Most people here just produce their own and farm it out. Way less expensive than your stupid retailers. People pay a hundred bucks for a box of ammo are morons. It’s brass, copper, and gunpowder. Literally everything you want is on the internet for pennies.
Check out Mark Knapp’s stuff. Probably the most well rounded knife maker in the country. 5+ year waitlist to get a knife from him
Depends on your requirements. For actual users, micarta and carbon fiber are fantastic if you’ve ever had natural materials crack on you going from one extreme temperature to another.
If your handles are cracking it’s because the maker did a piss poor job of curing the handle material. My mammoth ivory cures for 5+ years before I touch it. There’s only a few applications where having a quality knife is better than having a $40 piece of shit from Cabelas that you can replace twice a year. Filleting is certainly one of those applications.
Mammoth ivory is a premium material and as a subset of that there’s the core pieces that are more uniform in appearance and grain structure and then the “bark” (exterior) that has all the unique character, but is more subject to grain boundary creep etc. I’ve talked to quite a few master smiths who refuse to touch natural materials, and others that love it because of the challenge and the premium they can charge. *more and more guys are using stabilized mammoth which some view as “cheating” since the epoxy/resins used can make things easier, but that’s not to say those materials don’t introduce their own difficulties. Elephant Ivory is a whole different story due to its protected status. While mammoth ivory is older, elephant ivory typically has to have documentation following the entire piece of raw material proving its age and most pieces are 100+ years old. If a maker was caught using ivory harvested in our lifetime (with rare and expensive exceptions) they’d be put under the jail. For that reason, even with the correct paperwork, it has nicknames like “goat horn” to avoid detection on social media. I’ve got several pieces knives from the same maker where they did one in a micarta, for instance, then a similar one in goat horn. The markup is insane. Jigged bone dyed brown in the old school Remington knives process is a much cheaper natural material but to my eyes very few makers do it justice without it looking cheap. The gold standard is the late Tony Bose and his son Reese. They have/had a way with stag as well.
My “coolest” man made material knife has rag micarta scales. The micarta is from a pulley wheel from an escalator Macy’s in NYC and it came with pictures and paperwork to prove it. It had been in service for over 100 years before it was removed recently. I’ve got another with micarta from a fighter jet. It was from an electrical panel and when the pilot left the service he started making knives. They called him years later let him keep pieces of the jet when they dismantled it.
For folders and smaller fixed blades that’s a great/excellent one. Easy to sharpen and maintain, doesn’t form a stubborn wire burr, wear and corrosion resistance are great. Not the kind of steel you’d want on your primary bushcrafting blade necessarily but for a folder I would be happy with it.
It is the premium blade steel out there right now (at least for folders). CTS-204p and CV20 are the same as m390 just made by different companies. For fixed blades I like 80crv2 I really like Elmax as well. It gets a bad rep bc I guess Zero Tolerance had some heat treat issues, but I have Elmax on several folders and it is top notch. Vanax is cool too. Almost completely rust proof.
They did to Elmax what Chris Reeve continues to do to S35VN. The sebenza is the perfect gateway drug to nicer production knives unless you get one of the unfortunate ones from a bad heat treat batch. And in years past if you said something about it on the forums or Facebook and he found out who you were he’d confront you at a show. But this was 10 or so years ago. (Still can’t get consistent results from heat treat though.) S35VN isn’t as sexy and new but it will outwork 98% of users. My personal favorite commercially available steel is 3V but I don’t mind putting in a little effort to oil it down.
He goes too far on other batches and it is chippy as hell. Such a great design though. I’ve never had one that wasn’t smooth as silk and ideal lockup.
It is. Mine took MONTHS to break in. I was just going to polish the washers, but I wanted to see how long it would actually take. Took longer than any knife I still actually own. It is a keeper forever though. Prefer the 21 to the new 31’s.
I think I have a Russian knife in Vanax. Had Elmax on a Zero but I gave it to a friend when I switched to a new carry.
What kind of ammo? I got lucky that the owner of the range here likes me. Took him 6 months to get a box of .44 mag rounds but once he got them he held one for me and sold to me at cost since it took so long. He also sold me 5 cases of 9mm bullets at cost as well. He also told me that he shut the range down on Sundays completely to teach the conceal carry classes all day because of demand. /rant
The nice thing about ZT's up to Hinderer's is I'll stab anything with them and treat them like shit. I'm not doing the same with my S. African knives.
I sold all my hinderers a long time ago and I’ll never own another. Same with Gareth, he took too much money and didn’t deliver knives for wayyyy too long and basically waited until the market boxed him out to make it right. By all rights he’s sorted himself out but not a risk I’ll take.
Me too. If you want a Hinderer design with better materials, action, and performance...Get a ZT 0562 imo. Same can also be said for Emerson’s and Striders.