Follow up: I did order a couple of Civivi knives (not the Purr) and they are made in China if that matters to anyone. We shall see how they hold up.

I don't reckon I got no reason to abuse a knife, mmmmm hmmmmm

But if I did, I'm going to reach for a buck because their steel choice and heat treatment make for an astounding ability to beat the ever living hell out of their stuff.

I'm also a big fan of well made 440c, having carried a 70s era Western bowie for actual use in cuntree shenanigans and never being able to damage it, while still keeping an edge for a day's worth of said shenanigans.

420hc is very underrated imo. Like the linked article said, it fulfills several use cases better than more recently created alloys. Pretty much because the kind of niche knife focused steels just weren't possible. Not saying that modern powder steels in particular aren't freaking awesome, they are! Just saying that some of those older steels are awesome in their own way too.

Well, I would still categorize that under the heading of "making it cheaper," just making it cheaper with bureaucratic chicanery (or I suppose by avoiding bureaucratic chicanery) rather than physically cheaper to stamp out in the factory. But that explanation certainly makes sense.

Awesome write up on an iconic and affordable knife!

I got my brother one for Christmas when he started hunting 20-some years ago, and it's cleaned up deer ever since. He loves it and has never even considered "upgrading."

One other piece of trivia I don't have anywhere better to slip in is the apparent fact that this is made in Vietnam of all places, but "finished" in China. I cannot fathom how that would possibly contribute to making it any less expensive to manufacture, but it clearly must do somehow or else this wouldn't be stocked at Harbor Freight.

This is not necessarily the reason, but this may be a tariff/trade war thing.

I remember a Planet Money episode from a few years back where a guy that made power steering hoses kept getting undercut by a Chinese manufacturer. Dear Leader 45 put out his tariffs on China/etc, and he thought business would pick up for him now that the price disparity would be fixed, but the price on the competitor's parts never budged.

China was doing some various scams where they'd send parts to a non or less unfavorable tariffed country, relabel the stuff, and sell it to the US at better rates.

This article I found quickly said some companies were cutting out the middle man entirely and just slapping fake Made in Vietnam labels on stuff.

So my guess is some kind of bureaucratic bamboozling is going on even though it doesn't make sense to normies.

Finally, a knife I own! I looked up the stamp and mine was made in '94, so just before the movie even came out. Makes sense given it's a hand-me-down from someone who actually bought it for hunting.

I look forward to reading your in-depth knife reviews almost as much as I look forward to big Hollywood movies

As a side note, I would absolutely love to get my hands on a supply of 420HC to mess around with but nobody I can find online readily is willing to provide me any in the dinky quantities I'd feasibly A) be able to pay for, and B) would not have to rent out an entire warehouse to store. There's really no love for this stuff anywhere. I can do you Magnacut and Nitro-V and S45VN and CPM154 and any number of Damascus variants, but regular old 420HC? Go fish, apparently. I can score 420A readily enough, but I'm not positive that would be a great idea.

But I think making an Emperor out of it would be pretty rad. Imagine a 1/4" knife you could chunk into a tree and then use as a springboard. That would rule.

That is the classic tradeoff, yes. The current fascination is all about edge retention, so it's popular to try to get your hands on some manner of super hard wondersteel so you can boast to all of your online friends that you have the "best" edge retention on the knife that you e.g. never use for anything other than opening packages and your mail.

The whole point of the modern dicking around with steel alloys and crucible particle metallurgy and all of that is to achieve a steel which can retain most of that hardness while also not completely sacrificing its toughness and corrosion resistance. Because it seems there's no such thing as a free lunch in this universe, boosting one metric tends to come with at least some tradeoff in regards to the other two.

Toughness can broadly be thought of as a steel's springiness, not necessarily its ductility. A ductile metal is not terribly useful as a knife because although you are correct that it won't necessarily snap, ductile metals (copper, gold, silver, and to a lesser extent brass and bronze all leap to mind, as well as a completely annealed steel) will permanently deform under deflection rather than spring back. That's also bad news, or at minimum is highly annoying.

If neither toughness nor corrosion resistance were a concern it would be trivially easy to achieve ludicrous edge retention, at least theoretically, by just using a plain high carbon tool steel and hardening the holy hell out of it to the same extent as, say, a file. That'd certainly work but in reality only with some significant caveats, which is why nobody does that. Grab any garden variety file and whack it with a hammer and you'll see why, because it will shatter. If you are going to do truly unwise things with your knife including whacking it against stuff in the woods and and most especially bending it by using it to pry on things, having a toughness figure that's so high it's off the charts is going to be very beneficial. Because hard steels are prone to snap, and that's a show stopping complete failure for knife even provided you don't manage to injure yourself with it when it happens.

