What country makes the best blades?

esav benyamin said:
countries don't make blades, companies do. Ownership and manufacturing facilities often differ. Quality and utility within each company may also differ -- a lot, sometimes.

The question is too complex to be answered by a general geographical reference.
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bingo
 
I say USA among the custom knives, Japan among the production knives, especially the kitchen knives.
 
I don't think you can make an accurate blanket statement about blades and countries but I have been impressed with quite a few Japanese steels in various tools.
 
I am on a Scandanavian kick right now myself. Hard to beat Roselli and Mora...opposite ends of the price spectrum...or far apart anyway.

The Mora #780 is just about the best knife value there is and maybe the sharpest knife made at a factory.

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if you consider the huge amount of custom makers in u.s. then certainly we are champs . however there are japanese & russian & german individuals that take a back seat to no one.really esav probably says it best.
 
Agreed. One of the nicest knives I've seen (as in IRL, not over the Internet) was a knife made by a Chinese smith. He was really proud of it :)
 
They're all pretty good from my experience and hard to tell the difference anymore
these days. I got some US and Japan and China made Spydercos which are all pretty
much on par with one another in terms of fit/finish/quality.

My CRKT Stainless/framelock Drifter feels like a $100 knife and is one of the best built
knives I own to date. It's from China and was less than 20 bucks. The standards are
certainly changing for the better which is a good thing for us knife junkies.
 
DennisStrickland said:
if you consider the huge amount of custom makers in u.s. then certainly we are champs . however there are japanese & russian & german individuals that take a back seat to no one.really esav probably says it best.
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there are plenty of excellent custom makers the world over. (eg dave budd and bernie garland, both UK makers)

I think the US's prominence in the field comes from a combination of your greater population, economic development, wideness of available markets, and excellent communications.
greater population leads to a greater pool of people to become knife makers, and a greater potentiall buying public to support them.
economic development has the effect that more people can afford high-end custom knives, allowing custom makers to make a living, or be able to afford the hobby of knife making.
the wideness of the markets is best exemplified with the "tactical knife". compared to the UK and other european countries, the US has a far more developed market for millitary, law enforcement and self-defence equipment, allowing for this new style to develop.
finally communications cover both the internet ect, allowing makers to advertise, and with the larger knife buying public of the US, for word to spread. it also covers the internal communications whithin the country, allowing anyone within the country to order the makers work, where makers in less developed countries might only be able to serve a fairly local area, with any further trade quickly loosing their attached name.
 
in the high performance kitchen knife arena japan holds the overall crown atm but like like any country there is absolute garbage being sold as well. As other countries adopt the standards by which the good japanese makers manufacture blades to I would expect it to get quite interesting. The keys are the really good blades are very hard and pretty much waif thin. They are like the heroin waif models of the knife world but that is a good thing when trying to get a piece of steel through a varied medium like food.


I buy knives from wherever there is a knife I want. Hell some of my favorite knives are customs from canadian knifesmiths. There are maker in many countries firing off outstanding cutlery these days.

applying a ranking based on nationality is shortsighted at best due to the ever evolving world of knives and the intermixing of cultures. As has been said most places will have people who make a good product and those that don't.
 
my $0.02:

1: Japan
2: Sweden
3: Russia
4: USA
5: China

however, all of these countries have also made exceptionally bad knives at some stage.
 
All countries are capable of making excellent knives. I just tend to buy American for personal reasons that are independant of the quality of said sharp pointy things.
 
I don't remember exactly whether it was Bob Loveless or Bill Moran, but one of them in a book on knifemaking described a centuries old Persian dagger as being beyond the skills of any maker alive today. :eek: Of course, that was a different time, but just goes to show it's a wide world of great blades. :thumbup:
 
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