Do you have a “buyer’s rejoice” knife?

Every day my USPS delivery driver leaves "a present" for me in the mail box or at the front door. I love that woman like a child loves Santa.
 
Here's another one. An unlikely suspect but here's the rest of the story. Lovey and I were going to meet some friends at one of the Casinos in NE Oklahoma. Somehow, I left home without a knife on me. We were in her car so my truck stash was still at home. A near emergency. Thankfully we drove right past the A.G. Russell store and I had a real need to go in. I found this in the case and couldn't believe the price so bought it. Turned out to be a GREAT knife. It's been a lot of places and done a lot of things with me - it's the one that goes in checked bags whenever we fly. On one trip to the Keys it was the only sharp knife around. Cut up a standing rib roast into steaks, cleaned fish, sliced limes for drinks, sliced cheese and sausage for snacks, basically everything a knife was needed for it did. Like this knife so much I bought a few others - to give and to use. The D2 version is something else. I've been hard on it but it sharpened nicely.

This is a fun thread!

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These were both gifts from my kind and ever loving wife, but I have gotten much mileage out of the Voyager for years, using it for all kinds of cutting, carrying it for all reasons and all seasons. The SR1 has been a surprise as well, mostly because it cuts better than I expected a chubby blade to cut, and I don't worry about breaking the tip off like I sometimes do with the Voyager. I also appreciate their relative lightness, given their sizes, which only encourages me to carry them as much as I like, which is often.

 
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Runs With Scissors said:
It does my heart well to see a Douk Douk mentioned here! I often carried one in the oil patch as either a secondary blade or when I wasn't even supposed to have a knife. they are such a great, slicing knife, simple and durable with a really cool history. I once used mine to extract a broken tooth while I was on slope. the narrow, sharp blade was fairly well suited to the task, along with my Leatherman tool.

I once used mine for an experiment and went a year without traditional sharpening means. I sharpened on emery cloth, coffee cups, cereal boxes, random rocks, files, etc. though it was rarely shaving sharp, it was still better than 90 percent of the other knives I saw. The relatively soft carbon steel made this much easier for me.
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Whoa, hold up. Time out for a second. We need to back up a couple pages.

Are we just going to let this slide with no one asking for the story? You extracted a broken tooth with a Douk Douk?! I need to ask for more, here, please. Your tooth? Another guy’s tooth? Tell us a story…
 
If I were the audience rather than the storyteller here, I think one of the first questions rattling in my mind would be “WHY?!”

It’s difficult to explain or understand if someone else hasn’t worked that location, or at least worked in other similar oil patch locations, but I’ll try my best to explain. The North Slope oilfield is a pretty coveted place for blue collar workers to wind up. A person usually has to know someone to get up there. I really didn’t have any great connections, but I finally got my chance up there through either luck or persistence. I had come up as part of a rag-tag construction group that was pretty much made to fail. It was supposed to be a three month job. It had indeed wrapped up and I transferred to a different work group and was hanging in there tooth and nail. I was in a very volatile position. I could have been laid off for any reason, real or imagined, and it would just be easily marked as “Reduction In Workforce” And believe you me, the good ole boy system was alive, well, and in over drive.

Now, one must understand the “Safety Culture” It wasn’t a terrible concept, because carelessness could getcha hurt or killed in the blink of an eye, and we were in a very remote work location. That being said, like all things oilfield, it was hugely exaggerated. There were literally at least six easy ways to get fired before you even went to a safety meeting or poured your first cup of coffee. Go down stairs without using a handrail, not using traction devices, not having or pulling a “duck pond”, Not walking around your truck before leaving, or backing up without a spotter. Please don’t think they were that truly safety minded. It was more like….safety theatre, or perhaps more of a “gotcha” to get rid of somebody If a well or pad went down, they would send a crew out at zero dark hundred into a blizzard where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face or hardly stay standing in the high winds to do highly dangerous, critical work.

