Essential Cold Steel

whp said:
Everyone who appreciates Cold Steel folders should have the basic two work knives. The Recon 1 and the smaller American Lawman. Possibly the best large and mid size edc/work knives on the market. Certainly the highest value work/edc knives around.
Less expensive, the Voyager and the Air Lite in AUS 10. Also good workers and great values.
And, one of my favorites, the Ultimate Hunter. Great all round knife. Maybe the answer to the question, “If you could have only one knife?”
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Hey man. How do you find the finger grooves on the smaller Lawman though? From the looks of it, it may not accommodate every pair of hands out there.
 
XJ-linux said:
Couldn't resist commenting again... my choices might actually be less specific per se; to me Cold Steel was "tanto", for better or worse, so I'd suggest picking a favorite. Cold Steel was also always associated with steel, again for better or worse. So, with that in mind you need at least some model with Carbon V, AUS-8 or VG-1. Pick your favorite model. That's two, now pick a melee weapon of some type - hawk, sword, or ???. Those three together I think would represent the Cold Steel I recall fairly well, on a few levels.

I'd personally be going for a SRK, a smaller tanto from Japan, and maybe a melee weapon along the lines of a Laredo Bowie or a northern European axe of some era in Carbon V.

YMMV
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CS melee weapons are 🏆🏆🏆 I always had a soft spot for the gunstock war club; I haven't checked availability in a while. I have 2 hawks and 2 machetes. However, I think some kind of spear (bushman on a stick) is the best.
 
This thread leads me to wonder, just for fun, what would be the 7 top Cold Steel folding knives of all time. I know that one should leave aside several excellent knives, but I would humbly say Espada XL, Lawman, Recon 1 Tanto, Talwar, 4-Max, Rajah II and Voyager Vaquero, in any of their sizes. And why do I choose 7 instead of 5 or 3? Because I am not able to remove any from this list.
 
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I think someday in the future, Cold Steel will be looked at as a company that carried crazy cool items. For collecting purposes, I think that owning some of CS's more out there products, will be cool for posterity.

Examples...
Chaos series knives and Chaos Stiletto.
Aluminum/G10 scaled XL Espada.
Cable Tang bowie knives, (Laredo & Natchez).
Japanese made Trail Master in San Mai.
Tai Pan.
Master Tanto.
Cinquedea.
1917 Frontier Bowie.
Pretty much any of the products that CS had produced by US manufacturers.
And... a ton of other items that Lynn brought to the market that somehow didn't fit the market norms 😁
 
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DangerZone98 said:
Hey man. How do you find the finger grooves on the smaller Lawman though? From the looks of it, it may not accommodate every pair of hands out there.
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I remember first discovering Cold Steel at a outdoors store some years ago. Until then I was a Spyderco and Benchmade and Buck user.

I picked up a Recon 1 and it fit my hand perfectly. I picked up the Lawman and the ergos were surprisingly good. And the knives felt strong. Later came back and got both. That price with those ergos and xhp steel. What a deal!

With the Lawman, the knife feels good to me when I put my index either in the choil, or when I hold it in an extended manner with my index in the finger groove. With the index in the finger groove, I still have enough handle for a good grip. And I like big handles for a folder blade (like the UH).
 
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Juan Lopez said:
This thread leads me to wonder, just for fun, what would be the 7 top Cold Steel folding knives of all time. I know that one should leave aside several excellent knives, but I would humbly say Espada XL, Lawman, Recon 1 Tanto, Talwar, 4-Max, Rajah II and Voyager Vaquero, in any of their sizes. And why do I choose 7 instead of 5 or 3? Because I am not able to remove any from this list.
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Yeah, those Voyager Vaquero's are cool! Definitely in the same league as the Espada, Rajah II, Talwar and Large Luzon
 
XJ-linux said:
Couldn't resist commenting again... my choices might actually be less specific per se; to me Cold Steel was "tanto", for better or worse, so I'd suggest picking a favorite. Cold Steel was also always associated with steel, again for better or worse. So, with that in mind you need at least some model with Carbon V, AUS-8 or VG-1. Pick your favorite model. That's two, now pick a melee weapon of some type - hawk, sword, or ???. Those three together I think would represent the Cold Steel I recall fairly well, on a few levels.

