- Joined
- Jan 21, 2000
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- 8,888
I agree. Just am not sure how far the envelope can be pushed and stay within the limits of the steel in terms of the unconditional warranty. Thinner is definitely better for a machete, I agree.
I think what we're seeing is the potential intersection of two business models:
One (Busse) that says, "If we build a knife strong enough to guarantee it unconditionally, we can use that warranty for marketing leverage to produce a very high quality product for which people will gladly pay a premium price."
VS.
The business model of inexpensive blade (inc. machete) mfrs worldwide, which says something like, "If we can build a knife cheaply enough to make it disposable and keep the Rc hardness low enough to make it tough so it will have decent longevity under hard use, we can make a super-thin, super-fast long blade that will be an effective hacker on a wide range of materials and be affordable enough that even agrarian populations of third world countries can afford to buy them in large quantities."
The models are mutually exclusive until you get to the point where a knife design breaches the physical limitations of the steel in the first model, at which point you have a very expensive knife that is competing against a very cheap knife, and no longer with benefit of an unconditional warranty.
I think what most of us have come to understand is that INFI has so many other characteristics that make it so much better than other knife steels, that we would like to have the benefit of the steel and Jerry's heat treat in a wider range of blade applications, even though that range takes the product outside its limitations in terms of being "certifiably indestructible".
So the trick in my mind is how to let Busse off the hook for an indestructible product so that we can get to use INFI in blades which do not fit the "too thick to fail" model.
Does this line of thinking make sense to anyone else?
Went ahead and started another thread on the topic.
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