"Carl's Lounge" (Off-Topic Discussion, Traditional Knife "Tales & Vignettes")

5K Qs said:
Sounds like a very enjoyable experience, Randy! :cool: By coincidence, I was recently looking at a bunch of Wild Turkey Peanuts in a variety of intriguing handle materials (horn of buffalo, ram, ox, and bull; some interesting woods); know anything about the quality of this knife brand (I think it's a Frost subsidiary, since they were in a catalog from that Foggy Hill Cutlery Factory (or whatever it's called) in Tennessee)?
It's cool that you get to witness all that wildlife. I live in the city, so about all I see in my back yard are squirrels, rabbits, skunks, and the occasional possum.
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Did you ever see this video? Hundreds stags running away, probably from poachers seeking staghorn.

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Have I mentioned how much I dislike typing a long paragraph and clicking to post just to find out the server hiccuped?
 
My late Dad's neighbor owned a fairly new Rolls. I enjoyed tooling around it it, although it didn't have the panaché of the older Rolls.

My FIL restored vintage Jaguars (XK 120, 140, 150) we had engine parts spread over the pool table a few times. My wife's 1959 XK 150 had a factory automatic transmission, pretty rare.
 
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Memories
 
Sure and I married Patty Kerwin don't you know. The lady of red hair, freckles, and 100% Irish heritage.

So tonight I am full of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, home made Irish soda bread and a bit of Guinness to go along with it. That woman has been perfecting this feast for decades and she has it down pat.
 
knarfeng said:
Sure and I married Patty Kerwin don't you know. The lady of red hair, freckles, and 100% Irish heritage.

So tonight I am full of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, home made Irish soda bread and a bit of Guinness to go along with it. That woman has been perfecting this feast for decades and she has it down pat.
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Nice I haven't been on much due to working out of town but always return home for paddys day has a buddy who does corned beef and 3 kegs straight from the Guinness brewery every year wouldn't miss it for anything
 
I've been buying very inexpensive knives of late and am really enjoying them. Now these are not cheap gas station knives but rather good knives with a low price tag. This week I have bought three Opinels, a Case LT1405 lockback and an older but in very good condition Colonial TL-29 style electricians knife. Five great knives for less than $50.:thumbup: I really feel good about my purchases and my wife even said "you got some great deals" instead of her typical "what in the world did you need another knife for?"
I do have a GEC Beagle on preorder and have my eyes on a Northwoods Three Blade Sowbelly and a GEC #54 Big Jack. I do want to purchase these however I think I'm going to experiment with buying more inexpensive knives for awhile and try to stay away from more costly choices. Does any of you buy these type knives regularly or am I alone in this quest.
 
R Redden (Randy I believe?),

I love to buy inexpensive knives, they really let you enjoy a good knife, put in some therapeutic maintenance/refurbishing, and you wont be afraid to really use it. It is surprising how durable old slippies are, when I have found myself using them pretty hard and maybe a bit abusive. Short of a prybar, I use them for everything that needs cutting or trimming. I see it as a problem when I can carry my Northfield for two months without feeling a need to resharpen, because I have babied it and used my heavy use knife more. I think I'm going to try to only carry it and put it through its paces.

Cheers,
Connor
 
Randy, you are not alone. I enjoy locating older knives in good condition but that cost substantially less then what new knives have been costing lately. The cost of something does not necessarily determine it's value. The same amount of enjoyment can be had from a $3 knife as one costing $300 if it's one we want. Lately finding inexpensive knives to recondition has peaked my interest. I recently picked up a couple of SAKs for under $20 and I'm looking forward to receiving them. So there is at least a few of us like yourself.
-James-
 
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Randy, Picked this up last week. I paid 15 bucks for it. FF is OK. Although It does not compare with Rough Riders Imo.
 
My father is an automotive upholsterer. He had everything from locals cigarette burns that they got tired of looking at to total restorations of classic cars. He had a motorized carriage in for a job once, we couldn't start it in the shop, we had to move it outside to work on it, it was cool. Pre Ford. He worked on celebrities cars, he had parts flown in from England. Lots of local/regional car collectors had their people go to him, some went straight to him. A couple years ago, he visited a wealthy collectors garage, he said there was an attendant (not the right term) who's only job was to maintain the cars and garage, and the garage was immaculate, you could've eaten off the floor. Not a drop of oil, fluid etc on the floor.

People think I grew up around some exotic cars, and I did. But mainly I remember the vertical doors on the Lamborghinis and Ferraris that came through, and getting yelled at to stay the hell away from those cars ;). He had a few Rolls Royces and Bentleys come through. What I really developed an appreciation for were the old trucks and hot rods. The local guys that brought the hot rods over, worked in the same commercial park as my father, or at the dealership literally down the hill.