All things considered, they had pretty good medical facilities. The fewer people who were treated for on the job or off the job illness or injury, the better they looked. And British Petroleum had no shortage of folks looking to smear some mud or make a lawsuit. Suffice to say, we were highly encouraged NOT to use those facilities unless we really had to, and like I said before…I wanted to be there, and I was mighty job scared.

I’d made a small group of friends, and we had taken to grabbing our dinner trays, and going into an unused conference room to eat together, play games, watch movies, and generally wind down after the work day. Some of the greatest camaraderie I’ve ever known was developed there. So, anyways, I don’t remember what I was eating at the time, but I heard a “CRACK!” and felt a pain in the back of my mouth. Curiously, I got up, went to the bathroom, and looked in my mouth with a mirror and a flashlight. Sure ‘nuff, I had a rear molar that had split like an old hickory log. I went back to the room, told a couple of friends what was up and weighed my options. #1 was to just go to the clinic, tell them what was up and catch my one way ticket home. #2 was to make up some other story…emergency at home, or whatever that didn’t involve injury and likely catch my one way ticket home. #3 option, of course was to man up, shut up, and move on. You already know I chose that one.

I stropped my Douk Douk on an old tissue box for a minute and covered the blade in alcohol based hand sanitizer. Grabbed my leatherman tool, a flashlight, and went to the bathroom. The shards of tooth were NOT coming out easily, and I felt like I was doing more harm than good trying to wrestle them out with my Leatherman tool. So, I cut down my gum line a bit. Just enough to work the tip of my blade in underneath to loosen and free the tooth. By now, there had been a few guys that came into the bathroom, and saw me with a pocket knife jammed in my mouth and blood all over my face and the counter. I forced a smile, held my finger to my lips and made a “Shhhh! Gesture, a conspirital wink and then went back to my business. I was eventually able to pry and cut the two or three chunks of tooth out of my head and laid them on the counter while I cleaned up the rest of my mess. I went back to my friends for awhile, (Though I don’t recall being real lively) I eventually went to bed, and then went to work the next day as normal. I went through mouthwash by the gallon for another week or two, got off my hitch, and went to the dentist on my time. He kinda just shrugged and said there wasn’t much left for him to do.

Word traveled about my bloody display in that “well known secret” kinda way. My colleagues decided I was tougher than rawhide and spring steel. (I’m not) The crew leaders, foremen, Superintendents, etc. realized that I knew how to work hard and play the game. Now, here’s the surprise ending: The tooth I pulled was long dead from a root canal. So, while it looked plum awful, it was only…a fair bit uncomfortable. The hardest part was cutting a string of some sort that was holding it all in.

I also shaved with that Douk Douk from time to time. Guys eventually just kinda got used to me doing weird stuff with that knife, I guess. As an added note, just because it shaved don’t mean it shaved well. The skin on my face looked like a wart hog’s rear end by the time I was done, but I kept trying. Now, I understand the blade just wasn’t hard enough to take on a good face shaving edge.

I stayed up there for about ten years until about half the oilfield got laid off during a particularly brutal year. By the time I got my pink slip, every connection I’d had was already gone. So…I came up for a three month job, and made it for ten years. Not too bad, I guess. After that I decided I didn’t want the crazy nature of the oil patch and took on a lower paying but much cushier job in the public sector.
 
Runs With Scissors said:
If I were the audience rather than the storyteller here, I think one of the first questions rattling in my mind would be “WHY?!”

It’s difficult to explain or understand if someone else hasn’t worked that location, or at least worked in other similar oil patch locations, but I’ll try my best to explain. The North Slope oilfield is a pretty coveted place for blue collar workers to wind up. A person usually has to know someone to get up there. I really didn’t have any great connections, but I finally got my chance up there through either luck or persistence. I had come up as part of a rag-tag construction group that was pretty much made to fail. It was supposed to be a three month job. It had indeed wrapped up and I transferred to a different work group and was hanging in there tooth and nail. I was in a very volatile position. I could have been laid off for any reason, real or imagined, and it would just be easily marked as “Reduction In Workforce” And believe you me, the good ole boy system was alive, well, and in over drive.

