Use Your Stuff
The knife pictured above is my Dad’s EDC, a Cold Steel Mini AK47. It has been carried so much that the Tri-Ad lock stopped working (I did some maintenance and brought it back to life), that the blade shape has changed significantly, and the Cold Steel G10 is actually comfortable in the hand. While most of the stuff I post here is carried, it is, comparatively speaking, pristine. This Mini AK47 is anything but pristine. Nonetheless it still works—cutting, prying, poking, and doing all sorts of things. When you don’t worry about what happens with your knife, this is what it looks like. It makes me smile to know that my Dad carries it everyday, not only because it means I scored an EDC convert, but also because it provides me with insights on what non-knife people do with knives.
Let’s review some of the things I have seen this knife cut. My Dad is retired, but I think he is working more now than he was at the end of his career. Recently he got 8 tons of gravel delivered to his house for a yard project worthy of an HGTV show. He and my Mom moved all 8 tons by hand (with a wheelbarrow) in 5 days. They took one day off and during that day they came with us to hike up a local mountain. The man can just flat out work. And this knife goes with him. It has, of course, cut open boxes and packages. Its done food prep, including being used as the sole cutting tool and cooking utensil on a recent camping trip. It has marked cut lines in my Dad’s workshop. That is all pretty standard stuff I do with my folders. But here are some things I have witnessed that I just can’t bring myself to do with a folder. He cut asphalt shingles for an small home improvement project. He pried loose siding to allow access to the underlayment and then it cut that siding (both vinyl and aluminum siding, FYI). He used it as a wedge to move rocks apart so he could get a larger tool in between them for leverage. Each one of these things was cringe-inducing and something I DO NOT RECOMMEND. But the knife was fine. Note that my Dad is an engineer and pretty knowledgeable about materials and their limits. I am certain that he knew exactly how far he could push the knife, so he did.
I have sharpened it probably close to a dozen times and the AUS-8, which is clearly not the best steel on the market, comes back to a nice cutting edge. Its pretty fat as my Dad has used up a significant amount of blade and he is now well past the original cutting bevel, but as you can see, this isn’t a precision cutter. This is a get it done cutter. I have given the knife a full lube job and taken it apart once to fix the lock (the backspring had rocked out of place a bit). The funniest thing, to me, is that my Dad used it for a year without the lock working proving that a Tri-Ad is 100% unnecessary when the knife user has common sense.
I didn’t write this piece originally as an endorsement of Cold Steel stuff, but there is simply no way to avoid it—they make really tough knives. This is what happens to a knife that has been daily carried for nearly a decade and used hard every single day. My Dad has used the crap out of this sub-$100 folder doing things the IG knife folks would never do with their folders and it still works. I
This knife also shows us just how unimportant a lot of the stuff we fret about is. Locks don’t really matter. Blade steel doesn’t really matter. Blade coatings are REALLY stupid, as if you didn’t know that already. Simply put—if you make a good knife with a good design, your ahead of the game. M390 is more for folks that have converted their love of Pokemon to a love of knives. For users, for real workaday use, most steels, shaped and ground correctly, will work fine. The Mini AK47 wasn’t my favorite knife, but is clearly my Dad’s. I have given him probably $1,000 worth of knives over the years and this is the one still in his pocket.