My uncle organized a 60th birthday party for my father a couple years ago at his shop. He saw all these people coming by, and I was trying to play interference, as he worked and sipped his evening beverage. People came in with food and such, and he treated it just like it was back in the old days, a Friday evening, all of his buddies showing up. His shop was, and somewhat still is, like Carl's general store porch. Lots of dirty jokes, stories, beer and general tom foolery. Sometimes my father has to chase everyone out, because he needs to get work done. They just walk out of his shop and hold court right outside his bay door. He has moved to a smaller shop, actually the inner half of his old larger shop.

I hated working in the shop, there were many times as a kid I wanted to run with my buddies but I had to go to work at my fathers shop. Now, I dawdled and ran more errands there, my father likes to say that I wasn't his hardest worker but I was the one he loved the most, excepting my other siblings that worked there. My uncle called my fathers shop Dan's home for wayward men, he took in a lot of kids, friends of the family that had hit hard times. One of his former employees is a John Travolta doppleganger that his own successful furniture upholstery business.

I never thought that my fathers meager upholsterer earnings meant he had failed, but I detested the shop for a time. Not quite that Cat's in the Cradle song, but we didn't get to spend much time together growing up, I very fondly remember each and every time we went fishing. My father worked his fingers to the bone, literally, once crushing his hands under an engine. The story of the doctor scrubbing his hands while his flesh flapped back and forth is enough to still make me sick. He was very soon back at work. Driving his manual transmission GMC pickup with a broken leg, he used a block of wood to push the clutch pedal in. Things like that.

I look back on it, my mother likes to say that the shop is my fathers other wife. Thankfully they've weathered many storms and are still together, the fact that as a business owner he works odd hours is not a big deal to her, except for his safety coming home.

I love the old timer, his birthday is coming up soon, end of April. He's been through a lot, Lord knows I put him through a hell of a lot and I wasn't a bad kid.
 
Great story Silent hunter. :thumbup: I enjoy all of your stories of your days growing up. Seems we all come from many different walks of life. I grew up in the boonies as they are called on a 35 acre track of land that belonged to my family. My grandparents house was up on the main road next was my great grandparents house that was a little father down the mountain even father down was my aunt and uncle's house then you headed back up the other side of the mountain to our house. Unfortunately my father passed when I was young but I still remember sitting in the dinning room overlooking the lower pasture that was home to a corn field and my father sitting at the table next to a window after supper shooting crows off of the corn out of that window. I always had the job of fetching the dead crows and burying them in the woods before they started stinking. In the summer on Saturday evenings my father, grandfather and their buddies would gather on our porch and pick guitars and banjos while drinking "water" from mason jars. Mom would give my cousins and I our own mason jars full of water but was told never to drink the men's "water". I still have my grandfathers "water maker" although it's not made a run of "water" in many years. We were poor but I didn't know it because I always had everything I needed. We were true Appalachian Hillbilly's but what a great way to grow up.
 
Nice anecdote Randy, memory is one of our most important assets.:thumbup:

On your point about inexpensive knives, I totally agree, there's something inately satisfying about getting a simple, inexpensive but nicely made knife (you could say the same about meals etc) and coming back to it. Opinels in many sizes have pleased me, a well made but inexpensive Buck in delrin, several of my RR knives which certainly are not costly but are really well presented and satisfying. A lot of very much more costly knives often fail to hit the spot actually. It simply is not always true that you get what you pay for. You hope for a lot if you pay a lot.....:eek:

Thanks, Will
 
r redden said:
Great story Silent hunter. :thumbup: I enjoy all of your stories of your days growing up. Seems we all come from many different walks of life. I grew up in the boonies as they are called on a 35 acre track of land that belonged to my family. My grandparents house was up on the main road next was my great grandparents house that was a little father down the mountain even father down was my aunt and uncle's house then you headed back up the other side of the mountain to our house. Unfortunately my father passed when I was young but I still remember sitting in the dinning room overlooking the lower pasture that was home to a corn field and my father sitting at the table next to a window after supper shooting crows off of the corn out of that window. I always had the job of fetching the dead crows and burying them in the woods before they started stinking. In the summer on Saturday evenings my father, grandfather and their buddies would gather on our porch and pick guitars and banjos while drinking "water" from mason jars. Mom would give my cousins and I our own mason jars full of water but was told never to drink the men's "water". I still have my grandfathers "water maker" although it's not made a run of "water" in many years. We were poor but I didn't know it because I always had everything I needed. We were true Appalachian Hillbilly's but what a great way to grow up.
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Randy, I remember my father opening the patio doors and shooting a groundhog in the snow with my .22 Wards single shot, that was in the backyard. "It works fine", was all he said. This was some time ago. My father has a ten acre piece of property, that needs some more attention, but I remember eating my cereal before the sun came up, watching Little Rascals and a few cartoons, grabbing my "swords and guns" (sticks that looked like a gun or sword, family and friends still make fun of me that everything was a gun when I was a kid". I'd go to the marsh on my fathers property, in his woods that for all of the world were the north Canadian bush, but are in all actuality maybe two acres or so tops. I was just fixing the back yard fence in the woods over the weekend and realized how small the woods were.