Now, one must understand the “Safety Culture” It wasn’t a terrible concept, because carelessness could getcha hurt or killed in the blink of an eye, and we were in a very remote work location. That being said, like all things oilfield, it was hugely exaggerated. There were literally at least six easy ways to get fired before you even went to a safety meeting or poured your first cup of coffee. Go down stairs without using a handrail, not using traction devices, not having or pulling a “duck pond”, Not walking around your truck before leaving, or backing up without a spotter. Please don’t think they were that truly safety minded. It was more like….safety theatre, or perhaps more of a “gotcha” to get rid of somebody If a well or pad went down, they would send a crew out at zero dark hundred into a blizzard where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face or hardly stay standing in the high winds to do highly dangerous, critical work.

All things considered, they had pretty good medical facilities. The fewer people who were treated for on the job or off the job illness or injury, the better they looked. And British Petroleum had no shortage of folks looking to smear some mud or make a lawsuit. Suffice to say, we were highly encouraged NOT to use those facilities unless we really had to, and like I said before…I wanted to be there, and I was mighty job scared.

I’d made a small group of friends, and we had taken to grabbing our dinner trays, and going into an unused conference room to eat together, play games, watch movies, and generally wind down after the work day. Some of the greatest camaraderie I’ve ever known was developed there. So, anyways, I don’t remember what I was eating at the time, but I heard a “CRACK!” and felt a pain in the back of my mouth. Curiously, I got up, went to the bathroom, and looked in my mouth with a mirror and a flashlight. Sure ‘nuff, I had a rear molar that had split like an old hickory log. I went back to the room, told a couple of friends what was up and weighed my options. #1 was to just go to the clinic, tell them what was up and catch my one way ticket home. #2 was to make up some other story…emergency at home, or whatever that didn’t involve injury and likely catch my one way ticket home. #3 option, of course was to man up, shut up, and move on. You already know I chose that one.

I stropped my Douk Douk on an old tissue box for a minute and covered the blade in alcohol based hand sanitizer. Grabbed my leatherman tool, a flashlight, and went to the bathroom. The shards of tooth were NOT coming out easily, and I felt like I was doing more harm than good trying to wrestle them out with my Leatherman tool. So, I cut down my gum line a bit. Just enough to work the tip of my blade in underneath to loosen and free the tooth. By now, there had been a few guys that came into the bathroom, and saw me with a pocket knife jammed in my mouth and blood all over my face and the counter. I forced a smile, held my finger to my lips and made a “Shhhh! Gesture, a conspirital wink and then went back to my business. I was eventually able to pry and cut the two or three chunks of tooth out of my head and laid them on the counter while I cleaned up the rest of my mess. I went back to my friends for awhile, (Though I don’t recall being real lively) I eventually went to bed, and then went to work the next day as normal. I went through mouthwash by the gallon for another week or two, got off my hitch, and went to the dentist on my time. He kinda just shrugged and said there wasn’t much left for him to do.

Word traveled about my bloody display in that “well known secret” kinda way. My colleagues decided I was tougher than rawhide and spring steel. (I’m not) The crew leaders, foremen, Superintendents, etc. realized that I knew how to work hard and play the game. Now, here’s the surprise ending: The tooth I pulled was long dead from a root canal. So, while it looked plum awful, it was only…a fair bit uncomfortable. The hardest part was cutting a string of some sort that was holding it all in.

I also shaved with that Douk Douk from time to time. Guys eventually just kinda got used to me doing weird stuff with that knife, I guess. As an added note, just because it shaved don’t mean it shaved well. The skin on my face looked like a wart hog’s rear end by the time I was done, but I kept trying. Now, I understand the blade just wasn’t hard enough to take on a good face shaving edge.

