Knife Hype, Pt. 1

Editor's Note: This article was originally submitted as one piece. Due to its length and the large amount of information involved, it's been broken into two parts for publication. Part Two is slated for release / publication on July 22, 2010.

This is the golden age of knives. Every police officer seems to carry one (we think they should), and the cop magazines a full of ads for them - something we didn't see 20 years ago. There are hundreds of knives targeted at public safety professionals from dozens of companies - each loudly proclaiming that it's "ideal" for you in the constabulary profession. Each touts its "new, perfect" steel, its "high-strength" construction, its "high-tech" materials, and exceptional design.

It can be so confusing!

So what's the real skinny? What kind of knife does a police officer really need? How much should you pay? How do you cut through the hype and decide which knife is right for you?

It's really not that hard because as we first said, this is the golden age of knives. There are so many excellent knives being made now for short prices that by keeping a few things in mind, you'll have a choice of literally dozens of first-rate knives to choose from in your price range. If you're impatient, here's the bottom line: pick any knife that's comfortable in your hand, has a simple blade shape from 2.75 to 4 inches in length, comes from a major manufacturer, and costs no less than $45 (in gereral.)

Fixed-blade or folder?
In terms of a fixed-blade vs. a folder, a folder is what you should have clipped to your pocket, on your belt, or clipped to your vest. Fixed-blade knives are useful for raids and SWAT, but for patrol and regular plain-clothes assignments, stick with the folder - it's the knife you can always have with you.

Blade shape
Police use a folding knife for a wide variety of unpredictable tasks, from opening donut boxes to collecting evidence to searching containers to self-defense. This is the key to understanding the kind of knife blade they are best served by. Form follows function and a simple blade shape is best suited to a wide variety of tasks. Conversely, a strange or specialized blade shape is restricted to the few tasks that it can do well. For general utility work - which is what police do with a knife - you want a drop point, spear point, modified clip point or a slightly clip-pointed blade shape. Companies like to come up with strange, macho, "Rambo" or exotic-looking blade shapes and promote them as "tactical" and thus ideal for police work. Just the opposite is true. If you've served time in the military in a hot zone, you know that utility function comes from simplicity. Ditto for us on the civilian LE side. Stick with simple blade shapes.

Blade length
Folding knives vary from tiny little pen knives with thin, maybe one-inch blades, to monsters with 6 or more inches of blade sandwiched between the handle. Now, pen knives can handle a surprising number of LE tasks, and carrying one is a good idea - they hardly take up any room after all. Conversely, folders with five- and six-inch blades can usually be (surprisingly) comfortably worn in a front jeans pocket if we are in plain clothes, but they are certainly less comfortable and less versatile in terms of the jobs we usually need to do than a smaller folder (although some emergency jobs benefit by their extra length.)

In uniform, with the whole bat-belt thing going on and all the other stuff we have to carry in our cargo pockets, etc., such a folder is definitely too long. I'll save you the trouble of experimenting: the right blade length for us is between 2.75-inches and 4-inches. Since the knife closed is usually about one inch longer than the cutting edge, this translates into a closed folder of about four to five inches - which is perfectly comfortable to carry all day long and is right in the "sweet spot" of ideal length for the tasks we need to do.

Serrated or plan edge?
Serrations help to cut fibrous materials like webbing, rope, some cardboard, and so on. To have them or not is a religious debate, with "purists" thinking them sacrilegious, and others thinking them essential. While we prefer plain edges on our pure self-defense knives, we're agnostic otherwise. We personally like our police knives with half-serrated edges which is a politician's answer, to be sure.

