I don't know how familiar people here are with MAM knives, since I know a lot of yall prefer the more high end fancy stuff. But they make simple, cheap, wooden handled knives very much (very much, sometimes) like Opinels, but cheaper. I finally bought one, and I was surprised. I expected it to basically be an inferior knockoff product, but I am actually very happy with it.
The handles are just cheap wooden pieces, and the fit and finish on some of the pieces might be somewhat inferior to an Opinel, but they are cheaper than Opinels as well, and the blades can be made just as sharp...maybe even sharper. They come in a much wider variety of shapes and styles than Opinels, and they can be had with an ingenious kind of semi-liner lock which comprises a single carefully bent and shaped piece of sheet metal inserted into a milled slot inside the handle, and sandwiched in between the handle and blade and riveted in when the knife is assembled. Other than working backwards to the way most normal liner locks work they seem to work just fine. Most styles can be had with this lock, or a lock-free version for hoplophobic nations (I got a very useful sheepsfoot in both locking and non-locking variants).
Unfortunately the blades only come in stainless steel; "high quality German stainless steel", they say. I'm curious what it actually is. It feels roughly like good 420HC maybe, on the hard side by my standards, but easy to sharpen and take a nasty sharp edge. Blades are nice and thin. Made in Portugal. They come in a variety of styles, all of them more or less ugly from the factory - but that's really true of a standard Opinel as well. They can all easily be improved, some more creatively than others. The ones that are pretty much Opinel ripoffs can be taken as far as any Opinel, obviously. The ones I like the best have very minimalist, straight handles, without much material for fancy carving and shaping. But I still sanded down the ugly sharp edges and imperfect factory poly coating, and darkened the wood by baking it with olive oil. Looks much better now.
Anyway if you're like me and dig good, cheap, simple knifes that work, check them out. You could buy a whole case of these for the price of a single mid-grade Spyderco, and while I'm sure these don't have Adamantium blades that can cut through 10 miles of cardboard withour dulling, or slice steel like butter, or no-handed depolyment in 2 microseconds, and they can't hold the weight of a Toyota on their lock mechanism without failing, they work more than well enough for realistic tasks that I usually use my knife for. I'm thinking about starting a collection, and modifying them. Opinels are getting downright common it seems like.
If only they had carbon blades....I just like the way carbon looks better. Something about an always-shiny blade seems wrong to me.
The handles are just cheap wooden pieces, and the fit and finish on some of the pieces might be somewhat inferior to an Opinel, but they are cheaper than Opinels as well, and the blades can be made just as sharp...maybe even sharper. They come in a much wider variety of shapes and styles than Opinels, and they can be had with an ingenious kind of semi-liner lock which comprises a single carefully bent and shaped piece of sheet metal inserted into a milled slot inside the handle, and sandwiched in between the handle and blade and riveted in when the knife is assembled. Other than working backwards to the way most normal liner locks work they seem to work just fine. Most styles can be had with this lock, or a lock-free version for hoplophobic nations (I got a very useful sheepsfoot in both locking and non-locking variants).
Unfortunately the blades only come in stainless steel; "high quality German stainless steel", they say. I'm curious what it actually is. It feels roughly like good 420HC maybe, on the hard side by my standards, but easy to sharpen and take a nasty sharp edge. Blades are nice and thin. Made in Portugal. They come in a variety of styles, all of them more or less ugly from the factory - but that's really true of a standard Opinel as well. They can all easily be improved, some more creatively than others. The ones that are pretty much Opinel ripoffs can be taken as far as any Opinel, obviously. The ones I like the best have very minimalist, straight handles, without much material for fancy carving and shaping. But I still sanded down the ugly sharp edges and imperfect factory poly coating, and darkened the wood by baking it with olive oil. Looks much better now.
Anyway if you're like me and dig good, cheap, simple knifes that work, check them out. You could buy a whole case of these for the price of a single mid-grade Spyderco, and while I'm sure these don't have Adamantium blades that can cut through 10 miles of cardboard withour dulling, or slice steel like butter, or no-handed depolyment in 2 microseconds, and they can't hold the weight of a Toyota on their lock mechanism without failing, they work more than well enough for realistic tasks that I usually use my knife for. I'm thinking about starting a collection, and modifying them. Opinels are getting downright common it seems like.
If only they had carbon blades....I just like the way carbon looks better. Something about an always-shiny blade seems wrong to me.
I guess I should have known that, since they plaster the logo on every part of the knife!
