New definition of a budget knife

G

Goofcat

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Jan 8, 2020
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Just a thought after reading some of the recent posts of folks worrying about buying counterfeit knives.

A budget knife is one in which no counterfeiter bothers to make a fake one.
 
Sorry, but I completely disagree.
The Ontario RATs have become synonymous with the term quality "budget Knife". There are clones, counterfeits and homages of them all over the place.

Bottom line: if you make something good that people are willing to buy, some scumbag is going to steal that idea/design and sell it cheaper. Even if it's inexpensive to start with.
 
Interesting idea, but you'll pretty quickly find out that if you apply that definition then 'budget knife' will be filed away with the vorpal blade and Survive! pre-orders as purely mythical objects.
 
I accidentally bought a counterfeit CRKT once. I bought it as a cheap no-name. When I opened the box, I was surprised to see "CRKT" stamped on the blade. So I looked it up and sure enough, it was a counterfeit Civet. The Civet was a $20-something fixed blade made of 8Cr13Mov! Somebody knocked it off and sold it at half price. It looked exactly like the real one. The only reason I knew is that I bought it as a no-name for half the price.

To this day, I wonder if it was 8Cr13Mov. I'm guessing it was 3Cr or 5Cr but at Chinese direct prices, I wouldn't be surprised if they used the same steel. I've heard strange tales from expats working QC at Asian manufacturing plants. Supposedly, clones or counterfeits are sometimes made in the same factories by the same workers.

I never got a chance to find out. I immediately returned it for a full refund. I reported the listing and it was taken down.
 
Chronovore said:
...I've heard strange tales from expats working QC at Asian manufacturing plants. Supposedly, clones or counterfeits are sometimes made in the same factories by the same workers...
Click to expand...

When I was 18-19, I had a job working at a pillow factory, bagging and boxing the pillows at the end of the production line.
I was shocked to see the way it worked regarding that aspect. The little ladies at the sewing machines, sewing in the tags, they would for example have a stack of K-mart tags, a stack of Sears tags, a stack of Sealy's tags, and a stack of Ralph Lauren tags, and likewise I would have the appropriate bags at the end of the line to fulfill each order of boxes I was supposed to fill.
Meanwhile the exact same pillow would be running down the line all day long, with the same polyfill coming out of the same extruder, and down the same conveyor belt, with the same little old lady just sewing in a different tag once an order was complete.

Would not at all surprise me to find a similar thing at any mass production facility.
 
there are often "inspired" or copied designs
which bear almost a similar look to an
original product
but have yet to come across a 100% fake opinel in recent years.
perhaps there are some things
not worth the technoligical investment
or economically feasible enough to replicate? :-)
 
I dislike those Victorinox clones you can buy in the local hardware shops and super markets. Awful quality, none of the tools are sharp or work well, and the slip joint locking is non existent. And I see people snapping them up thinking it's a great deal. A Victorinox wont break the bank, but the sheeple will by a cheaper lookalike all day long.
 
Lots of Chinese factories run “third shifts” Basically using a company’s tools to make clones to sell on the black market.
 
Goofcat said:
Lots of Chinese factories run “third shifts” Basically using a company’s tools to make clones to sell on the black market.
Click to expand...
I'm not disagreeing but curious how you know that.
 
There are many ways to counterfeit almost anything. And 're-branding', putting someone else's name on the same product, is done in many, MANY industries, not just cutlery. Prices are all over the map for the exact same thing, the only difference is marketing. Knives are no different. One company will be making the same knives for 15 different companies across the globe. The only differences are colors or graphics. I do this myself, every day, in the industrial electronics industry.

To be a TRUE counterfeit, the product would have to be made in a DIFFERENT factory than makes the originals. I have one, a Ganzo version of a Pro-Tech auto(not a 100% accurate copy of any model, as far as I can tell)), and it's actually not a bad knife(DISCLAIMER: I know!), except the spring is a bit weaker than I would like, and it's a little slower to open as a consequence. I didn't buy it because it was a copy of a Pro-Tech, I bought it to practice sharpening on, because it had no edge. It had chips and large flat spots from being knocked around in a box with other junk knives at a gun show. The steel is supposed to be 440C, and I have no reason to doubt it. A half hour on a hand-held dual-grit diamond hone, and it would shave, except for the first 1/8 of an inch just back of the point where the biggest chips were, it's just a tiny sharp serrated portion now. It sharpens like 440C, and holds an edge like 440C. All this to say, it's a decent quality counterfeit, but I likely wouldn't buy another. (I like the Launch 8, from Kershaw, MUCH better.)

For fixed blades, I may buy a licensed copy of a custom design, but the knives I like are seldom seen counterfeited, so I don't much worry about it..
 
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Is this a an authentic Ozark Mountain slippie?



best

mqqn
 
There's been a lot of talk about what a "budget" knife is and what an "expensive" knife is.
A knife's affordability is a bit of a sliding scale depending on how much you like it.
We're all on some kind of a budget. Any knife that fits within my budget is MY "budget" knife.
 
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