A defensive-oriented EDC knife will have different features from an EDC knife that will spend most of its time shaving kindling, sharpening pencils, or opening boxes. Despite its name, Columbia River Knife & Tool’s soon-to-be-released ‘Tighe Dye’ is no earthy crunchy granola-crumbling knife. It looks more like a small dagger from Assassin’s Creed, because its full spear point, symmetrical grips and double blade guards are optimized for fighting and nothing else. It’s also a flipper, one of the fastest single-hand opening designs.
Read the rest at our sister site The Truth About Knives.
Don’t use your EDC to open cartons or boxes unless you have to. Use a box cutter or anything with disposable blades. Corrugated is hell on knife blades. I like the folding lock-blade type that take the trapezoidal blades. I keep a couple around the house, one in my desk and one in my day pack.
They make this new thing called a stone.
Yes, they do, but if opening boxes is part of your day-to-day, sharpening your knife every two days gets real old, real fast.
I have come to the conclusion that the knife taste of many at TTAK and mine are at extreme variance. I own and use a Harsey-Tighe folder, but this thing leaves me cold.
Email me with some links to research, and we’ll find some Like blades to profile. We’re always looking to broaden our coverage!
I kind of feel the same way. It seems like most of the knives covered by TTAK are lower end. I’d rate the most common/well known knife companies as follows more or less by cost/quality:
Tier 1:
Chris Reeve
Hinderer
Strider
Zero Tolerance
Tier 2:
Spyderco
Benchmade
Kershaw
ESEE
Becker
Tier 3:
Buck
CRKT
SOG
Gerber
Cold Steel
I’m including both production knives and semi-production and this is of course my opinion. I’m not including custom knives. There are too many to list and they are really in another arena altogether.
Most of the knives I own are in tier 2 and I feel are the best value. If I had more money to devote to this I’d have many in tier 1. I have very little interest in tier 3.
While I’m not that into them, there are some interesting traditional folders. There’s also Mora knives, Opinel and many other inexpensive imports usually in carbon steel.
The 3 teir system doesn’t really work because most production knife companies sell knives at many different price/quality points. Benchmade is a perfect example with their red, blue, black, and gold class.