Knife buildoff challenge discussion

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If you're more into whittling, Opinel sell their famous #8 with a raw cherry handle with extra material on it for carving. $15.
Raw-Beech-Carbon_1000x.jpg

Fancier wood versions available for more bucks.

People go crazy with their Opinels.
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That’s tempting too.
I carried an Opinel for years. It was my EDC until I got my current Swiss Army knife about 30 years ago, and got an Onion pocket with a clip. I broke the tip off my onion, replaced it, lost that on a camping trip, but still have my Swiss Army knife.
That Opinel stayed in my truck or camping gear until it disappeared a few years ago.
it was pretty ragged but was good steel that took a nice edge.
 
That’s tempting too.
I carried an Opinel for years. It was my EDC until I got my current Swiss Army knife about 30 years ago, and got an Onion pocket with a clip. I broke the tip off my onion, replaced it, lost that on a camping trip, but still have my Swiss Army knife.
That Opinel stayed in my truck or camping gear until it disappeared a few years ago.
it was pretty ragged but was good steel that took a nice edge.
Lack of pocket clip is the one thing I don't like about my Opinel. Mine is the version with the plastic handle. It floats, has a serrated section, and a whistle :bigsmile:
 
I bought a beginners kit. Cherry handle. I’ll see if I can come up with a way to personalize it.


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I think they're all pretty rubbish stainless steel. But Blade HQ has a bunch of cool shaped blanks by Tallen (a Pakistani manufacturer, known for its terrible Damascus)

However, for $6 to $15 bucks you could have a lot of fun and practice building these up, then a lot of fun beating on them until they die.
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I'm sure there's some artisans on here preemptively rolling in their hypothetical graves at this post. But I love a cheap knife with a solid handle, and a sharpened piece of stainless with some oak scales fits that brief perfectly. :thumbsup: :21:
 
I think they're all pretty rubbish stainless steel. But Blade HQ has a bunch of cool shaped blanks by Tallen (a Pakistani manufacturer, known for its terrible Damascus)

However, for $6 to $15 bucks you could have a lot of fun and practice building these up, then a lot of fun beating on them until they die.
View attachment 149475
View attachment 149476

I'm sure there's some artisans on here preemptively rolling in their hypothetical graves at this post. But I love a cheap knife with a solid handle, and a sharpened piece of stainless with some oak scales fits that brief perfectly. :thumbsup: :21:


But the question is if..........


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But the question is if..........


View attachment 149479
Keeling is not a valid or even difficult test. Lawn darts, fist sized rocks, and poorly installed window AC units all keel with ease.

A tougher test is to find an object with which it is entirely impossible to keel someone.
 
This is my only hand made knife. I bought it in ‘99 on the west coast of Ireland. Then, Rory Conner was the official knife maker for the Irish Navy.

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Suppose I should clean it/polish it.


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Putting lols and political baloney aside, this badge is kind of correct, but possibly not in the way it's maker intended.

Let's get esoteric.

Knives and axes have a shared origin, handaxes (not hatchets) being specialization of early heavy duty knives.
At conception, around two million years ago, they were tools of work, survival, and life improvement, not weapons.
Canto_tallado_2-Guelmim-Es_Semara.jpg

Their ability to be used by us to kill animals for food and sadly to kill each other was a later discovery.

Awls, and later adzes are also some of the earliest tools. In fact to my knowledge, the adze has remained peaceful throughout its history, never being developed into a specialized weapon.

Early spears are harder to pin down, as wood doesn't preserve well in dirt, but in its most basic form it's just a sharp stick. It's very likely that they were developed as early as the "mode 1" tools. Mode 1 being what archeology boffins call the simplest axes and knives.
While the earliest use of a spear may be difficult to totally know, given that modern chimpanzees make and use spears for hunting, it's likely that our prehistoric ancestors used them for the same purpose. So, not necessarily invented for killing other humans, still a violent origin.

The same goes for the much later development of the bow and arrow. Probably made for hunting before war, but its use for both would have been immediately apparent to the first users of them.

Swords, invented probably a million and a half or more years after knives were really just a knife specialized for killing other humans. They're not that helpful for hunting, and have very few uses outside of putting a sharp object into an objecting opponent.

Guns share the same sad origin story as swords. While they are clearly the best hunting tool available today, and once they became cheap enough for a common person to afford they drastically increased the survival chances of pioneer types, they were created as weapons of war, and for much of their early history that's all they were. War being the worst human invention so far.

Tl;dr
Many human inventions (especially ones that appear on the history channel) have been inspired by violence at best, and at worst violence against each other.

Knives however are inherently, from the beginning of our history, a tool first and a weapon second.
 
Disagree... farming is the worst human invention so far, as the shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture is 'the root of all evils'.
Interesting. I don't disagree entirely, though I'm not sure I'm totally on board.

Farming, like your biblical reference says of money, it is not evil in itself, but the root.
The same can not be claimed of war.

However, to your point, the archeological record could be interpreted to suggest that large scale wars were basically non existent in pre-agrarian times.

The theory being that as a migratory species we didn't own land, and not owning land, we didn't fight over it.

Smaller sustainable population size of hunter gatherer cultures would have played a large part in the lack of war as well.
 

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