I stayed up there for about ten years until about half the oilfield got laid off during a particularly brutal year. By the time I got my pink slip, every connection I’d had was already gone. So…I came up for a three month job, and made it for ten years. Not too bad, I guess. After that I decided I didn’t want the crazy nature of the oil patch and took on a lower paying but much cushier job in the public sector.
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Wow - crazy story! Thanks for sharing! And amazing that you didn’t end up with an infection. Must have been good mouthwash.
 
I decided not too long ago to finally see what all the buzz about spyderco was really about and picked myself up the legendary pm2. Even though it is still not my cup of tea aesthetically I finally understood the hype. Fast forward a month or so I got a chance to pick up a subvert sprint run, and now I am head over heels with the "tactical spatula"

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junglefighter said:
My buyers rejoice was when I picked up the first generation Benchmade CQC7 and the Benchmade AFCK back in 95 when they first came out. The AFCK was my edc for more than 10 years until I left chicago in 2007 to return to my home overseas.. I sold my car that I was driving and after I left Chicago the day after, I found that I had left my AFCK in the car, but by the time I found that I had done it, I was on the plane back overseas.. Took me more than 5 years to find a replacement and it is sitting in my weapons locker semi retired...
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I really liked my AFCK, but I haven t carried it in years.

Interesting that the AFCK was your edc in Chicago. I lived there in the 80 s and seem to recall that the blade legal length limit for carried folders was 2.0 or 2.5 inches. You must have been very careful with your concealment. Or maybe the restrictions changed.
 
whp said:
I really liked my AFCK, but I haven t carried it in years.

Interesting that the AFCK was your edc in Chicago. I lived there in the 80 s and seem to recall that the blade legal length limit for carried folders was 2.0 or 2.5 inches. You must have been very careful with your concealment. Or maybe the restrictions changed.
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I was employed by a federal agency at the time during my civil service days, so I was aware of the laws at the time.. I never pulled steel in public because I always had my expandable baton on my person when I was in plain clothes and off duty.. Plus situational awareness was also part of the game.. I used to carry a randall 15 in a fanny pouch when I didn't carry my personal firearm..
 
junglefighter said:
I was employed by a federal agency at the time during my civil service days, so I was aware of the laws at the time.. I never pulled steel in public because I always had my expandable baton on my person when I was in plain clothes and off duty.. Plus situational awareness was also part of the game.. I used to carry a randall 15 in a fanny pouch when I didn't carry my personal firearm..
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Did you know any grappling arts like judo, BJJ, or wrestling?

Those seem like the single most effective method of ensuring any type of handheld weapon actually remains in your possession.
 
Dagoth_Blur said:
Did you know any grappling arts like judo, BJJ, or wrestling?

Those seem like the single most effective method of ensuring any type of handheld weapon actually remains in your possession.
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Why would I want to know grappling arts? I am an instructor in the Filipino Martial arts of Combat Judo and escrima. Taiwanese and Filipino art of Kuntao and now studying Penchak silat.. As well as being an instructor of the above mentioned arts other than silat for 50 years.. Bladework is also part of the FMA and silat
 
junglefighter said:
Why would I want to know grappling arts? I am an instructor in the Filipino Martial arts of Combat Judo and escrima. Taiwanese and Filipino art of Kuntao and now studying Penchak silat.. As well as being an instructor of the above mentioned arts other than silat for 50 years.. Bladework is also part of the FMA and silat
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I’ve never been in a fight by any stretch of the imagination, but I assume that grappling also flies out of the window once blades are in the equation. Judo throws and BJJ submissions become extremely dangerous when the other man has a knife.

This is the chief reason why I would be extremely reluctant to break up a fight between strangers unless absolutely necessary. Somebody just needs to pull out even an inch of blade, and someone else can get killed. It’s just not my business.

Very cool that you teach FMA, sir. Greetings from a Filipino here! :)
 
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