Category: Knife Learning (page 2 of 3)

We’re in the age of locking knives. Each major knife brand has at least one of its own proprietary locking mechanisms. There’s the Tri-Ad Lock, the Compression Lock, the AXIS Lock, the Arc Lock, the Reeve Integral Lock, and many more.

But it wasn’t always like that.

Not long ago, most knives were slipjoint knives. These folding knives use backsprings to keep a blade open or closed, even though it’s not technically locked. And before that, there were friction folders.

In fact, the first folding knives ever made were friction folders. Let’s find out what these actually are.

What is a Friction Folder?

A friction folder is a folding knife that doesn’t use a lock or springs. It uses the handle’s friction against the tang to stay open. Over the years, the design has adapted to feature an extended tang. This allows the user’s hand to keep the blade from folding shut.

As you can tell by the description, friction folders aren’t for hard use. They are excellent for light cutting, but put any pressure on the spine and your fingers will be toast.

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These days Portland is best known for old-timey beards, hipsters, microbreweries, and veganism. But, if you look past the alternative culture oozing out of the city, you’ll find out that Portland is the undisputed knife capital of the United States.

That’s not surprising considering some of the most important knife innovations and designs have come out of the Portland metropolitan area over the past 75 years or so.

How did Oregon’s largest city take a seat among the greatest knife cities of the world—alongside Solingen, Germany; Seki City, Japan; and Sheffield, England?

Read on.

Portland’s Start in the Knife Business

Pretty much all of Portland’s importance in the knife community can be traced back to one name: Gerber.

It started back in 1910 when the Gerber family set up an advertising business in Portland—a business that still runs today. Joseph Gerber, founder of the Gerber advertising agency, was looking to send gifts to his clients during the holiday season. So he obtained carving knives from a local knife maker named David Murphy.

According to a great article in the Portland Business Journal discussing the city’s place in the knife industry, the knives were a hit. Because the knives were so popular, Gerber arranged for Murphy to produce the knives on a larger scale.

Then, in 1939, he established Gerber Legendary Blades and made his first sale to Abercrombie & Fitch.

By 1939, Gerber wasn’t the only knife company to call Portland its home. Coast had been established earlier in 1919. The company, which still makes knives and flashlights, was founded by Henry Brands near the banks of the Willamette River in Portland. An excellent early history of Coast can be found on its website.

While Coast remains an important name in the history of Portland knives, much of the city’s stake today can be attributed to Gerber. Thanks to his marketing prowess, Joseph Gerber turned those holiday gifts into thousands of retail accounts around the country. Then, when his son Pete Gerber took over the company from 1951 to 1987, the company only grew bigger.

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If you bought a knife in the past, you probably noticed the inclusion of a sticker or piece of paper that says something along the lines of “WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

Don’t be alarmed. You’re not going to get cancer or cause birth defects if you use and carry the knife regularly.

This warning, which can be found on knives from companies like Buck and Schrade, is the result of California’s Proposition 65. Way back in 1986, California voters passed an initiative aimed at reducing the presence of cancer-causing chemicals in drinking water. For the most part, the proposition was successful, but there were some downsides.

Part of Prop 65 prohibits businesses from knowingly exposing individuals to select substances without providing a clear and reasonable warning. That’s fine in theory—who wouldn’t want to know if there are cancer-causing chemicals in things. The only problem is that the substances on the list are pretty much present in everything.

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I’ve lamented the fact that there aren’t many useful knife apps out there, aside from the fantastic Steel Knife Composition App from zknives.com, but now you can add another to that list: the LegalBlade app.

Created by Knife Rights, the app gives you information on knife laws for all 50 states, along with info on select cities and jurisdictions in the U.S.

As someone who travels frequently, I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along. Knife laws in the United States are a confusing mess. Each state has its own variations of certain laws and some cities have different laws than neighboring ones.

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There aren’t many useful smartphone apps out there that pertain to knives—in fact, there aren’t more than a handful.

