Remember the 1980s?

stabman said:
The 1980s remembers you.
I remember the days of bins full of "Survival Knives" in drug stores for $5 each.

Guess what?
This one survived.

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My friend has had it since we were kids in the 80s.
He brought it out to the woods...and we survived! :D
(we didn't actually use it though...)
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I had one of those, ordered late one night from a TV ad, probably after watching music videos. Then I had a slightly more robust hollow handled knife with a steel handle with survival tools inside I had purchased from Hudson Bay outfitters clothing store. After that, got my first Swiss Army knife. There is a progression there, as I earned a little more money.😁
 
Still have mine, circa 84 with most of the original handle contents. The days of going to the local flea market with $12 at 11 years of age and walking away with a 6" fixed blade are gone I suspect.
 
crom said:
Still have mine, circa 84 with most of the original handle contents. The days of going to the local flea market with $12 at 11 years of age and walking away with a 6" fixed blade are gone I suspect.
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Maybe not, occasionally when you hit some flea markets, or old antiques malls, you find the old carbon steel kitchen knives in carbon steel, thin edges. Like Old Hickory, they are hard to find at times if not totally worn. If you have some skill, you can reprofile it with Dremel tool or give it new handle scales. And some old SA knives or buck knives and all the inexpensive copies.
 
Got my SAK Spartan back in the 80’s as a wedding party gift. Carried it for the better part of 40 years, right up until the pandamndemic had me working from home. That was the end of daily knife carry, but also the end of a miserable daily commute. I’ll take that trade off every time. But I digest - the Spartan is surely showing the signs of wear, sharing pocket space with keys and change for all those years; it’s on its second tweezer, but the big blade is still mostly all there. It’s retired to the knife drawer now, but it could easily resume duties if needed.
 
A guy I knew in college also was using an Aitor Jungle king II when he went hunting.
 
I was still floating around in the family jewels in the 80s so I wouldn’t know.

I do enjoy seeing 80s era knives around here. 😁
 
DangerZone98 said:
I was still floating around in the family jewels in the 80s so I wouldn’t know.

I do enjoy seeing 80s era knives around here. 😁
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I am so sorry, we were kind of messed up back then……yuppies and big hair and all. And don’t forget the music videos. At least check out Silverado, a good western with a lot of famous actors at the time. One of the worst but I enjoyed too was the original Blood Sport with Jean Claude Van Damm, sort of a bloody version of the Karate Kid. You also cannot go wrong with Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan, and Star Wars and Indiana Jones. So I guess you had some good movies. 👍
 
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Yeah, but I also like some of the slow stuff from the 70s, my brothers were older than I so I appreciated more music, but I liked Billy Joel and Chicago.
 
DangerZone98 said:
I LOVE 80s MUSIC. Heh, most of ‘em anyway.

Bon Jovi, Asia, Phil Collins, Wham, George Michael, Toto, Poison, Jim Steinman. Best era of music hands down.
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D DangerZone98 , you're Wanted Dead or Alive after that comment. You might even be Shot Through the Heart because for the rest of today I'll be Livin' on a Prayer while I'm Blessing the Rain down in Africa. LOL! You just Went to the Danger Zone!

I now have a playlist for the drive home this afternoon. :)
 
I remember the 1980s as that period where the Bowie knife gave some ground to the Survival knife, just before the Survival knives faded and we had a mess of Tanto knives. As films like the Iron Mistress faded, newer films like First Blood and James Carvel’s Shogun mini-series (which was a major network TV event) took its place. Long before the turtles, Shogun helped to inject the word Ninja into popular culture.

This was the height of the Cold War; so fighting, survival and patriotism were constantly on everyone’s mind.

I first came across the Bladeforums while searching for the U.S. distributor for Aitor Knives. Catoctin (the US importer) had gone out of business, and their knives were becoming scarce. Aitor was then a military contractor for the Spanish military, and were supplying Oso Blanco-style knives to their army, navy and special forces. I believe the Jungle King II had also been issued to some units. They were good knives but the Oso Grande’s pommels were weak and could not be used for hammering.

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N2s
 
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Man that thing brings back memories. I can remember a time when a very similar one never left my hip except for when I was at school. Built so many palm frond forts with that thing, and truth be told I got just as much enjoyment out of it as I ever have any of my knives costing hundreds.
 
My dad still has the Survival Knife I got him back in 1982 (or something like that) from V-Mart for $5.
He loaned it to me to get some pictures of it:

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Batonned a slot in the wood with the ESEE 5, then lightly tapped this knife in place. ;)

Here it is with a genuine Survival Guide from 1980:

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It is still 100% complete! :eek:

The only thing I did was add the 3 tiny hair elastics to hold the baggie of survival items closed, since the elastic from 1982 disintegrated when I carefully pulled the bag from the hollow handle:

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Here is the compass, front and back:

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My dad actually carried this on a company plane (a Twin Otter) in the early 1980s when flying into northern Alberta. It was carried as a genuine survival knife.

Then, he brought it to Peche Island in 2010, along with myself, our fellow forumite kgd, and Joe, the guy who competed on Season One of Alone 5 years later. :cool: We had a table filled with many, many hundreds (thousands, possibly) in dollars of knives laid out on the table, but the only one we all wanted to play with was that 1980s survival knife.

So, it has been carried as an actual survival knife, and been in the presence of survivalist celebrity.
How many of your fancy modern knives can claim, that, eh? :D
 
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The 1980's was my heyday for knives. I had already started collecting Gerber but when I graduated college and started working as an Engineer I got into Al Mar, Benchmark, Pacific Cutlery, Blackjack, Randall, Brend, Spyderco, Timberline, Cold Steel, SOG, etc. etc.
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