Manual opening or automatic?
The advertising people in the industry and any number of armchair warriors would have you believe that automatic knives (switchblades) are the only "real man's" knife (sorry, gals!), and that you just gotta cop one if you want to be a real professional, the envy of your squad, and just an all-round sexy guy. We disagree. While the federal ban on autos is just foolish (they were originally designed and sold as housewives' knives, so that the women of the early 20th century didn't break a nail while opening their kitchen knives) and most likely racist (the law was passed in response to the rise of ethnic gangs), auto knives do have a legitimate place in situations where only one hand is likely to be available to open them, with parachuting the classic example. For most people most of the time, they are just ordinary knives with more moving parts to break that are much more expensive than the same knife without the opening spring. Most folding knives today already open with one hand anyway, so the extra expense, agency approval, and potential legal hassle off-duty is just unnecessary.

Another issue with automatics is that most of them open with a push-button. These buttons have two problems. Counter-intuitively, they can be difficult to activate under stress - you'll just have to take my word for it or try it yourself. Second, they can inadvertently "fire" when in your pocket if you brush up against something in just the right way. This can be painful and bloody, and it's always embarrassing. (Benchmade and Camillus make models that operate with a different - and better - mechanism, and they are they way to go if you just have to have a switchblade.) Stick with a normal - and far less expensive - hole, stud or disc operated opening knife. Which you choose is up to your personal preference.

Lock Type
There are four main types of locking mechanisms on folding knives. When well made, they are all reliable and good choices.

Lock-back mechanisms, the oldest of the bunch, have a spring in the spine of the handle with a tenon at the front that engages a mortise on the back of the opened tang of the blade, locking it in place. This is a very secure lock, and the only thing you have to watch for is that the lock does not inadvertently release when you take a very strong grip on the knife - test any you plan to buy.

Liner locks have one of the metal handle liners split lengthwise so that one of the splits jumps behind the tang of the knife as it reaches the fully opened position. For this lock to be secure, tight machining tolerances are necessary. Test any you plan to buy by whacking the spine of the opened blade on a hard surface like wood to see if the lock fails. (Obviously, do this is a way that your fingers won't get cut if the blade flies shut.) Another thing to check is that the lock doesn't fail when - again - you take a super hard, twisting grip on the opened knife. Sometimes the flesh of your palm can inadvertently release the lock. If the knife has an all-metal handle with no scales, and one side of the handle is split to make this same type of lock, it's called a frame lock.

What we call tang locks use a spring-loaded piston in the handle that engages a notch on the rear of the opened blade tang. These are very secure locks that can't be inadvertently released, and we prefer them although we are happy with all of these types of knife locks if they are well made.

Lock strength is an area of promotional competition. Clearly the lock on a knife has to be strong enough not to fail when the knife is used normally, but all folding knives are weaker side-to-side than they are lock-wise, and it's these lateral motions that will usually break your knife if it breaks.

Steel
This is where a lot of the confusion and hype, and the genuine quality of a knife can come from. Manufacturers are constantly searching for a better steel, with the result that while some perform better than others, almost all of the knives from the major manufacturers these days use very good steel - certainly steel that's far superior to anything that grandpa could have dreamed of.

All steel is iron with carbon added. So-called "stainless" steel also has chromium added, but with a few expensive exceptions, "stainless" steel isn't - rather it's stain resistant and it will eventually rust - just much more slowly than non-"stainless" steels. You may have heard the term "carbon" steel used to indicate steel that's not "stainless", but that's just jargon - all steel of any type starts out as iron with carbon added. Other elements such as vanadium, cobalt, copper, manganese, nickel, phosphorus, sulphur, tungsten, and many others can be added to get just the right "recipe" for the "perfect" knife steel.

Knife steels ideally have high levels of edge retention (they don't go dull fast), toughness (the ability to withstand chipping), stain resistance, and edge-taking (they re-sharpen easily.) However, these desirable characteristics have to be traded off with one another, and different steels to that in different ways. For example, edge retention implies hardness which can leads to brittleness and difficulty re-sharpening.

