A little Benchmade retro goodness

Frankki

Frankki

Joined
Oct 26, 2007
Messages
1,557
Lucky finds to be made sometimes I guess. Located and purchased a nice Benchmade, a rather old-school model too, a Mini-Afck. Very nice little knife, small and light but feels quite solid. I thought the pocket clip was a little on the large side, removing it improved the ergos considerably and I don't much care for clips either. I like bigger folders usually but this one ain't bad. The fact that it's a plain-edge M2 steel model doesn't exactly hurt either. :)
 
Great score, I know a couple of guys would sell their mother for that knife.
 
Well, exchange rates come and go but at the current rate it was just a hair under 100 USD. With other recent purchases my Visa bill isn't going to be exactly small but this was too good a deal to pass. :)

A lot of the newer stuff from Benchmade doesn't do much for me but they sure had nice knives some ten years ago. But back then I didn't care for their stuff, how typical.

Here it is with a couple of other "round opening hole & rare" buddies. That's not much of a collection but cool pieces nonetheless:
 
Beautiful find. You must be living right and had built up some good kharma. Not many of us here wouldn't love to find that knife, in the condition it's in.

Enjoy it, and use it like it's built for. That's one of my top 3 steels and top 10 knives. Good luck! Joe
 
Nice, here is another one, you don't see to often 804M2HS
I still don't understand why the new 806M4 has a round hole instead of the oval :(
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Small update:

finally got this thing reprofiled and sharpened to my liking. It still had the factory edge when I got it, not so terribly good and the edge bevels were uneven. It took me a while to muster up the courage to start reprofiling, but I wanted to know how good that M-2 steel is. Well, it is good!

It took a considerable while on the Sharpmaker to get a nice 30-degree inclusive edge, a great number of hours and hundreds and hundreds of swipes, I really lost count. First with a DC4 stone laid against the rods for the proper angle and after that the normal progression. Don't have the Ultrafine rods yet but careful finishing with the standard Fines and stropping produced a really cracking edge.

Dry-shave? No problem. Cigarette paper? Easy enough. And then we have this, which I don't even usually attempt:

m2hair.jpg


Niiice! A sharp shiny bevel is a happy bevel. :)
 
I am glad that your persistence had finally paid off and you now have a nice knife to your liking. I'm not sure I have the necessay patience to do all the necessay profiling. Well done!
 
That is one beautiful knife. As close to perfection as a production knife could get. Well done!:thumbup:
 
Well done.

I chose M2 for my first "hair whittling edge" also.

Beware, though, as M2 will spoil you into thinking all steels should be as good.
 
Thanks guys! It was a long job but worth it I think. It's a nice pocket scalpel now. Truth be told, I've always thought the hair-whittling thing a bit silly and impractical but I had to give it a go, if only just for a laugh. I was pretty awestruck when I managed to do it. :eek:
 
I had one with M2 for the longest time, and ended up selling it to get a Busse.... I wish I had that little knife again. I picked mine up for a steal at a local gunstore. The owner said it was there for at least ten years..... I bought it for its original sticker ($128) and there were two other AFCKs as well (812SBTLH, and an 806D2 both for 240!!!!! NIB!!!). I was very happy to live in a small town with a Benchmade premium dealer!!!
 
great looking mini-afck you have there! i had one of the fullsize afck in M-2!:D man i wish i had kept that knife! :grumpy:
 
Incredible find, and the M2 is icing on the cake! However I do not envy the reprofile job on the sharpmaker... ouch:)
 
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