There’s a great app called Kitchen Knife Skills that shows you how to expertly cut difficult foods like avocados, but other than that there’s not much for the knife fanatics. That is, except for the absolutely amazing Knife Steel Composition Chart.

We recommended this app back when it came out in 2012, but we thought it’d be wise to come back to the app because it’s definitely a must-have for any collector, custom knifemaker or knife knut.

The app is a knife steel composition and name cross-reference database for all types of alloys used in knife blades. According to the description, the app features about 5,600 alloy names and more than 930 compositions, which covers pretty much anything you could ever want to look for. Some of the things you won’t find are proprietary steels, which are classified. For those who like to get deep down and dirty, there is a composition comparison that has a bar graph with three different options that show the mass percentage, molar masses and atomic count per 1,000 atoms.

If I lost you there, chances are you probably won’t use that part of the app too much, but the app could be a great resource if you’re trying to learn more about the steel composition of the blades in your collection. One of the most useful things in the app is the “Notes” section of each steel type that gives a brief description of the steel—like where you’ll commonly find the steel and some of the characteristics of it.

Another really useful resource is found not in the app, but on zknives, the website of the creator of the app. The chemical elements effects on steel portion of the site gives a nice breakdown of what effects each element has on the steel. For example, the section says that Molybdenum prevents brittleness and improves machinability and resistance to corrosion. This helps put some of the steel compositions found in the app into perspective. The website in general has a lot of great resources, so we also recommend checking out zknives.

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This is the second of a two-part series from survival expert Creek Stewart. In addition to doing a Q and A with Creek on survival knives, we’ll also be giving away a  BlackBird SK5 — Creeks’ survival knife of choice – to one lucky reader and two copies of Creek’s new book.  Scroll to the bottom of the article to learn how to enter.  You can learn more about Creek’s survival school in our post from yesterday.

KD: So, what’s your survival knife of choice?

CS: I carry the Blackbird SK5.  It’s made by Ontario Knife Company and designed by Paul Scheiter.

KD:  Why this knife?

CS:   The core of my courses and what I do, especially with primitive skills, revolves around using a knife.  So there’s a lot of reasons why I use this knife.  First, for my my primary survival I want something simple. I don’t want a movie prop.  I don’t want something that’s off of Alien or Predator with big spikes on the back like you might see in Mad Max.  I just want something that has everything you need and nothing you don’t. That’s what this knife has.

KD:  What characteristics do you look for in a survival knife?

CS:  For a core survival knife, it has to be a fixed blade. Whenever there’s a hinge, there’s a weak spot. I don’t care how you look at it.  Even the best made folding knives aren’t going to compete with a fixed blade knife. And full tang– it’s got to be full tang.  I’ve seen partial tang and rat tail knives break under similar conditions that I use my knife.

KD: How can someone determine if a knife is full tang

CS:  A lot of times you can see the metal sandwiched between the scales, but if you can’t, see if the scales are removable. Lots of times rat tail tangs will have a button at the bottom, where you can see where they’ve pinched the bottom of the rat tail. Worse case scenario, call or email the manufacturer.

KD:  What about the pommel?

CS:   I like a flat, solid pommel. It’s kind of like a little hammer and you can use it to pound in stakes.  I also like a flat grind so I can strike my ferro rod with my knife.  That’s important to me.

KD:  What about size?  What’s the ideal range.

CS:  My sweet spot is about a 10-inch knife with a 5-inch blade.  That’s  small enough to do detailed stuff, like feather sets or carving fishing gorges, but it’s also big enough to baton through a tree with a diameter of 24 inches if I had to.  So size definitely matters — too big is too much and too little isn’t enough.  I’ve spent thousands of hours in the field using a knife the way it’s supposed to be used and I’ve been doing it long enough where I can say that I’ve made all the mistakes. I’ve bought the big boys and I’ve tried to get away with the little knives — the little neck knives — and there’s kind of a middle ground that I think is best.

KD:  What other knives do you carry when you’re in the woods?

CS:  I always carry a back up blade.  So on my EDC kit I carry a leatherman — the MUT — and typically a  little Victorinox or a folder like a little thumb-assisted Spyderco, but I always carry a backup, because you never know.  Even though there’s nothing I could do to break or destroy this knife, I could lose it.

