You will find many negative opinions about most things. If you want to form your own valid opinion buy one and make up your own mind. You can always resell it very easily.
The Sebbie is an exceptional knife but at the price, not for everyone.
However you cannot form a valid opinion until you at least see one and handle one yourself.
If cutting and utility are your only criteria for buying a knife then the Sebenza will never be for you.
I could catch the bus to work but I would rather drive myself in a Maserati....
How on earth you can make that statement or an informed decision having never ever seen or handled one is beyond me.........
Good for you Jill for trying it out and making an informed honest decision.
You know now beyond a shadow of doubt that the knife is not your cup of tea and you moved on.
To have a negative opinion about a knife you have never even seen or handled........That's just wrong
First of all, I never expressed an opinion about the quality of the Sebenza except to say that I would not appreciate the level of craftsmanship and the difference in fit and tolerances. You claim that I'm "uninformed" in making that decison, but I ask you why I should have to handle the knife to decide that slightly better tolerances than knives I can get for much cheaper is worth the extra money. I also don't need to be informed to know that the tolerances on a Sebenza can't be that much better than on a Benchmade or a Spyderco because +/- .0005" is already an insanely precise tolerance. I have all the information I need to realize that paying any extra for tigther tolerances is not worth it to me.
So why would I need to hold the knife to know that the design of it isn't for me? I already know that I'm not concerned with sharp corners, and even if I was it's not as if my Benchmade has any so, why exactly would I need to take a look at a Sebenza to realize I don't need to invest in one for this?
The idea that a person can't possibly make a decision about whether a knife is for them without holding it is pretty silly, and especially when you're talking about knives that aren't even carried in a lot of areas--millions of people make decisions to purchase knives without ever holding them. Bottom line though is that I really don't need to hold one to know that it's not worth the money based on my standards of value, because I probably wouldn't even spend $200-$300 on a folder, that's more money than I'm willing to spend on a knife regardless of its quality.
To make another analogy, I would spend a little extra to drive a Lexus instead of a Toyota, but that's all I need; I wouldn't even entertain the idea of spending a couple hundred grand on a Ferrari, because to me the strive for the utmost quality of craftsmanship is not my top priority. Having a good balance between quality and cost is more important to me, and so when we're talking about the contrast in quality between Sebenzas and offerings from other production companies like Benchmade, Spyderco and Kershaw, I know from handling those knives that the Sebenza could really not do much to impress me more in the area of quality that these knives could. I don't need to be any more informed than I already am to realize this, and to insinuate that I can't form an opinion like that without holding it is to suggest that the knife would somehow have some instant quality imperceivable to me until holding it that will instantly redeem itself. In reality, if there is a difference in tolerances between Sebenzas and a normal production knife, then as I said earlier you'd need to measure it to actually be able to appreciate how much tighter the tolerances really are.
To put it another way, if you spend $50 on a production knife from some more economical company like Buck or Case or someone like that, then you can expect to see a very large difference in quality when you spend $200 on a higher end knife from Benchmade, Spyderco, Kershaw, etc etc. A lot of the improvements are in material, a lot of them in things like tolerances and fit and finish, and by the time you get down to it you can get a G10/S30V knife from Benchmade machined to +/- .0005" tolerances that will be significantly finer crafted than many other offerings to compare it that are of a lower price. However, when you then take that Benchmade and compare it to a Sebenza, how much difference in quality can you really see? Many knives use the same materials in a Sebenza, and ultra precise tolerances, with very exceptional fit and finish... How do you even rate such things and say that they're better on a Sebenza, how do you quantify it? When you do, is it in direct proportion to how much more you're paying for it? If you spend $200 on a knife instead of $50 and get +/- .0005" tolerances instead of +/- .005" tolerances that's significant; if you spend $200 on a knife with +/- .0005" tolerances, and $400 on one with +/- .0001" tolerances, is that extra $200 in any way worth that very small amount of extra precision? Can it even compare to the leap of precision from the $50 to $200 price?
When it comes right down to it, the only things that I've heard of about the Sebenza are materials, tight tolerances, good craftsmanship, and there are just too many other companies that can claim the same thing. What follows is simply conjecture that Sebenzas are just so much smoother than any other, and so much tighter and snug and all of these assertions. At the end of the day though, it's all subjective and opinion, and I doubt most people can actually gauge the difference in any of these qualities between their Sebenzas and other high end knives. Then once again, if they could somehow quantify it, would it in any way be proportionate to the difference in price they paid?
Simply put, I don't really need to have held a Sebenza to be informed enough to know that the possible difference in quality is very minimal in respect to the price difference. For some people, price is no object, and they see the very little increase in quality as worth it no matter what the price. On the other hand think that to put down over $400 on a knife, that it should at least be a custom, and even then I wouldn't be able to justify that expense personally unless I had come into a lot of money.
Anyway, I already said I'm not trying to trash the Sebenza, I'm really not even forming an opinion on it as a knife. The opinion I'm forming is that I really don't think the increase in quality is worth the increase in price, and that's really contingent on my own subjective views of just how much quality is worth. For me, when you get down to tolerances like you can get on Blue Class benchmades, that's already far beyond "good enough", and spending anymore on a knife to get finer craftsmanship is just not up my alley. You can really apply this opinion on the majority of high-end knives that are priced in the same range as a Sebenza, but what I'm mostly focusing on is just the actual, quantifiable, tangible difference in quality, and no one even seems to be able to offer straight up fact for that as opposed to conjecture.
I mean, Sebenza's have tight tolerances... What are they specifically? I'm not saying, "The Sebenza isn't actually well crafted," I'm mostly saying it's not as good as people say it is because instead of actually giving real details of why it is so good, they often just say things like, "You just have to hold one to appreciate it." What I mean by saying I wouldn't appreciate it if someone sent me one is that: I wouldn't have paid a cent for it, I would have absolutely no other reason for seeing it as a commendable knife other than its actual merit. For me personally, I just can't see how the craftsmanship of a Sebenza is actually good enough for me to go, "Wow, this is leaps and bounds better than this Benchmade/Spyderco/Kershaw/whatever," when I really wouldn't be able to perceive the difference in quality, and I don't think anyone really can. How can you perceive the difference in tolerance at that kind of precision? How can you talk about, "Well, these are tighter fits," without busting out a pair of calipers and measuring dimensions? By that point, when you have to use precise equipment to quantify the actual difference in quality, is the difference in said quality really equivalent to the difference in price?
Let's just get right down to a specific example...
I've heard people trying to point out the very "fine" details of craftsmanship in a Sebenza, and one person pointed out the space between the blade and the liners being very small, and it being dead centered. It got me curious, so I measured my Benchmade with my calipers, and they're both .010" of space. So, what is it on a Sebenza? Let's say it's .005" just for example, and it's perfectly centered as well. Does that mean .005" is better? The blades are both centered, so there's no advantage there... So why exactly should I find the Sebenza to be of much higher quality based on this?
I just think that there's too much talk of, "Well, the Sebenza is the smoothest opening, tightest, snuggest piece of craftsmanship I've held, I'm selling all my knives for one, and if you don't think that it's the be all and end all of knives it's just because you haven't held one and can't possibly be enlightened until you have." As much as my opinion on it being over-priced is irrelevant as the value of a dollar is anything but objective, I think it's hard to argue that there's a lot of people over-rating the Sebenza. I mean, it's as if a Sebenza was gold and all other knives are lead, instead of other knives just being slightly lesser grades of gold.
