I was unplugging a can of spray primer a few years back, with the awl on my Huntsman. One little push too far, one short shot of paint, and my knife, me, and the area I was working in was covered. Getting that knife cleaned out took weeks. I was too stubborn & PO'd to buy another.
After that, I got good at figuring out some of the things people (twits like me, maybe?) do with their knives. Like: how did a blade got broken (pieces of it in the knife, maybe used over & over to open paint cans?). Or how the knife implements are pristine and new, but the scales are a gummy mess (smells like it was soaked in gasoline), or one that was fused shut: I've found knives where folks obviously used dish soap as a lubricant, a trick I'd heard as a kid, but I found a knife several years ago that was fused shut; some unbright individual had used what apparently, due to the smell, was dishwasher detergent. (Sodium Hypochlorite ain't good to knives.) I found a knife one time at a garage sale that smelled burnt, and had nasty melt marks and large round chips out of the blade. I realized later that someone had cut through a live wire with it.
("
Now there's a real career booster! Instant retirement!" -one of my electrician friends.)
A friend who works with horses out here lost his little hardware store knife a few years ago. Later, another coworker brought it to him, mangled & corroded, in a little baggie. It was covered in dirt - he thought. Turns out it was in stall, and one of the new kids had 'mucking' duty, and caught a glimpse of something shiny in a shovelful of doo. The last time my friend had seen it, he was opening bags of feed, and he figured he dropped it one of the buckets by accident. Luckily, it was closed.
Imagine finding
that at Goodwill.
Of course, my wife still loves to remind me of how I I used a nice old antique Russell butcher knife to chop branches off a Christmas tree, and was left with eight nasty chips out of the blade.
~Chris