Many of the farmers and residents in the neighborhood took pity on my father, and later became fast friends. My parents were dirt poor when they first moved "up the country" as my late friend called it, but we never missed a meal. My father worked trap lines, hunted, fished. Many times my sister and I had rabbit for dinner, my father likes to tell family and friends that he told us we were eating chicken. I grew up on venison, and my mother and father did a great job on it too. I'll never forget a local farmer, named Red. He smoked like a 53 Buick as my uncle says, drove a red Ford (;)) pickup truck and always brought vegetables. I loved it when he brought Maryland sweet corn. Forget boiling or grilling it, I sat there and ate a few ears raw! Mr. Nash next door really helped out my father. One day I got off the bus, and no one was home! We got out early, and I went down to spend the afternoon with Mr. Nash. He was taking care of his cows, and had a mean old bull raising hell. It was throwing itself against the wooden gate, and raising a terrible racket. I was so scared I wasn't worried about falling butt first into the cow dung, it was raining too, and my backside was covered. Mr. Nash was laughing like hell helping me up. He was a great man and a great neighbor.

I planted apple, pear and plum trees for my father throughout my teens, and fondly remember my grandfather, father and I going out to the small orchard as my grandfather picked fruit. He and my grandmother would be going back to Baltimore after a weekend of visiting family in the coal hills of Schuylkill county PA, and he would get well water from my parents house (he'd do the same at my aunts house, like me he much preferred it to city water). He'd give my father hell about drinking beer (my grandfather wasn't a teetotaler and my father doesn't drink too much, but my grandfather was worried about him and my uncles nonetheless). Then we'd come in to a big meal put on my mother and grandmother.

Sitting here, I'm thinking about all of my relatives that have passed away. My father's mother had a big family, and our family reunions have the Lithuanian boilo, pierogies, blinis, kielbasa, galumpkis etc. Yuengling too, the brewery isn't that far away. It seems our reunions are just standing around outside a funeral these days, kicking back beers in the remembrance of the dearly departed. It seems that everyone crowds around my truck these days, and I'm usually not even tossing a cider back!

I don't know why I'm nostalgic, but I am diabetic. Hypertension all kinds of health issues, but I found I've lost almost 50 lbs since the fall. No idea how, I am not doing anything right, but I'll take it. My fathers parents were both diabetic. My grandmother was type 1. When she found out, she cried, and the next day she was on point for the rest of her life. Before she died, she beat diabetes. My grandfather on the other hand, would eat an entire cherry pie at a sitting, because it was okay, it was sugar free ;). I'm trying to find a happy medium between the two, but I'm leaning more towards my grandfather MO.
 
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For a large portion of my life, I hated the area I grew up in. Middle of nowhere, in north eastern Harford county, affectionately called Hazard county by it's residents. While the area has grown up a bit, it's still a small dot on a map that people ask "that's in PA right?". Just about. Talking with friends at work, they visit a local restaurant about ten or so miles from me (I guess that's when you know you're in the boonies, ten miles is local). Anyway, they talk about a relaxing drive in the country after dinner, and pulling off to stop and enjoy the scenery. Twenty five years old to sixty five years old, every race, religion etc. I am darned lucky to have grown up where I did.
 
Sounds like even though you are from the North and I am from the South we have a lot in common my friend.
 
silenthunterstudios said:
I never thought that my fathers meager upholsterer earnings meant he had failed, but I detested the shop for a time. Not quite that Cat's in the Cradle song, but we didn't get to spend much time together growing up, I very fondly remember each and every time we went fishing.
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Dan, that statement hit a cord with me, as I had some of the same resentment abut my father and his line of work. He was gone a lot most of the time we were growing up, and it was storage as a little kid, knowing that I had a father, but he was "off someplace" while mom, my sister Anne, and I went about life. When he was home, he did like to go fishing, and try to have a father son relationship, but I was a little jerk and for a longtime held it against him. Only later did I regret that feeling and attitude. That Cat's In The Cradle song struck a nerve with me also.

Sometimes fathers and sons can be so different, there may not be a meeting of the minds. Until both are grown up at least.
 
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