Opinels: what do YOU do with 'em?

spyderco lover 450 said:
abuse i hate this knife its dull as shit so i beat the shit out of it i am not a gold member if i was i would sell it for 1 penny its a pile of shit with scooby do vomit all over btw i love scooby doo i am not hating on scooby i am hating gay ass opinel
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You need to relax...read more and post less or your stay here is going to be a short one.
 
Don't see why not, but wouldn't it be cheaper to test it yourself? No shipping that way. :p
 
Email me, I'll buy it for that price! :D

And take Morrow's advice.

Ps, just so Morrow knows, I'm being facetious about buying it. If it's dull, sharpen it.
 
I think you're a trustworthy enough fellow to be taken at your word, but all the same I'd be happy to test out a custom-bladed Opi. When you get it done feel free to drop me a line. :)
 
There is a theory that Nessmuk's fixed blade was incredibly thin, and the knifemaker's rendition of it as an all around knife could be wrong. He used the blade mainly for game processing and in camp, and used his folder mostly for wood. I'm down with thin stock.

as for the OP


[video=youtube_share;xyZgoKDYOdI]http://youtu.be/xyZgoKDYOdI[/video]
 
What do I do with an Opinel? Well for twelve years I carried one daily as an archaeologist and whenever hiking or camping. Never broke one and never encountered any cutting task that an Opinel could not easily perform (there are surprisingly few things in the outdoors that need cutting).

Now I've 'upgraded' to a small fixed blade for outdoors use and keep the Opinel in my briefcase for emergencies or backup.
 
jackknife said:
That's because all these 16 year old internet experts have no father or grandfather figure to teach them the way it's done. So they have to go with what they learn from video games and trash knife magazines that are the whores of the knife industry and are out to sell the latest fad cover knife of the month in the totally artificially created market. It has very little to do with reality. It's all about the tactical craze, and so called hard use knives. Never mind that thier granddadys worked the farm and built a life with a stockman or trapper in their pocket, and did whatever they had to do cutting wise with it. Now, the kids think they need a quarter inch thick blade with a massive pivot just to open the mail. It would be a huge shock to them to find out an Opinel will do what they have to do, cost a fraction of what the so called tactical knife will do, and weight a lot less in the pocket.

But that would be reality, and that's not allowed in todays knife market.
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Nice post and so true, (according to the youngsters,us oldsters obviously know nuthin') :D

These three knives are carried and used daily by myself, obviously I only use and carry one at a time:-

Top to bottom.
Opinel no.8 carbon.
Victorinox Pioneer.
Taylors Eye Witness.

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:cool::cool:
 
I use a #8 everyday. Now during the summer it's my okra knife, it cuts about a 5 gallon bucket every other day, yes, a 5 gallon bucketfull. That's a lot of okra cutting to do. :) During the winter it gets it's workout as my collard knife.
 
Joezilla said:
There is a theory that Nessmuk's fixed blade was incredibly thin, and the knifemaker's rendition of it as an all around knife could be wrong. He used the blade mainly for game processing and in camp, and used his folder mostly for wood. I'm down with thin stock.

as for the OP
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If I remember right, Nessmuk's sheath knife was a reshaped butcher knife/ sheep skinner pattern. If that is true, then I seriously doubt it was much, if any, over 1/16th inch stock. Most kitchen/butcher knives are very thin stock. Most machete's are thin bladed with blades 3/32 thick, and if there's a hard use knife in the tropics the machete must fit the bill. Yet very few machete's ever get broken, just worn away from the file sharpening. A 12 inch blade Tramontina will take more abuse than you think possible. I have grave doubts that you will find much in day to day cutting that an Opinel will not handle.

Heck, the old mountain men and later buffalo skinners used plain old Russell's Green River knives. Pretty thin blades there.
 
jackknife said:
If I remember right, Nessmuk's sheath knife was a reshaped butcher knife/ sheep skinner pattern. If that is true, then I seriously doubt it was much, if any, over 1/16th inch stock. Most kitchen/butcher knives are very thin stock. Most machete's are thin bladed with blades 3/32 thick, and if there's a hard use knife in the tropics the machete must fit the bill. Yet very few machete's ever get broken, just worn away from the file sharpening. A 12 inch blade Tramontina will take more abuse than you think possible. I have grave doubts that you will find much in day to day cutting that an Opinel will not handle.

Heck, the old mountain men and later buffalo skinners used plain old Russell's Green River knives. Pretty thin blades there.
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Nessmuk's knife matches a sheep skinner pattern just about perfectly. His just happened to have a stag crown handle but beyond that I'm pretty sure it was a lamb skinner. Great all around skinning knife. I've used one for dressing out our domestic meat rabbits (though I usually use a 5" curved boning knife) and a buddy of mine just bought one from me to use as his hunting knife and was very pleased using it in that role.

Hey Joe! How do you like that monster Opinel No.13? I've been thinking about getting one to play around with. :D
 
How do you guys sharpen your opinels? I'm trying to decide which angle I shoul use on my lansky system.
 
@ 42B: if you want to try the #13, you ought to get two. Then you can baton one with the other. You could even chain 'em together and make Opichuks! First 'woods-ninja' ever... :p :D
 
kowalski7 said:
How do you guys sharpen your opinels? I'm trying to decide which angle I shoul use on my lansky system.
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I keep mine at a 30 degree included angle, so 15 per side.

timberweasel said:
@ 42B: if you want to try the #13, you ought to get two. Then you can baton one with the other. You could even chain 'em together and make Opichuks! First 'woods-ninja' ever... :p :D
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Ogawd. Opichuks. Internet--what hath thou wrought?

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I don't tend to use Opinels much but they've a lot going for them apart from the rust and binding up problem at the pivot................... In the back when the woman I was with did a bunch of floristry come set dressing. They'd do huge displays all round the capital. To give you a sense of scale a props list for a single display could easily incorporate a dozen cathedral candles so big a grown man can't touch his hands together round them, several pounds of bamboo sticks, a hundred meters of wire mesh, mebe 50 cycle pumps or the same amount cod fish, and several Bedfords full of twisted willow, and that before the actual greenery and the flowers. These are tremendously creative people that use stuff in ways that just would never occur to a pleb. I'd be just as likely to find them slicing umpteen meters of linolium or sawing the tops of a couple of dozen road cones as I would actually doing what the layman probably thinks of when they think florist. The tools of choice always in the pocket were shears, kinda like medical scissors beefed up and a knife. I gave them Opinels................Originally I picked her an Opinel because she was not a knife lover and I suspected she'd treat it badly, also because it was a dead easy thing to personalize for someone with minimal effort [important when you see the bin not being far away]. It worked brilliantly. No need for a thin EDC handle, it's got one you can push on in comfort. The blades are thin and hard and cut really well, an ideal compliment to the handle. Of all those I gave out some were lost, a few had snapped tips from being over zealous, but most that died simply by being left in buckets to get sticky crap off the blades..................Personally, I believe what these people were doing with these Opinels shames a lot of what I see written by proclaimed knife lovers. You see those folk going ooooh I did testing. I shaved arm hair, cut a bit of string and a sandwich, and whittled a cardboard box = w00t here's my review. Apart from the arm shaving that kind of stuff formed a tiny portion of what any one of these girls would be using one for on any given day.................mmmm, I'm not disposed to these kinds for knives as a rule, and I make no secret of my lack of tolerance for non-stainless, but these worked brilliantly. Just a simple bit of 1095 at 62HRC on a stick.
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Man, the #13 is bad out awesome, especially for slicing large slabs of beef ( we butcher our own cows/hogs).
 
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