i don't know if this will really add to the conversation, but i just got back from a week of camping and fishing in Killarney Provincial Park, north of Toronto. i used a $20 Gerber Profile from Wally World all week. i used it to cut wood and start fires, build a shelter, cut rope, cord, fishing line, and fish; and even used a rock as a baton to chop down a 4" sapling. it got a little dull and some of the TiNi coating came off, but approximately 30 seconds on a $9 V-sharpener had it shaving the hairs off my arm again.
the bottom line is that knives are cutting tools and all will fail at some point when subjected to extreme use and/or abuse. now, some will fail more quickly than others, but when i can do roughly the same thing with a $20 piece of steel as you can with a $400 piece of steel, then someone has been sold a bill of goods- and that someone isn't me.
somewhere along the line, your high end knife means pretty much the same to me as your exotic car. yes, it's really pretty to look at and goes really fast; but i can spend 1/5th the money on a Mustang or Camaro with a Nitrous kit that will blow your pretty (and really expensive) car out of the water... same with watches. yeah, $9k Breitlings are pretty to look at. they do exactly the same thing as a $90 Fossil- tell you what time it is...
it's all subjective of course, but there's NO WAY i'd carry a $400 knife into the woods with me. it's just not worth it. especially when i can buy a "Chinese piece of crap" that does the job for 1/20th the price, and with no crying if (when) it breaks.
the vids are cool but i don't think any of us really 'learn' anything about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of the knives in real world applications.
meh, i'm rambling here, but i will NEVER buy a knife that i'm not willing to beat the ever-loving piss out of. a knife that's too expensive or pretty to use is useless.
peace.
Actually, this is a very interesting post, because it reveals some misunderstandings and strange attitudes common in almost all walks of life.
First, a very vague concept of "roughly equal" or "roughly the same" performance. What does "roughly the same" even mean? Who and what determines when the differences between two things are relevant enough that they can't be called roughly the same?
Second, the awkward idea that expensive items can't be used. Just because one person is afraid of doing something doesn't mean everyone else is, too. I'll use a $ 1,500 car, and I'll use a $ 1,000,000 car too if I happen to get one by some enormous strike of luck. Some people don't use expensive items, even if they own them. Some people do. Not all in the latter group are wealthy people.
And finally third, ignorance or perhaps indifference on quite a number of aspects of "performance". The car example was good, I think. Slapping some nitrous kit in a car won't give it any better aerodynamic performance or handling or balance or anything. Sure, it'll give you straight-line speed, but you'll still get wasted in the corners, where things actually require something from the driver and the vehicle. So, instead of blowing anything out of the water, the nitrous equipped home made racer will more likely find itself off road and on the bottom of some roadside ditch, while the expensive car it was supposed to blow out of the water flew right through the corner and continues on. People seem to be completely oblivious to many important aspects of performance. One could say that a $2 Chinese 440A folder has roughly the same performance as a $ 200 Busse Game Warden - because both are knife blades that cut materials. On the other hand, anyone could tell that the Game Warden has enormously superior performance in some fields, such as edge retention and toughness - both of which are important to people who actually use their knives.
Of course, there are a lot of people who think that more expensive automagically means better, and they're wrong. Price doesn't determine performance, performance itself determines performance. You can get a $ 1000 knife that performs like crap, and a $ 7 knife that performs decently well. On the other hand, money can be used to make things better - but is not always used for that end. You can make a good knife with $ 20. But you can't make that knife as good as you could make one with $ 400.
Each man determines what he needs from his knives, but one can't reasonably deny there are real performance differences with knives - good cheap knives always perform lower than good expensive knives. Any exceptions either aren't good knives or aren't cheap knives.
Just as an example... if one thinks that a $20 knife can do the same job as a, say, $ 400 knife, then why not just tell us which $ 20 knife perfoms as well as, say, a Busse ASH-1 in terms of edge retention, toughness and chopping performance - and warranty - all in the same package? I would buy that $ 20 knife. I'd buy five of them. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist. Sure, you can chop down a sapling with that $20 knife and you can do the same with that $MUCH Busse. But anyone who claims there aren't any differences between the two in such things as edge retention are out of their minds.
Of course, it's up to each man to determine whether those differences make the much higher price worthwhile to them as individuals. But even if it's not worth it for you, it may be more than worth it for someone else.
Not really sure why all this seems so difficult for some people. It's not like performance is a complicated issue, if you actually bother to think about it.
I don't mean to come across as offensive or anything here, but I do honestly wonder about some things some people say. It seems as if some people, after finding something "good enough" for them personally, ceased to perceive any further differences in performance. To use a car example again, it would be exactly like saying: I only need a car that goes 60 MPH and takes me from A to B, so my cheap car that tops out at 65 MPH is actually roughly the same in performance as your Ferrari (although my cheap car is of course a million times better than cars cheaper still that only go 50 MPH). Sure, the Ferrari is a lot faster, but somehow I just don't seem to give that any credit.
