**CONTEST CLOSED - the WINNER is grownstar** 3,000th Post Giveaway (GAW)

Checking post count..

Drat:grumpy: I need to post more! Awesome and generous giveaway anyhow :thumbup:
 
I'm in

A little story, methinks:

How I discovered Bladeforums!

I was researching knives. An acquaintance of mine had lost a finger to lock failure on a cheap linerlock. Guess what the only knife I had was? Yep. Wal-Mart Ozark Trail made-in-China-by-someone-not-really-trying and then purchased and rebranded by at least 6 different companies. Yeah, you could buy the same knife from 6 different companies.

Now, I started off with a Cold Steel, obviously, because that was a fail-proof lock. I found the edge didn't hold for too awfully long, so I did more research into blade steels. Almost any combination of "(x steel) vs (y steel)" typed into google search pulled up several results from Bladeforums.

This went on for a while. I would search for information about a knife or an aspect of knives, Bladeforums pops up. Bladeforums always had the most informative results. I never even considered joining - "I'm not a knife guy", I thought, "I just need one good knife and these guys know a lot about it."

I spent a lot of time looking through eBay and Amazon. I am probably one of very few people who has searched "folding knife" and looked through every single result. I wanted to find quality but I kept finding either junk or things I felt were overpriced. Ultimately, I picked up a Manix 2 XL for $90, which was and is a damned good price for retail.

After a while and hundreds of google searches, I figured it was time - Bladeforums is a place I need to register and I need to realize that I'm a knife guy. Done and done. I had lurked on BF for a good 6-8 months before I ever registered an account.

Now, just over a year later, I'm quickly spiraling towards 1000 posts, I've bought, sold, and traded literally more knives than I could hope to remember. Heck, I made a post about which manual flippers I had handled and my experiences with them in a reply to someone's thread, and I had to edit it eight times after I had made the post because I had remembered another one I had owned - and I had already listed a couple dozen. That's just manual flippers, too - I didn't know about flippers until I had already bought/sold/traded a hundred or so knives.

So, here I am, the guy who thought he was living it up with his $40 Cold Steel Counter Point II, just a couple years later buying, selling, trading, and using knives that cost anywhere from 2 to 15 times as much.

After it all, though, I still have my Cold Steel Tuff Lite. It's lost almost 1/8th of an inch from constant use and sharpening, the blade is way off center to the right, all of the hardware has been anodized at least twice, the tip has been chipped and damaged so many times that it now sweeps up... But it still locks up solid and cuts like a demon. I have a Kershaw Echelon recently de-assisted that is probably going to replace it pretty soon, and I'll be sad to finally cut the Tuff Lite out of the rotation for good.

However, that knife will be the first knife I have ever straight up retired. I'll keep it, though, just to remind me of where I started and where my priorities did and should continue to lie: Value and function. A perfect balance between the two. Don't get caught up in aesthetics, don't get suckered into the current trend that people are spending too much on, don't do anything but get the right knife for the task.
 
10fingers said:
Checking post count..
Drat:grumpy: I need to post more! Awesome and generous giveaway anyhow :thumbup:
Click to expand...

But you HAVE been a member for over a year; therefore, you're good to go! I included that qualification because I have noticed there are many members here who have been members for years, but who don't post a lot - I wanted them to be able to participate in this GAW for a change.

Cheers, and best of luck!

Derek...
 
Great story, Comeuppance, and thanks for sharing! Although, I'd better not respond to every entry here or this GAW would be over by night's end - LOL!
 
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