Help name this knife design? - The Prevail

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David Mary

pass the mustard - after you cut it
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Good afternoon friends. I have a design that was inspired in part by the ergos, style, and performance of my favorite large Spydercos, the Endura, the Resilience and the Military. Now that I have this new design pretty much dialed in, I am looking for a catchy name for it. It would be cool, though not strictly required, if the name could somewhat reflect the Spyderco inspiration, but not necessarily in a blatant way like "Enduritarience" or something equally boorish. And of course, please no innuendos or anything remotely family unfriendly. But before I ask your help, here is a little background on the design to give further context to my request.

I have always been interested in the Temperance 2, but felt it was a little too large and heavy for EDC, so this knife is kind of like my attempt to fill that void for myself. A pivotal moment in this emergence of this design was when I experimentally modded a Spyderco Resilience into this:

Skinny Slicer inspiration.jpg

That knife quickly became my favorite to use, carry and look at, even when I still had more expensive Spydercos, in more exotic steels, with fancier locking mechanisms. As such I consider it the proof of concept for the design ergos, performance and aestethics. Eventually I decided to make a fixed blade version of this knife in some thin AEB-L I had in stock. Here is the alpha prototype:

Skinny Slicer.jpg

I called it the "Skinny Slicer", which is surely not a long term name for this design! This knife belongs to a valued customer, to whom I also ask: @Hurrul since you own the prototype, and because I know you are keen with the use of linguistics, I would love to hear any suggestions you also might have for this design's new name.

Next was the beta prototype stage, in 15N20 (which I hand profiled from one of my universal blanks, hence the slightly odd hole placement). In these images you can see the versatility in grip options:

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The specs on the one above are:
Steel: 3/32" (.093") 15N20
Overall Length: 8 1/2"
Cutting Edge Length: 4"
Weight: 4.4 oz (same as a Spyderco Military)

The next stage, of course, is production. I have a small number of these coming, one in .0136" LC200N, and two in .118" AEB-L. The production version of these will have jimping available, as the blank shown below in LC200N, and blade lengths may be 3 3/4" - 4" (and of course they can be made shorter at customer request):

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So there is the background on my new design, and I truly have no idea how much interest there will be in it, but of course my hope is that people will want it, and I know that as a knife user myself, one of these in stainless steel will soon be on my hip at all times.

So my mind has been drawing a blank (no pun intended) on what to call this one. What do you think would be a good name??

Thanks!

P.S. Whoever's design name suggestion I choose will receive 15% off their first purchase of this knife, whichever version they choose.

The base price for the first run AEB-L ones will be redacted, LC200N $redacted, and a 15N20 or 1084 hand profiled version is $redacted. The hand profiled versions may show some variance in their profiles, but the overall design, ergos and performance will remain. I also have one .125" AEB-L version currently in the works (hand profiling) which can be ready within the next few days, so long as the order is placed very soon. It's base price is $145. Jimping won't be available on this one, as it is already hardened to 62.5 RC, and that would destroy my jimping file. Once my hardened LC200N blanks show up (they are in the mail to me now, but still in San Francisco), I will be quite busy and any new orders will have to go to the back of the line, most likely to be started in the mid to late spring.
 
Why don’t you call it the Hurl?

That's interesting, a shout out to Hurrul, the original owner of the alpha prototype. I'm afraid I wouldn't want to, though, for literally the exact same reason I disagree with Alan Folts calling his little wharncliffe knife the S.P.E.W. :)
 
That's interesting, a shout out to Hurrul, the original owner of the alpha prototype. I'm afraid I wouldn't want to, though, for literally the exact same reason I disagree with Alan Folts calling his little wharncliffe knife the S.P.E.W. :)

Totally understandable, I did think of that too. Also...Hurl is also a throwing action. ;)
 
The Blend? Since it’s a blend of designs but also may refer to the aggressive cutting of a blender.

The Chelicera? Spider themed without being too on the nose a nod to Spyderco and not as cliché as fang.

The DM Combo?

Too bad Spyderco already coined the Amalgam..
 

Interesting suggestion. I like it. Can you expand a bit on the reasoning behind it?

Also gotta be honest, I kinda dig Enduritarience...

Lol!! :D

But I really like Chelicera. Like a lot. My only concern is it might be too obscure a word for most people... but I'm definitely keeping it on the list of possibilities. Thank you!
 
Interesting suggestion. I like it. Can you expand a bit on the reasoning behind it?



Lol!! :D

But I really like Chelicera. Like a lot. My only concern is it might be too obscure a word for most people... but I'm definitely keeping it on the list of possibilities. Thank you!

Kind of went off jlauffer jlauffer 's recommendation, Atlas was the Titan god of stamina.
 
Ah subtlety! Still making the Spyderco tribute, but one more step removed from being too obvious. Well played. I should have mentioned that I'm going to avoid pseudo-theistic references, though.
 
Couple spider-related terms that could work?

Gossamer - silk webbing

Maxilla - part of the mouth
 
How about a sprint, the most for the least? Okay that was lame, and it's not sprint anyway!
 
So...I've got a couple of ideas...and...they're mostly terrible.

OK, so one idea is to play around with the word resilience. One synonym for resilience is adaptability. To go along that line; and taking into account the many uses and grip versatility (and being somewhat light hearted) The Capricious or The Mercurial.

Another thing I thought of was, it could just be kept simple. Something that expresses it's reliability, many uses and the everyday carry aspect. If you wanted your name included you could opt for something like David's Little Helper. Or invoke a well known landmark; Old Faithful (or Ol' Faithful for a stylized choice.) Or simply something the The Can Do, a simple name that reflects the multitude of uses.

I'm almost done, thank you for bearing with me. I'm personally a big fan of David Mary Custom Presents: Keen. So, I think it works from a marketing perspective because it is short, simple and easy to remember. It also has the advantage of potentially meaning different things to different people most if not of them would be beneficial in terms of a knife. A quick look at dictionary definitions returns: "highly developed" which applies to this well thought out knife, "sharp" which...I mean...that's normally a good thing for blades, informally it has been used to mean excellent and in British slang to mean a comparatively low price (I'm not British...so...I'd really need someone who is to comment on that one for me if it means low price as in good or low price as in cheap...I'm not sure of a negative or positive connotation.)

Keen is also short enough to easily acronym if you wanted. Knife Everyday Every Need. Or...Knife Excellent...Exciting...Nife? Clearly as we can all see acronyms are not my strong suit.

Going off of sprint, you could use an informal word for movement like Boogie or Zoom. Or you could get purposefully esoteric and use an entire phrase like "let's blow this popsicle stand" and shorten it to Popsicle.

If you move the endurance ideas back a step, you end up with endure. A synonym from their could work really well. Like Prevail or Persevere, perhaps Perseverance.

Ok, I'm going to stop there...because...I could spend the rest of my day doing this. And tragically, I have things to do. I hope at the very least I give someone a good idea out of this.
 
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