Mike, thanks again for the entertaining GAW!



This is my favorite kind of GAW on The Porch, in which participants actually have to DO something (besides write, "I'm in") that helps us all learn a little more about each other. I've been amazed and enriched by the amount of participation this week, with many participants posting periodic updates on how the challenge was progressing for them.
My summary of the week of the challenge emphasizes nostalgia, both short-term and long-term.
First, by short-term nostalgia I mean that the GAW took me back about 5 years to when I first got interested in pocket knives again, joined BF, and started accumulating some knives. I knew that many members changed their pocket knives on a daily basis, but that didn't appeal to me for a couple of reasons. First, it was too time-consuming to have to pick out a different knife to carry every morning, and second, I didn't think I was getting to know my knives very well by carrying them for only a day at a time. So I started carrying each new-to-me knife a week at a time, and that was much more satisfying and helped me learn the pros and cons of each knife. This GAW took me back to those days: even though I still carried the MANY knives my weekly rotation assigned me for the week, the pre-owned Imperial Kamp-King was the ONLY knife I used during the week. Doing that "intense bonding" was good to experience again!


By long-term nostalgia I mean that the GAW took me back almost 60 years to when I got my very first pocket knife, a Colonial Forest-Master that is very similar to the scout knife I used for the challenge. Here are photos of my first-ever Forest-Master (don't know why I didn't open the bottle opener for this old shot

) and the Kamp-King, my most recently-acquired knife:
It was like going back to my youth to have a scout knife clipped on a lanyard attached to a belt loop and hanging in my RFP with my keys (except I didn't carry any keys when I was 10). The black plastic handles felt so familiar, the spear main was like an old friend, and it was great to have some tools available if needed. Surprisingly, I didn't use the awl even once during the week, while my (possibly inaccurate) memory is that I used that tool often when I was a kid; might be a difference between life on a dairy farm and life in the city. That was really the only surprise to the challenge for me; I expected that I would enjoy using the Kamp-King, and I was right!
(This really wasn't a surprise, but it's certainly a difference between my knife use in the 1960s and the 2020s: as a kid, I almost never used my knife for food (I had a Mom who basically took care of that for me

) but had myriad other occasions for knife use, while in the past week, almost all of my knife use was food-related. Stuart
@Duckdog gently objected to so many of us using pocket cutlery for food prep, and I thought, "Lighten up, Stuart! If I didn't use my knife for food, I'd have almost no use for a pocket knife, as shown by my not carrying one from age 18 to 63." But, a couple of posts after Stuart's remark, I found myself hypocritically reacting to a
Jack Black
post with the thought, "Why in the world is that crazy Yorkshireman using a sodbuster to cut cheese slices when there are much better dedicated cheese-slicing tools??"

We humans are a logically inconsistent race!)
Thanks again to Mike for getting this started and to all the participants who made the thread so entertaining!



I'll conclude with before/after shots of my Kamp-King; it definitely picked up some patina over the course of 7 days:
- GT