Has Bark River got back to you? I'm trying to get an idea of how their customer service is. I have a preorder out for a Boone 2 A2 but am feeling iffy if Bark River still has not got back to you by now (I understand A2 is the oopsy steel for 3v). They seem are growing really fast and might be pumping out more knives then they can handle with their work force perhaps....bit off more than they can chew. Their production rate seems crazy for their shop size and layout (video below) and I can see mixups happening with the different steels.
BRKT doesn't cut, primary-grind, or HT the steel blanks in house, they receive the ready blanks from the contractors, and only their fancier scale-material isn't pre-made when they get it. Their process is handle assembly and polishing and then grinding the flat-ground bevels to convex (they also now make their leather sheaths in-house, but that is a new thing). In the video, Stewart indicates that they receive contracts (PRE-PAID) for ~40K knives per year. They have
~50 employees, they put out ~160 knives per day
spending ~20 minutes total on each knife - think about that the next time you take more than a few seconds to sharpen a knife
BRKT has been around since 2001 and Stewart himself has an even longer history. I sincerely doubt that the amount of time spent on each knife was ever significantly longer than it is today.
Their handle variety and knife photography are their major selling points, and they do know how to produce fairly thin edges, although the dry power-grinding of their convex bevels to thin edges has raised concerns about how it affects the HT of some models, and BRKT has been known
for years to put out knives with problematic steel possibly as a result of this process - it may not be very many knives, but they get brought up when folk come across them.
It is 2019, almost 2020. In 2013, I posted the video below about rubbing off rust-spots on a large, heavily used CPM-3V blade to youtube and in the comments one individual brought up that THEY received a knife from BRKT that was marked as 3V and turned out to be A2. There may be early instances. They have evidently been mis-labeling the steel on their knives for some time, though I am not sure that they have ever mislabeled a
more expensive model as a less expensive one. *shrug* Like you typed, A2 is the 'economy' model, you shouldn't have to worry about them giving you something better by mistake.
In the video below, I just use dish soap and #0000 steel wool to remove the "freckles" from my abused first-run GSO-10. WD40 or a penetrating oil would have worked better to lift the oxidation, but what remains (besides the stubborn sap) are just dark grey spots. In the images above, the GSO-5.1 has an improved HT protocol and a different surface finish, it is far more resistant.
A link to a thread with images:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads...-with-photos-warning-pic-heavy.1026109/page-2