I'd personally be going for a SRK, a smaller tanto from Japan, and maybe a melee weapon along the lines of a Laredo Bowie or a northern European axe of some era in Carbon V.

YMMV
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Good catch XJ. Yeah, Cold Steel literally started the Tanto craze in 1980, so having at least one old school CS Tanto would be a great goal. For the money, I nominate the Kobun. It has classic AUS8 Japanese Steel and is very "Lynn Thompson-esque" and old school Cold Steel. Also, grab one of the AUS8 push-daggers if you can. They were among Lynn's earliest designs. I can definitely see them being discontinued or replaced with 4034 junk steel in the near future. All it takes is for one nut to use them in a high profile crime and Wall Street funded GSM will fold like a cheap suit and stop making them.

EDITED TO ADD- The Recon Tanto is of course, another classic, but unless it's in AUS8, Made in Japan San Mai III VG1 (not the current Taiwanese VG-10 San Mai), or Carbon V, it's not the same for me. SK-5 is a Cold Steel classic steel, but I don't trust it like I do the other classic Cold Steel blade steels, so it just doesn't have the same appeal especially for such a hard use knife. But others may feel different and now would be the time to grab one.
 
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coloradowildman said:
Good catch XJ. Yeah, Cold Steel literally started the Tanto craze in 1980, so having at least one old school CS Tanto would be a great goal. For the money, I nominate the Kobun. It has classic AUS8 Japanese Steel and is very "Lynn Thompson-esque" and old school Cold Steel. Also, grab one of the AUS8 push-daggers if you can. They were among Lynn's earliest designs. I can definitely see them being discontinued or replaced with 4034 junk steel in the near future. All it takes is for one nut to use them in a high profile crime and Wall Street funded GSM will fold like a cheap suit and stop making them.

EDITED TO ADD- The Recon Tanto is of course, another classic, but unless it's in AUS8, Made in Japan San Mai III VG1 (not the current Taiwanese VG-10 San Mai), or Carbon V, it's not the same for me. SK-5 is a Cold Steel classic steel technically (more of a modern Cold Steel blade steel compared to the others), but since I don't trust it like I would all of the true classic Cold Steel blade steels, it just doesn't have the same appeal especially for such a hard use knife. But others may feel different and now would be the time to grab one.
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I think the Recon Tanto is acceptable in SK-5 because of its robust tip design. The SRK, not so much.
CS has been using SK-5 in the Bushman for ages, right? I never hear people complain about the steel until they made the SRK in SK-5.
 
dogstar said:
I think the Recon Tanto is acceptable in SK-5 because of its robust tip design. The SRK, not so much.
CS has been using SK-5 in the Bushman for ages, right? I never hear people complain about the steel until they made the SRK in SK-5.
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Yeah, the Recon Tanto does have a really thick tip but has a hollow ground unlike the earlier indestructible Recon Tantos. As for the Bushman, I believe the first Bushman were some type of high carbon spring steel before switching to SK5 (EDITED TO ADD- the first Bushman's were indeed SK-5 according the 1995 CS catalog). But the SK5 Bushman did seem to be pretty tough back in the day, at least until around 2015 when heat treat problems began to appear. But I do remember when CS started using SK5 in the Recon Scout and Trail Master and CS fans started to report some failures and were unhappy with the change from Carbon V. NutnFancy also broke his SK5 Recon Scout whereas his older Carbon V had no problem doing the same tasks.

I don't know what is up with SK-5, but I suspect that Japanese and Taiwanese manufacturers decided at some point to made it/make it too hard and brittle to compete in order to compete with American Carbon V after Camillus went out of business. My guess is that Japanese steel manufacturers assured Lynn that their SK-5 would be as tough as American 1080 yet have the same edge holding as Carbon V, for instance, and he got locked into using it after spending a fortune for the tooling that is needed to mill out, shape and finish SK-5 knives. However, time has not been kind to the legacy of SK-5 in Cold Steel's line as it has with AUS8 and Carbon V.

Trust me, I want to love SK-5. I mean, it technically should be a bomb-proof steel based on its composition. But all of the failures lead me to believe it's in the heat treat. Newer buyers have become such whiners about edge retention to absurd extremes (thanks to people ignorantly reading threads about folding knife steels and not knowing it doesn't apply to survival knives) that Cold Steel may have asked their knife manufacturers to up the RC on SK-5 to the point where it has become brittle like D2.

