In 2010, my wife gave me 13 sheep, a guard dog, and a small Chinese knife for cutting hay strings. Prior to that time, I rarely had any interest in or need for a knife. But when you have livestock, there are things that need cutting almost every day. Not that I do a lot of cutting, but when I do something every day, I want to do it efficiently. I looked on Amazon for knives with good reviews and bought a SOG Flash II. I liked that knife so much, I bought a SOG Access Card as a backup. These three knives did everything I wanted from a knife, except that they could be hard to find if I dropped one out in the middle of a sheep pasture.
By 2020, the hay string knife was beginning to wear out. The Flash II disappeared. I discovered that carrying the Access Card in my back pocket might be illegal. So I started looking for replacements. I still have not found replacements that I like as much as the originals, although some knives come close. So now I am stuck in a futile quest for not one perfect knife, but for at least three perfect knives, or maybe a dozen perfect knives depending on what I expect to cutting, where I expect to be cutting, how the weather is, what clothing I will be wearing, and so on.
By now, I have far more knives than I need, but a lot of them are excellent knives that I enjoy using. So maybe I'll use a fairly expensive Spyderco Atlantic Salt for a few weeks for cutting hay strings during the summer rains. But although it has some good features, it does not cut spectacularly well. So I switch to a fixed-blade Victorinox Paring knife--which is a fantastic slicer--for a few weeks. But I do not have a good sheath for the Victorinox, and in hot weather I'm concerned about accidentally slicing off a love handle trying to get the knife back in the sheath. And a fixed blade, although very convenient, can be a little boring, so I switch to a Benchmade AFO II Auto, which is not boring. But the AFO II is a little heavy, so after a while I switch to a Bugout, which is marvelously light and also a great slicer. But after a while I get tired of flicking the Bugout, and I think maybe I'll go back and try that Gerber Haul, with excellent assisted action but bargain basement steel, that I bought before I learned about steel. So I have been using the Haul (strange name) for about a week, and I strop it a bit each time I use it. Out of the box, the Haul was quite sharp, and it's getting a bit sharper every day with little effort on my part. This is all fun, even though I have yet to find a perfect knife for cutting hay strings.
I have not sold any knives yet. Maybe I will. I have given away a couple knives. I had an Emerson, but the Wave feature absolutely did not work with my shorts, so I gave that to a friend. I have a few knives that are so bad they are unusable, but I think it is fun having them as curiosity pieces. Knives are fun.
What I need now are better sheaths.
Photo: Cutting hay strings. I'm cutting the orange string with an orange Haul. There is also a blue string. The sheep waste no time.
