Cobalt
Gold Member
- Joined
- Dec 23, 1998
- Messages
- 17,262
Oh, it was much better than a movie. I call this the Jurassic period of the knife world. MD had actually gotten a contract to sell knives to some seal team members in Coronado. This is way before cliff broke the first Tusk. I use to go to those knife shows in San Diego and Pomona, CA. Well, MD was not delivering the ATAK knives he had gotten paid to make for a bunch of seal team members. At one of those shows, word spread that two seals had walked up to MD's table and saw that he was selling a bunch of ATAK's, the knife they had ordered and never gotten. You can imagine the words they had. Bad enough that I was at the other end of the show and the talk spread from maker to maker faster than people walked. Word spread all the way to where I was, talking to Lynn Thompson at his table and working out a deal to get Cliff several knives for free to test. To Lynn's credit he gave me the knives, and I forwarded them to Cliff. Lynn, also tried to buy my first SHBM from me as he claimed he couldn't get one. I told Jerry that later on and Jerry said, he would have sold Lynn a BM any time Lynn wanted it. Lynn did end up with one.
Meanwhile back at MD headquarters, they were trying to do triage with the seals, some of which were on recKnives. But triage was difficult when you had the likes of me and a bunch of other engineers trying to explain to MD, that hard chroming a basic carbon steel was not a good idea. HC not being a vapor barrier, air could go through and cause oxidation under it being that O1 was the kind of steel that would rust if you looked at it. He obviously knew better than all of us. And his fanboy minions came out on the attack, which were mostly personal towards anyone who disagreed with MD's methods. The term I used for them at the time was Arrogant Ignorance. But then came Mission knives and they offered almost the identical design to the Atak, made out of Beta Titanium. Wallah, rust resistance and no magnetism solved in one shot for the seals. Then to top it off Cliff breaks Tusk #1. By this time we had all been on both recKnives and KF concurrently for over a year. The battles raged on, then Cliff breaks Tusk #2, and the problem is undeniable. This second event created an irreparable rif in the forum. And since we had no Lincoln to unite us, BF was created to secede from KF. MD listened enough that you could get one of his blades without the HC, which was smart. Everyone that held an MD loved how it handled. Without the HC, they were good knives but not worth the crazy prices. I am pretty sure Cliff paid more than double the cost of the SHBM for the Tusk. During this time, Jerry is doing his cutting demonstrations at blade show in front of ALL the custom Knife makers of the time. The challenge was open to all. No one stepped up. So that is a cliff notes(no pun intended) on that period of time, between late 1995 and 1998.