Inexpensive steels like AUS 6 and 440A are at the low end of modern "stainless" knife steels, but they are perfectly serviceable if you don't expect them to hold an edge too long. There are dozens of other steels in current use in mainstream manufactured knives, and you will see their names bantered around as if they possessed magic qualities. ATS-34 was the darling of the industry a few years ago but never fulfilled its performance promise. 440C and AUS 8 are mid-level steels today, and steels like S30V, 154CM, BG-42 and others are today's hot high-end "stainless" steels, and they are very good steels, indeed. In the non-"stainless" category are low-end steels like 1095 and high-end steels like D2, among many others. Some people like the performance of "carbon" steels over "stainless" steels. We like them both, and aren't too concerned about rust since we maintain our knives. If you don't, go with a "stainless" steel blade.

A new to the market (but not to the world) type of knife steels are the Crucible Particle Metallurgy (CPM) steels. Regular steel is formed by melting all of its metallic components in a big vat, pouring the fluid stew into ingots, and letting the ingots cool. These ingots are then later forged or rolled into bars. As these steels cool, the steel takes on a granular character of some average grain size, and the alloying elements segregate into particular grains called carbides. CPM steels, by contrast, are formed by molten steel being forced through a nozzle to create very uniform droplets of steel which solidify in to a fine powder, which is then formed into bars of steel under high pressure. CPM steels thus have a very fine granular structure and very fine carbides, meaning that they are more uniform, can take a finer edge, and take a smoother edge (see the sharpening section in Part 2.) CPM steels are high-end steels.

Steel has to be heat-treated after it's shaped, and a proper heat treatment is essential to good performance. Many el-cheapo knives you find on the market not only use el-cheapo steel, but that steel is most likely not properly heat-treated, if it's heat-treated at all.

Steel has to be hardened, too. Hardness is measured on the Rockwell scale, and utility knifes such as we use will usually have a "Rc" measurement of 58 to 62 for "stainless" steels and a little less for non-"stainless" steels.) Harder than that and the knife is all but impossible to sharpen. Softer than that and it won't hold an edge long.

We tell you all this stuff about steels so you'll have some understanding of the terms you hear bantered about. But the bottom line is that any and all of the steels used by the major manufacturers these days will be quite serviceable, with differential quality being generally related to price. Depending on how you use your knife and how attuned to it you are, you may not notice any real differences in knife steel if you sharpen your knife regularly.

Finally, other exotic materials such as ceramics, titanium, or cast metals can be used for knife blades, but they are specialty items, and normally should be avoided for general purpose LE work.

Comfort and fit
The most important thing about a knife - assuming we are talking about a quality knife - is the way it fits your hand. When choosing among good quality knives, use this criteria first. My personal favorite knife from every manufacturer is one of their less expensive ones. Yes, they make better knives - and I can actually appreciate the difference - but the ones I prefer fit my hand better and are more comfortable to carry than the more expensive knives that they offer.

Handle material
The handles of folding knives either have scales over the frame or not. If they don't, you usually have a smooth metal handle, which can get slippery. Many high-quality knives have all metal handles, but we don't like them. Scales are usually made of Zytel, a molded thermoplastic, or G-10, a fiberglass laminate. When textured to provide an antidote to slipperiness, both make excellent knife handles. Other materials are sometimes used for scales, and so long as they provide a secure grip and comfort, they are fine.

Price
Yes, you get what you pay for - as with anything else, and as with anything else, once you pass a certain point, the relationship between the extra price and true functionality diminishes. Also like anything else, if you are look carefully you can find some real bargains. Most manufacturers' highly serviceable knives begin at about $45. The one notable exception and the one easy to find bargain is Spyderco's Byrd line of folders, which uses low cost manufacturing methods and quite good but inexpensive steels to produce folders for as little as $25 (list price.)

In part two we will discuss:

• Manufactured vs. Custom vs. Branded
• Construction
• Forged vs. stock removal
• Blade Finish
• Sharpening Systems
• The Bottom Line

Stay tuned!