Brand New versus Worn In

Fish Boy

Fish Boy

Joined
Aug 2, 2014
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369
Do you enjoy the look of a brand new knife or a worn in knife?

I enjoy the look of both; however I think that worn in looks much cooler. It's the middle ground that drives my OCD nuts. The knife doesn't look new enough to look nice but it doesn't look worn in enough to look nice.

What about you? What look causes your OCD to go nuts?
 
I'm in the same boat as you.
New knives look great, especially "fancier" knives with high satin or mirror polish blades, or exotic handle materials (CF, wood inlays, mammoth tooth, etc). That said, there's something extremely cool about a well-used, heavily worn work knife. I think this is especially true for titanium handled knives like a Sebenza or Umnumzaan. The in between phase is rough though - it looks to me like you baby your knife whenever possible but have screwed up or not taken as much care of it as you wanted to. Once it collects enough wear it goes from being "poorly cared for" to "battle-scarred," and starts looking cooler than it did when it was new.

An exception to that rule is excessive wear on high satin and mirror polished blades... drives me nuts. Wear looks great on coated, stonewashed, or low satin finishes, but on a highly reflective surfaces it looks like total garbage IMO.
 
Worn is better than new imo. Like amg mentioned about different finishes, mirror polish only looks good pristine. I'm usually partial to some kind of brushed metal finish.
Here's a buddy's Western USA 640 knife, he has no idea how old it is as it belonged to someone else; looks really nicely worn in though. Sharpened that bad boy up for him and knocked off some rust, it's looking good.
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Nicely worn for sure.

I've begun looking for a used, battered, beater Sebenza. I never see them. I'm not sure whether to attribute it to CRK Use Syndrome and they just aren't out there, or if people bond with them after so much use. I'd like to have one to just beat up some more. I wonder where the price drop finally happens.

Agree w/ AMG on the high-polished blade wear vs. on stoner, bead, etc....I see highly polished and I begin thinking collector/safe queen.
 
Here's a very well worn Al Mar Sere 2K. I've had it almost 15 years and carried it daily almost the whole time:





Just looks better and better to me! Plenty of life left in it. Hell, in my eyes it's just getting broke in.... It's smooth as butter.
 
Definitely worn in. A new knife is soulless, with no personality to it yet. No history. This one has about 70 years of use between two owners. Original owner carried it for about 50 years.

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I think that beat up blades are incredibly ugly - unless I was the one that beat them up. People say there's character to them, but it doesn't matter to me if the knife has a story if I don't know the story. I suppose that's why I hate Kershaw's blackwash offerings so much - to me, they're like buying those pre-torn jeans.
 
I like putting wear on a knife, but I also hate putting that first scratch on a new one. Typically that just means I get good deals on lightly used knives.

This RC3 is one of a handful that I bought new and used the crap out of.

 
I agree with the sentiments here, especially regarding polished blades. My LionSteel is my only knife I've yet to put through its paces... because I'm scared I'll scar the pretty SR2 blade haha. My BM 943 though, well it has seen far better days. I like it more now than I did brand new, despite having chipped that needle-like tip.
 
I like a used look on some knives, and I look for well-used modern folders when I go to garage sales and flea markets. I have yet to really find anything, much less anything for a decent price. I guess people hang onto their used/abused "tactical"/modern folders for sentimental reasons.

One the other hand, I see traditionals for sale that look like they have been through hell a dozen times. I purchased an old Camillus TL-29 that had what I would best describe as "Rust Patina", a tooth pick main blade, and a screw driver blade filed down into a point. So much history in it, I couldn't pass it up for $1.50
 
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