“A man who doesn’t have a sharp knife handy when he needs it just ain’t very sharp.”–anonymous sage
I quite literally have no idea how many knives I own. I probably ought to do an exhaustive inventory of them, but I also have a lot of other chores on my plate, so that’s not likely to happen any time soon. Still, every now and then I drag an old fav out of some pile sitting around and clean it up, sharpen the blade and just generally work it to make certain it’s still usable… then after a few weeks’ use it’ll drift on back into some stack and I’ll fall back on my three or four most-used knives.
I dug this one out today and did a tuneup on it. (These aren’t pictures of MY knife but some of the exact same model kyped off an ebay display.)
That’s supposedly high carbon steel (though it “takes” an edge more like stainless steel and “stains” like high carbon–the worst of both worlds *heh*) and the “ivory” handle is Delrin. (See here.) It take a LOT of work to get a decent edge on this blade, and it doesn’t really hold an edge all that well. But. It fits my hand very, very well and has a nicely designed shape and is well balanced for skinning and general knife work, so I used to carry it in my right boot almost all the time, for quite a few years, back in the day when ropers were daily wear for me. Daily attention to the blade was enough to maintain the edge, once it HAD an edge of any decency. Heck, if it already ad a fair edge, the bottom of a coffee cup would do some fair daily maintenance.
Have to keep the blade oiled (I’m still going on a very small bottle of an IBM synthetic oil that was used on some of their old tape drive technology), but if I do that (I hadn’t in a couple of years so that needed attention), the blade stays pretty clean.
It’s a handy knife when it’s been maintained. I gave a like knife to my brother who has reported that he found it quite useful in deer season.
Imperial Frontier Model 432. Pretty cheap. The ebay listing had it around $20, IIRC. Imperial, of course, is history as a knife maker. (Yeh, yeh, I’m sure the brand name has been acquired by some company that’s now making knives in Bangalore or somewhere, but they’re bound to be not as good as even this mediocre knife. AND they’re really, REALLY not “Imperials”.)
I have some other Imnperials–pocket knives–from the early 1900s that are really nice knives for their intended uses: hold a good edge, nice “hand” etc. This one, though… if I carried a boot knife on a regular basis again, this would probably be it.
I corrected some material about the blade. Earlier I got this knife conflated in my head with another, similar, knife from another maker.