I'm sure Munk's right, and there are many guys I think who just slip in quietly and add to their collection and then disappear. I don't know about "top dog", I know what I have and what many others do, as well as what Yangdu has mentioned to me, and unless people start posting numbers no one will ever know the answer to that for a certainty and can only guess without any evidence to back it up. I don't think that's particularly helpful or healthy in any case; however I do know I'm not the longest standing by a long shot. Also, many folks get their HI's second hand, as there are a lot of them out there and they don't exactly wear out.
If you haven't guessed from my past reactions, or you could legitimately argue "over-reactions", I am sensitive about this subject, having found that for some few people, the only thing that separates a "casual collector" from a "^%$#@ no good greedy SOB" is him having one more knife than you. That's why I made it a point to lie low for at least the first 6-9 months here, and to post only periodic reviews or mentions of knives from that point going forward. As Jim Morrison said, "People are strange..."
There is one fellow up here in the Bay Area that has posted less than a hundred times, but I have watched his screen name come and go and he has posted enough to let me know he has snagged some real one of a kind knives. He has excellent taste, and just because he might have only 20 of the very best khukuris that HI has ever offered doesn't mean that he might not have 10 times that many from other mfrs. or collectibles on his wall.
Some folks always post that they are emailing, some never do, and some like me are intermittent. When Sassas and a couple of other "new" guys were snagging them within the first minute last year, I can tell you I did not spend much time posting that I was emailing Yangdu.
In fact most of my time in Q3 of 2005 was spent morosely creating Sassas voodoo dolls and frantically jabbing pins into them every day around 12:30 p.m. PST trying to screw up his rythym.
Two 20" M43's indeed...
LCS37 was a huge collector for a while, and then died down. I'm not working now, or at least am working at home and making quite a bit less than I was previously, so by necessity I've slowed down but still try to keep my hand in as much as financially possible. Trying to get back into the FT job groove takes priority though.
As Sassas mentioned, many times I see a model I would like to upgrade and so will sell off the old version. Nothing wrong with it, I just saw one I kind of liked better. I also will sometimes do that, and then get the new one but can't bear to part with the old one! Which is why I have so many BGRS's. BUT, I still don't have a chiruwa BGRS, or a single one with a standard bolster. I'll live though...
In the last 6 months I really got into Bark Rivers and ended up selling probably 30 HI knives to finance them (but then bought 20 replacements.) Still, I made _some_ progress.
Thank God the Busse / Randall and CRK bugs have bitten only (somewhat) gently so far, or I would really be in trouble.
Oh, almost forgot, one other reason people keep going for years, and we discussed this in a thread last year, as of now there have been something like 120 different HI models offered, and that's not even counting the handle variants.
Norm