Cold Steel has not had a good carbon steel replacement since Carbon V, so it would stand to reason that they heat treat SK-5 to give it the same edge retention as Carbon V which as mentioned makes it too brittle.

Cold Steel's AUS8A was the perfect, affordable survival knife steel that has legendary toughness and ease of sharpening to a razor's edge, but thanks to ill-founded threads here on BF and Youtube comments, the knife community SCREAMED like little children to "give them more edge retention!" over toughness. That's why there are no longer any affordable, quality made AUS8 survival knives anymore. All replaced with over-hardened SK-5 because that's what they wanted, not knowing it would come back to haunt them later. Now you go on Amazon and all of these same whiners that started this are screaming at the top of their lungs why their over-hardened/higher edge retention knives failed during basic bushcraft tasks.

As the old saying, be careful what you wish for:)

PS- Sorry if I got into a rant, but I am just tired of all of the ignorance out there that caused so many classic, affordable (and indestructible) knives to be killed off over the past 10 years:)
 
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coloradowildman said:
Yeah, the Recon Tanto does have a really thick tip but has a hollow ground unlike the earlier indestructible Recon Tantos. As for the Bushman, I believe the first Bushman were some type of high carbon spring steel before switching to SK5. But the SK5 Bushman did seem to be pretty tough back in the day, at least until around 2015 when heat treat problems began to appear. But I do remember when CS started using SK5 in the Recon Scout and Trail Master and CS fans started to report some failures and were unhappy with the change from Carbon V. NutnFancy also broke his SK5 Recon Scout whereas his older Carbon V had no problem doing the same tasks.

I don't know what is up with SK-5, but I suspect that Japanese and Taiwanese made it/make it too hard and brittle to compete in order to compete with American Carbon V after Camillus went out of business. My guess is that Japanese steel manufacturers assured Lynn that their SK-5 would be as tough as American 1080 yet have the same edge holding as Carbon V, for instance, and he got locked into using it after spending a fortune for the tooling that is needed to mill out, shape and finish SK-5 knives. However, time has not been kind to the legacy of SK-5 in Cold Steel's line as it has with AUS8 and Carbon V.

Trust me, I want to love SK-5. I mean, it technically should be a bomb-proof steel based on its composition. But all of the failures lead me to believe it's in the heat treat. Newer buyers have become such whiners about edge retention to absurd extremes (thanks to people ignorantly reading threads about folding knife steels and not knowing it doesn't apply to survival knives) that Cold Steel may have asked their knife manufacturers to up the RC on SK-5 to the point where it has become brittle like D2.

Cold Steel has not had a good carbon steel replacement since Carbon V, so it would stand to reason that they heat treat SK-5 to give it the same edge retention as Carbon V which as mentioned makes it too brittle.

Cold Steel's AUS8A was the perfect, affordable survival knife steel that has legendary toughness and ease of sharpening to a razor's edge, but thanks to ill-founded threads here on BF and Youtube comments, the knife community SCREAMED like little children to "give them edge retention!" over toughness. That's why there are no longer any affordable, quality made AUS8 survival knives any longer. All replaced with over-hardened SK-5 because that's what they wanted, not knowing it would come back to haunt them later. Now you go on Amazon and all of these same whiners that started this are screaming at the top of their lungs why their over-hardened/higher edge knives retention failed during basic bushcraft tasks.

As the old saying, be careful what you wish for:)

PS- Sorry if I got into a rant, but I am just tired of all of the ignorance out there that caused so many classic, affordable knives to be killed off over the past 10 years:)
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Ahh, that's why we have the GI Tanto in 1055 and the True Flight Thrower!
 
dogstar said:
Ahh, that's why we have the GI Tanto in 1055 and the True Flight Thrower!
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True! I forgot about the good ole GI Tanto. I had one of those about 15 years ago. Tried to break the tip on it just to see what it could take since I only paid $18 for it. The thing was a tank.
 
coloradowildman said:
True! I forgot about the good ole GI Tanto. I had one of those about 15 years ago. Tried to break the tip on it just to see what it could take since I only paid $18 for it. The thing was a tank.
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There is this guy on YT that breaks knives for fun. He was only able to snap the relatively delicate tip on the GI Tanto; the rest of the knife is bombproof.
 
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