I tried to let this lie, but it began to rankle me.
at least they aren't the same blanks with a different stamp. they do look alike although it is kinda a basic bowie pattern.
Um, no. Fallkniven copied Cold Steel's design, plain and simple. At the very least, it's theft of intellectual property (which people love to accuse Cold Steel of, though the truth actually is that Cold Steel knives have been ripped off
ad nauseam over the years). If the Trail Master's pattern is ubiquitous, it is because Cold Steel made it so. If its profile appears commonplace to you, it is because thirty years ago Lynn Thompson and Dan Maragni collaborated to construct what they envisioned as the best performance-based bowie knife they could create.
History is comprised of facts, not opinions. And one of the facts of knife history is that prior to the Cold Steel Trail Master, commercial bowie knives looked like these.
Just about every modern production bowie (and, arguably, large camp knife) that followed, from the Gerber Australian Bowie and the Blackjack Rio Grande up through the current Busse Battle Mistress and the Becker BK-9, owes a debt of gratitude to Cold Steel for the trail it blazed with the Trail Master. After 1827, people may have asked for "a knife like Bowie's," but after 1987, people asked for "a bowie like Cold Steel's." The performance that Cold Steel wrung from the Trail Master--and that they demonstrated undeniably in the very first Proof video in 1987--set new standards that jolted the knife industry almost as monumentally as the Tanto had done just a few years before.
I don't care if you don't like Cold Steel. Nobody says you have to in order to hang out here. But please don't come into this subforum and try to convince us that Cold Steel's imitators have done something impressive. There are those of us here who were actively engaged in the knife world before, during, and after Cold Steel helped to revolutionize it.
-Steve
