Summarize your collecting "style" or tendencies ...

L

Lansky1

Joined
Apr 12, 2016
Messages
466
- I collect post 1970 Case knives almost exclusively.
- I'm an eBay bottomfeeder - never pay full retail.
- Through trial and error, I've narrowed down my preferences to a half dozen patterns I really like and focus on those.
- My wife says I'm not afraid of color ... I tend to shy away from the common reds, browns and ambers - I must be part magpie - if it's colorful or shiny, I like it ...
- I like to tinker with blade shapes - try to be imaginative & find ways to create wharncliffe's or sheepfoot's from factory blades where no man has gone before.

That's my knife collecting tendencies in a nutshell ... let's have your collecting style ---->
 
Hahahaha
Summarize your collecting "style" or tendencies ...
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I collect all kinds of traditionals (as long as they are Trappers).
Well . . . large trappers.
I have many other styles but the glaringly obvious reaction someone would have while looking at my collection would be . . . TRAPPERS.
Lansky1 said:
I like to tinker with blade shapes - try to be imaginative & find ways to create wharncliffe's or sheepfoot's from factory blades where no man has gone before.
Click to expand...
Ever cut an entire blade off just to make the knife single blade ?
I can hardly resist doing that with most of my two blade Trappers.
I did once turn the Spay blade into a Wharncliffe on one of them in a fit of restrained Dremel surgery.
 
Given unlimited funds I could see myself having an embarrassingly large collection of Whalers and Elephant Toes.
Hey . . . a man can dream can't he ?
 
I have a wide range represented in my collection, but it seems that pen knives dominate when it comes to pattern. There doesn’t seem to be a certain huge majority of covers in my group, but I seem to go towards the natural materials.
 
Mostly multi-blade slipjoints.
I find them the most versatile and more than sufficient for my daily needs.
I do have a Buck 110 on my belt every day, but I seem to reach for the slipjoint 9.969 times out of 10 when I need to cut something.
 
Do I like it?
Do I have the funds for it?
Mostly single blades, no Lockbacks, toothpicks, or muskrats.
 
I look, I find, I buy...repeat.

Pretty simple really. Sometimes I even ask the Mrs.

Sometimes :D
 
Equal Ends. I have a wide variety in my collection but I have more Equal End patterns than any other type. I also seem to have more knives with a Sheepsfoot or Wharncliffe blade than knives without them.
 
  • My sweet spot is between 3 5/8 and 3 7/8" long closed.
  • Bar far, I collect more scout knives than anything else. And of all those scout knives, the Remington/Pal scout knives and Camillus Army engineer knives are my favorites to collect. They have a wonderful history that intrigues me as much as the knives themselves.
  • My favorite traditionals are from the 1920's to the 1940's. There's just something about the Rogers bone from that era that I love.
  • The rest of my collection is a mix and match of anything that grabs my eye, with no real focus.
  • While I love natural handle materials, I am also quite fond of yellow delrin and natural canvas micarta.
  • I'm a bargain basement kind of guy, always looking for low price deals.
 
Stockmen and Trappers are my favorites. Specifically the 881/885uh/8ot stockman design I too patrol eBay and have got a few good deals and stubbornly have let a couple I really wanted get away :mad:. Also really like Tony Bose designed knives.
 
For traditional knives it is usually one blade models.
 
Many, many knives lol...but the predominate gravitation is back to GEC #15's. I look at my collection and suddenly I have 15 or 20 GEC #15s that are all exactly the same (or almost) but different handle materials. I liquidate to just a few #15s, rinse, and repeat.

And if it is isn't a GEC 15 then the knife is almost always a wharncliffe or sheepsfoot.

Hi my name is XXXXX and I'm a knife-a-holic.
 
As best I can do is say I really like smaller 3-1/4 or less 1-2 blade slipjoints.
I'm not confined to this and have no problem with lockbacks up to the Buck 110 or fixed blades up to the 119, but the little slipjoints I really like.
 
I don’t have a specific way I collect. I guess I like variety. Everything from vintage traditional slippies to modern folders to large fixed blades. I like to hold, use, and experience it all.
 
These days I’m focusing on single-blade jacks with frames 3-1/2” and smaller.
 
When I was actually a collector (even a card-carrying member of the Case Collector's Club at the time), I would say that what described my collecting style in a single word was "variety."

Like the OP, I primarly collected recent production Case knives and looked for bargains over rarity.

I tended towards wanting to try at least one of every pattern, and if I liked a particular pattern after trying it, I might buy multiple variations of it - different steels, handle materials, blade combos.

I branched out into other brands, but in less quantity, and not with the full-on "gotta try every pattern" mindset.
Buck 301 and 303 but only one of each, and only in yellow synthetic handles.
3 Queen knives - Country Cousin, #9 Stockman, small serpentine jack.
About 14 GECs, with a few duplicate patterns but different blades, steels, or covers (two 15s, three 12s, two 48s, three 77s, a Maverick, a Congress, a Pony Jack, the BF Congress Jack)
One Canal Street - the Eric's Jack, forum knife runner-up from 2014.
A few SAKs - several Pioneer variants, the alox Cadet in a few colors, even a red-handled Spartan.
I even tried a couple of Rough Riders and Taylor Brands Old Timers just to see how the imports stacked up. Verdict - RR makes good knives, the Taylor OTs are usable tools.

Once I got to a point where I had more knives sitting never-used in their boxes and tubes, with about a dozen that get regular carry, with maybe 6 of those the real go-to carry knives, it just seemed foolish to buy another one when I had so many already. I am not sure why that mental trigger waited until I had somewhere in the range of 150 knives and not at 50 or 15, but now, no matter how much I like looking at some new knife or variant of a pattern, I just don't feel any desire to add yet another one.
 
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