What's your favorite handle material?

WE Knife Media

WE Knife Media

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Nov 14, 2019
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July new releases to the market,new to your daily!
What's your favorite handle material?
1.-Green micarta CIVIVI Cogent
2.-Twill Carbon Fiber CIVIVI Cetos
3.-Cuibourtia Wood CIVIVI Thug 2
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Micarta is generally favorite. Some textures can get clammy in humidity but they all hold up better than wood in damp conditions.

I do love wood. I've been happy with your Cuibourtia Wood across product lines. I'm also a fan of Olive Wood, Osage Orange, and Goncalo Alves.

G-10 and Titanium are good. Either of the above materials with titanium hardware is a win. I like carbon fiber for inlays but not as a primary scale material. I hate aluminum. I tolerate it on flashlights but it feels cheap to me on knives. I'd honestly rather have FRN versus aluminum.
 
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The green Micarta is really nice. One of my favorites. But the Cuibourtia is also classy (less threatening)… fitting for a different environment like the workplace.
 
A lot of CIVIVI’s Micarta feels almost like G10. I have a new green Micarta Cetos coming and have a black Micarta Cogent and it’s very hard, smooth and plastic’y feeling. Some of their other Micarta (what they usually call Dark Green) has a nice, softer, more grippy cloth feel to it. Even their crazy budget line SENCUT has a couple of knives I own with the “good” feeling soft Micarta.

I wonder why the differences? More resin in the hard/smooth stuff?

Kaiser does some of the same things with their Micarta. I recently got one of their new “Denim Micarta” knives and the Micarta was rock hard, smooth as glass and shiny. Um, I thought I was buying a softer, cloth’y feeling Micarta… I actually returned it. I own budget Kaiser Micarta knives that have that wonderful soft paper/cloth feel.
 
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KVT said:
A lot of CIVIVI’s Micarta feels almost like G10. I have a new green Micarta Cetos coming and have a black Micarta Cogent and it’s very hard, smooth and plastic’y feeling. Some of their other Micarta (what they usually call Dark Green) has a nice, softer, more grippy cloth feel to it. Even their crazy budget line SENCUT has a couple of knives I own with the “good” feeling soft Micarta.

I wonder why the differences? More resin in the hard/smooth stuff?

Kaiser does some of the same things with their Micarta. I recently got one of their new “Denim Micarta” knives and the Micarta was rock hard, smooth as glass and shiny. Um, I thought I was buying a softer, cloth’y feeling Micarta… I actually returned it. I own budget Kaiser Micarta knives that have that wonderful soft paper/cloth feel.
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Micarta is an extremely diverse material depending on the type and finish.
 
The Micarta on my two Cogents is literally as hard as a rock. Hopefully the Cetos, coming in a couple of days, will be a little more softer & grippier.
 
elde66 said:
The Micarta on my two Cogents is literally as hard as a rock. Hopefully the Cetos, coming in a couple of days, will be a little more softer & grippier.
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Just got my Cetos yesterday. It’s not much better.
 
elde66 said:
Bummer….but thanks for the heads-up. I’ll lower my expectations. 😕

Edit: No more Civivi Micarta for me!
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Don't mistake style for quality here.

There are different types of Micarta and each can be finished in different ways, from soft and fuzzy to slick and shiny. It all depends on what was chosen for a particular model.

A good recent example of "soft and fuzzy" from WE is their Sencut Neches. It's a good basic folder in 10Cr15CoMov (Chinese VG-10). The simple ergonomics, slight forward curvature, and softly finished Micarta make it wonderfully comfortable in hand.

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BTW, here is an example of smooth and glassy Micarta from today's carry, the Bark River PSK EDC. Compare it to the Micarta in the above photo. If you took the soft and fuzzy Micarta on the Sencut Neches and polished it up, you'd get something a lot like this:

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^^ I carry a SENCUT Honoris quite a bit with the same soft n fuzzy - great knife.

I think we “get” that Micarta takes all forms depending on resin content and other factors. Problem is I think we’re all expecting certain things based on pictures and past examples of the same manufacturers. There’s very little way to tell from a picture and spec sheet what we’re going to get. There needs to be a grading or scale system for Micarta in the specs. I just return knives if the Micarta isn’t what I was expecting and I know others do the same. This costs the manus and resellers money - you figure they’d come up with a solution. Even using the words “Soft Green Micarta” or ‘Hard Black Micarta” in the specs/description would be an improvement.
 
KVT said:
^^ I carry a SENCUT Honoris quite a bit with the same soft n fuzzy - great knife.

I think we “get” that Micarta takes all forms depending on resin content and other factors. Problem is I think we’re all expecting certain things based on pictures and past examples of the same manufacturers. There’s very little way to tell from a picture and spec sheet what we’re going to get. There needs to be a grading or scale system for Micarta in the specs. I just return knives if the Micarta isn’t what I was expecting and I know others do the same. This costs the manus and resellers money - you figure they’d come up with a solution. Even using the words “Soft Green Micarta” or ‘Hard Black Micarta” in the specs/description would be an improvement.
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This is a good point. There is certainly a lot of confusion and ambiguity, and it probably does cause a little headache between customers and dealers.

I had posted what is hopefully an easy comparison, where a similar type of Micarta is finished two different ways. The polished example from Bark River is obviously shiny and glassy. The fuzzy example from Sencut looks fuzzy but even there, seeing and feeling are two different things. There are even differences in what constitutes "soft" or "fuzzy".

For instance, look at these. My Kizer Mini Begleiter is soft and fuzzy and I can feel the grain of the fabric. This custom from Dirk Pinkerton is soft but less fuzzy and I can't feel the grain of the fabric. (Both use a similar type of Micarta to that glassily polished example from Bark River.) Then there is this example from Bestech that uses a different type of fabric with a tighter weave. It is very soft and but people might argue over whether it counts as "fuzzy". (The fuzz is much finer, like on a well-worn T-shirt.)

Coincidentally, the difference between Micarta and G-10 is that the "fabric" in G-10 is a woven fiberglass.


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KVT said:
^^ I carry a SENCUT Honoris quite a bit with the same soft n fuzzy - great knife.

I think we “get” that Micarta takes all forms depending on resin content and other factors. Problem is I think we’re all expecting certain things based on pictures and past examples of the same manufacturers. There’s very little way to tell from a picture and spec sheet what we’re going to get. There needs to be a grading or scale system for Micarta in the specs. I just return knives if the Micarta isn’t what I was expecting and I know others do the same. This costs the manus and resellers money - you figure they’d come up with a solution. Even using the words “Soft Green Micarta” or ‘Hard Black Micarta” in the specs/description would be an improvement.
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Well, you were correct sir. The Cetos, an otherwise okay knife, (but somewhat heavy thanks to the steel frame) does come with the slick, smooth G10-like Micarta. I’m going to try to “rough it up somewhat” with a file. No more Civivi’s bought in the future without an actual example to examine.
 
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