… Its just a shame more companies cant have the consistent quality that Victorinox has. I have about 30 classic red and alox SAKs. Not a single issue on any of them and all but 4 were bought on the internet. I cant say that about any other knife maker I have bought from...
To each his own, strictly my opinion, void where prohibited by law, etc:
I understand fully what you're saying, I really do. You've got to bear in mind, however, that a traditional Stockman and a Swiss Army Knife of any kind are very different knives. Try as I might, I can't equate hollow plastic handles and thumbnail busting pulls with quality.
If you want blades that have monster springs behind them, then GEC is the answer. I'm not a fan of most Great Eastern knives. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of manufacturers over the past couple of hundred years who built elegant Stockman knives, for example. GECs Stockman knives are huge, clunky things. Their attempts at Whittlers could be used as hammers. They do build pretty good Barlows, though.
Case is problematic. During the 80s and 90s they were primarily targeting collectors. They churned out thousands of knives with glittery acrylic scales, and they priced them higher than anything else I can think of that was on the market at the time. You could find tables full of Case knives at even small shows. Then the inevitable happened, Case fell out of favor.
I have a friend that is a big knife dealer, he sets up 40 cases and six additional tables full of knives nearly every weekend. I was behind the tables with him this past weekend, in fact. Four times that afternoon he had people walk up and ask, "Do you buy Case knives?" They'd pull out a twenty-plus year old knife. My friend would point out an identical knife in his case with a forty dollar price on it, and offer the seller thirty bucks for his knife. The prospective seller would move on, feeling insulted. That knife probably sold for eighty bucks at one time. This dealer
might sell one Case per show.
Think of it this way: Case was a premium-priced product forty years ago. These days WalMart sells them. If you're going to sell knives at WalMart, and at their price point, make them in the USA,
and still make a profit, there are going to be compromises.
The Case mystique lives on, but it's hard to rationally explain why.
Traditional knives, even very fine ones, are out of favor right now. It's truly a buyer's market. Yes, there are still makers (like Case) who are churning out their idea of what a traditional pattern is. But, given the numbers of old makers' knives out there going dirt cheap, why not go after the real thing? Schrade, Camillus, Queen, Belknap, Keen Kutter, Bull Dog, Western, Russell. Tidioute, Remington, Primble, Winchester, Ulster, Schatt & Morgan, even Old Timer and Uncle Henry and dozens more. If you look to Europe the choices just about double. They're all out there.
Take it or leave it, strictly my opinion, etc.