KD:  What about price?  How much does the Blackbird run for and how much should somebody expect to pay for a good survival knife?

CS: This knife goes for about $120, which I think is a pretty fair price for a knife that you would expect to last a lifetime and maybe even pass on one day.  That’s the way I look at knives, I don’t look at them like a disposable tool. When I buy a knife, I expect to keep it.  I’d rather spend $100 on a really good knife, then buy five $20 knives, because you never know when a cheap knife is going to break.

KD:  What are some of pitfalls of buying a cheap knife?

CS: There becomes a point when the price is a reflection on the materials.  You can only make a knife so cheap without cutting corners somewhere, maybe it’s in the metal, maybe it’s going to corrode fast.  Look, you get what you pay for.  I don’t mind spending money on two things:  food and knives.

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We’ve talked a lot on this blog about sharpening straight-edged knives, but we haven’t focused much on serrated blades. While we always encourage those with serrated knives to get them sharpened professionally or by the manufacturer, it is possible to sharpen one yourself. You just have to know what you’re doing.

For a straight-edged blade, you would take a sharpening stone and simply run the knife across it, but doing that with a serrated knife will only grind off the serrations. This might give the blade a specious and temporary feeling of sharpness, but it’s very bad for the blade and you should avoid it at all cost.

Instead, you will need a sharpening rod—either made from steel or ceramic. The size you get is really important, but it also depends on the size of the serrations. If you’re using a large cooking knife with wide serrations, opt for something like the DMT Ceramic Steel. For most pocket knives with small serrations, go for the DMT Diafold Serrated Sharpener. This works with made types of small serrations because the rod tapers down at the end, so it fits various sizes.

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Halloween is synonymous with costumes and dark festivities. However, no tradition tests your creativity and knife-wielding skills more than carving a jack o’lantern. If you’re looking to carve the perfect jack o’lantern either to scare your neighbors or enter our pumpkin carving contest, here are a few important tips.

Pick the right pumpkin

The first step is actually picking a healthy pumpkin from the patch. In order to pick the right shape, you can go about it two ways. You can go in with a design already planned, so you can get a pumpkin that fits your plan. For example, if you want to carve a screeching cat, you might want a taller one. Or you could simply go in without a plan and pick the most uniform pumpkin with no scratches or bruises. You also want to make sure that the skin is firm.

Select a unique design

This one is entirely up to you, but you should be fully aware of your limitations and avoid something too ambitious for your skill level. You can create your own on a piece of paper or scour the Internet for inspiration.

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A survival knife is a piece of equipment that can literally save your life if all else fails. This tool can be used for hunting, building shelter, cleaning fish and even self-defense.

And for those looking to pick up a solid, all-around survival knife, the choices are plenty. While many of the survival knives being sold today are great quality tools, not all of them are perfectly designed for survival situations. So if you’re trying to buy the best knife for surviving in dire circumstances, these are the five features you don’t want on your survival knife.

Folding mechanism

The last feature you want on a survival knife is the ability to fold. A folder, while much more convenient, is also much more likely to break when used in survival situations. You want a knife that does not have moving parts or bits that can be easily broken. Even if it does have a lock, extreme pressure will sometimes break a knife. Instead, opt for a fixed-blade knife.

Serrations

Serrated and partially serrated knives are all the rage these days. While there are plenty of good uses for serrations on certain knives, a fully serrated blade is a bad way to go. Serrations are mainly good for cutting rope, among a few other specialized activities. Everything you will be doing in the wilderness would require a plain edge. Also, serrated blades are impossible to sharpen on the fly, so if your blade dulls while you’re trying to survive, you’ll be out of luck. Instead, go for the plain-edged blade.

Gut hook

It might make sense to try to pack all the features into your survival knife like a gut hook. Wrong. You want a simple blade that will not make doing some of the important tasks, like slicing things, more difficult. You would likely rarely if never need a gut hook in survival situations.

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