First the short answer...make sure you send it directly to me and I will take care of it.
Whenever we make a run of knives from Stag or Elk, this type of issue comes up.
I cant tell you how many guys I have listened to that said the ONLY good stag is the kind that is very dark and full of ridges.....cant tell you how many BUT....its the same number as the guys that tell me that the ONLY good stag is light and smooth.
Both groups are right IMO. Especially when it is an expensive knife, you should get what you want, period. In the good old days, you picked up a knife, looked at it and either liked it and bought it, or didnt like it and put it down. As convenient as internet buying is, you do lose that option.
The problem arises when the ELK, in this case, comes in with such a wide range of color and texture. We get complete antlers, sheds from the forest, and cut them into inlays.
The scratches on the handle are from the bull using his horns to dig a wallo, destroy a tree, and/or beat up an adversary. They do all those things with great earnest I can tell you. Often times you will see a big bull with antler tips that are almost white compared to the main beams. They get white because of all the abuse the bull puts them through.
Elk is not as dense as stag but you can get solid pieces of elk in the tips. Due to the smaller diameter of the tips, they are good for smaller knives like the 112.
I will talk to the right persons here about narrowing down the color/texture range so that the knives and catalog photos match better in the future.
I am very sorry that you were so disapointed, especially when the knife was for something so special!
So, I think its clear that the thread is no longer about John's legitimate dislike for the scarred elk horn and his preference for a barked look. Looks like things are moving towards a resolution and that's a good thing.
The question of the legitimacy of the scarred elk horn and what, if anything, Buck should do in the future is something that I'm still perseverating on though. I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything in what follows. More just trying to sort things out for my own self in a public sort of way. I promise that what follows will eventually get back to the scarred elk horn on that 112, but the road there is going to require a side trip through the history of bicycle manufacture and will also include an undeserved pot shot at the knives of Tony Bose. So, read on at your peril...
In the 1970s, there were essentially 2 kinds of steel used for bike frames: hi-carbon steel (aka gas pipe) and chrome-moly or chrome-magnanese alloys (e.g. Columbus SL and Reynolds 531). Carbon steel frames were heavy but very cheap since the steel could stand up to high temperature welding in semi-automated machines. If anybody remembers Huffy and Murray bikes of the day, this is what I'm talking about. Cr-Mo and 531 could not be welded as the high temperature would cause it to crack, so bikes built with this lighter, stronger material needed to be put together using low temperature brazing, which at the time meant produced by hand.
If you noticed bikes at all in the 1970s, you saw the Raleigh Gran Prix, which was one of the most popular bikes in the US at the time. Raleighs were hand made in massive volume in England. Their quality ranged from good to sloppy not much different from Ulster or Imperial knives from that same era. Things started to change at the end of 1970s with the arrival of Japanese bikes like Fuji. Fuji made big investments in robotics and materials. By the early 80s, they were machine producing alloy frames. Among bike collectors, 1982 is generally considered to be the point where machine built bike frames matched and started to surpass production level hand made frames. The end of an era.
Machine production of bike frames advance through the 1990 raising the bar of the quality and consistency of the joinery on mass produced bikes to levels we never dreamed of in the 1970s. I think a good analog in the knife world would be the Swiss mass produced Victorinox SAKs or Chinese knives like the Rough Riders. The bottom line here is that good investments in computer controlled automated production capabilities means that you can drive QA consistency towards 99.999% (5 nines) and costs down.
But imo, this new level of consistency changed the flavor of hand crafted custom bikes. It used to be that the primary reason one went with a custom bike frame was to get a fit, design and material selection (you can match steel tubing to a cyclist's riding style, it turns out) that you couldn't get from production companies. By 2000, the movement in custom bikes was towards perfect and flawless execution. In a very real sense, custom builders were now competing with automated machines in a relentless and soulless pursuit of consistency.
Richard Sachs and Bruce Gordon are the bike counterparts to custom knife makers like Tony Bose. You can't look at the work of any of these artisans without immediately recognizing the utter and absolute mastery of their craft. Their stuff is just stunning and it totally leaves me cold. For me, they are examples of a mindless pursuit of perfection for it's own sake, following a path blazed robots. It's what happens when instead of having his heart explode, John Henry gets better at driving steel. When you put an SAK or a Tony Bose or a Rough Rider in front of me, they all smell the same to me.
There's a green one and a pink one And a blue one and a yellow one, And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
My primary bike is a 1979 Trek. It comes from the era when Trek was first starting and like the Raleighs of the day, it was mass produced by hand. It's crude compared to other bikes and clearly bears some marks from the guy who built it. For me, these marks remind me that I'm riding on a hand built bike, but it's hand built with a form of authenticity that more perfectly executed hand builts have. Today, if I wanted to, I could get a "custom" bike from Trek. I put custom in quotes because, like Buck's custom shop, the customization is really more of a reflection of computer enabled inventory and production management. You can "customize" your selection through a series of drop down menus, press a button and in a little while, UPS delivers the goods, just as seen on the computer terminal. Makes me gag.
I suppose it is inevitable that something as rich, varied and wild as elk horn will be domesticated and commoditized to the point where there are clear grading specifications and tight quality control like saran wrapped Perdue chicken breasts. And I suppose that it is just as inevitable that human powered selection process that considers and matches scales to tell a story is replaced with these production guide lines. I'm showing my age and curmudgeonliness to think that Buck could produce limited edition knives using wild materials with significant variation in them and that buyers would work with their retailers to find the right ones like we did when things were purchased in brick and mortar stores. But I find it very brave of Buck to have produced the knife in question and I would really hate to see Buck's limited edition offerings get stuck in a world of bland consistency that, in a very real sense, could be knocked off by a machine. I would prefer to have and hold some
thing produced by some
body, somebody would use their judgment to craft a knife out of wild materials in a way that represents a harmony and authenticity with the wild material. Perhaps this isn't something that a production outfit like Buck can do and perhaps this sort of artisanal work is something that can only be done by independents (like Jared).
Or maybe the problem is that Buck hasn't gone far enough towards the new digital world. Maybe the problem here is the static catalog representation and maybe the right answer is for Buck to produce digital jpegs by serial number so that retailers and buyers could point and shoot with their mouses and select this knife versus that knife.
I dunno. I'm feeling pretty blue about all of this. Like we've lost sight of something real and that computers are a part of the problem.
Sorry for the long ramble...
.
. So I'll add this old thread to help add to this ones discussion, enjoy it and I'll just sit back mumbling with my foot in my mouth...well not really. 