The whole situation with edge retention is more complex than simply more hardness = better edge as it may appear at first blush, because there are tons of ways a knife can go dull beyond abrasion which is mostly what your steel's sheer hardness will combat. You can also chip the edge, especially if it's got a very thin geometry, and harder more brittle steel is much more prone to having this happen. You can also permanently deform steel which is usually an impact related thing, which if you think about it is something that toughness would ward against even though the superficial conclusion that harder, less tough steel would be better at holding its edge. So to some degree what you plan to do with your knife is going to decide how it gets dull, and what it needs to have in order to retain its edge. All of this is before getting into the size, frequency, and distribution, and even type of hard carbides suspended in the steel alloy which all contribute to either making an edge "feel" sharp, behave as if it's sharp, or stay that way. That whole mess is basically voodoo, and carbide formation in particular is hugely influenced by how your steel is heat treated. Some of the heat treating regimens required for the latter-day high end supersteel alloys are fiendishly complex.

The takeaway, and perhaps the bright side, is that the majority of modern steels either specifically intended to be used for knives or even just commonly bullied into service for the same are more than adequate for regular medium duty use regardless of how the armchair metallurgists may argue about them in the comments. A modern blade made of even lowly and pedestrian 440C will perform miles better than the plain carbon steel blades that literally all of humanity had no choice but to use from the iron age all the way up to circa, say, 1913. The world was already conquered by then and nobody needed Magnacut or S35VN or Elmax or Nitro-V to do it.

Just scanned through and you make an interesting point about 420's edge holding.

The chart shows it's tough, but not as hard as other steels. Seems to me, for a utilitarian knife (which is what this is), a tougher steel is better than a harder steel. Harder holds an edge better, but a tougher (I assume that means it's more ductile) will give more before breaking.

I hate having to constantly sharpen my knives, but not breaking off the tip or chipping the edge is the tradeoff, I guess.

I also have to say that I really like the recurve on that blade.

I don't see any problem. Some people have big pockets. :-)

You misspelled 'knoife'. Try to keep up, eh mate?

Don’t be a knifist.

I see you've played "knifey-spooney" before

With a narrow sheath and an ulticlip, this would be a great pocket carry. If I'd change anything it would be to soften the edge more at the front of the scales, which would allow an easier pinch grip. Not a full scallop or anything, just a little bit more of a transition. Visually, I think that would go well with the narrowing of the blade that happens naturally with the thumb ramp and finger choil. But then again, a lot of people who know me say that I'm an idiot so...maybe just ignore me.

I've got a belt grinder. Me and files have a history of not getting along. I detailed some of my, for lack of a better word, process in this old post here.

I'd like to think I'm considerably better at it now than when I made my first one.

I'm just getting started in blade smithing. What do you use to freehand it, just a file or something?

I use an adjustable jig to hold the angle, but the plunge locations are freehand. As anyone who has tried it knows, it's very easy to overrun the end of the grind towards the handle due to being a muppet. I have thankfully honed my technique so that I don't do this... much.

I like the profile. And that plunge grind looks clean. Did you free hand that?

Good point. And I know you see all the flaws since you made it, but from an outsider perspective it looks very clean, you did a good job.

Thanks!

And, no jimping on this one. Just the depression in the top for your thumb, if you so desire to put it there. For knives that are going to see food service duty I generally eschew that sort of thing, since jimping tends to leave a nook for crud to hide in and that makes it tough to keep clean enough to satisfy the health inspector.

More pictures, including nice close-ups of all the flaws, here: https://www.flightlessforge.com/item.php?sku=pinfeather-custom

That’s a nice looking knife! It doesn’t look like there’s gimping on the spine, is that a design choice or something else? I like the profile, big belly is generally good for those utility tasks.

Looks like a great rabbit skinner.

I wasn't going to attach an ad to this initially but somehow — we're redefining tenuous cat adjacency as "somehow," mind you — this silly post has traction and is still in .world's active feed not too far from the top of the page. So, what the hell.

Idon'tjustwriteaboutknivesbutmakethemtoo. Score yours at flightlessforge.com. You all know the drill. I say this, and yet despite believing my entire life that advertising doesn't work, every time I reiterate this I make another sale or two.

My knives are not cat themed if that's what you're after. They're all named after kinds of penguins instead.