I will admit that my 'default setting' as it may be is the old scout knife. My dad gave me one when I was a kid and joining the scouts, so it became very ingrained into what there was of my mind. That scout knife saw me through my adolescence and misadventures and high school graduation. Not long after I enlisted in the army and picked the Engineers for the purpose of posable learning of a trade that was usable afterward. I didn't think at the time that there would. be much call for snipers, sentry removal, or blowing bridges in civilian life.
Lo and behold, the army in its infinite wisdom issued me a scout knife. They didn't call it a scout knife, but a MI-L-K-818D, knife, pocket utility type. It had plain steel handle scales with a pattern stamped into it, but it was a scout knife for all intents and purposes. One spear shaped blade, screw driver/bottle opener, can opener, and awl. It even had a shackle for attaching a dummy cord so it wouldn't get lost. A scout knife by any other name.
I carried that MIL-K-818D knife through a tour in the Southeast Asia fiasco some call the Vietnam war, and it was good. Then in Germany, in a little knife shop in Rothenburg, I discovered SAK's. My world was never to be the same again. There were big SAK's, little SAK's, and I left the shop with a small assortment of SAK's. A huntsmen, a Pioneer, and a secretary for just slicing.
It didn't take long to find out that I didn't like the huntsman. I didn't really need a saw, and it was too think for my fatigue pants pocket. The pioneer was just like my scout knife and my MIL-K-818D. It got to be my first pick of pocket knives. But what annoyed my about the huntsman was the back tools. The awl was like floppy. if you leaned to much into the drilling motion, it moved over to the other way a bit like it was unstable, for lack of a better word. It just didn't work out as well at its intended task as the inline awl on the pioneer. And it's position on the knife didn't make it work as well as an alternate cutting edge like on the pioneer. The corkscrew was just okay, as I'm not a wine drinker but stick to beer and/or whiskey. Just didn't need a corkscrew that bad.
Then I discovered the tinker. I liked the tinker, it had an extra knife blade, and still had an awl even if it was on the backside. I thought the dedicated Philips driver would be handy, and it was for light duty, but soon I discovered a flaw. A potential fatal flaw.
I'd bought a slightly used 1966 VW bug. The former owner was another young soldier that was shipping out and he sold it. I was getting his old plates off he car and the screws were a bit rusty. I was using the tinker and a small pliers. As they were rusty, it was hard to unscrew them from the nuts on the back of the plate mounting, and had to put some elbow grease into it. Halfway through the job, notice a weird feel in the tinker as I twisted, and found out the Phillips driver was now having almost a quarter turn of 'slop' in the tool. The pin that was holding it had twisted and deformed and pushed out the liners and had almost had come part under the twisting torque. Not good.
This was all a longtime ago, and I'd almost forgot why I had a slight mistrust of tinkers. Yesterday I get a call from my grandson in California, and in the course of conversation he told me about a project he was working on with a friend, and his tinker was being used. Some wood screws being put into some treated lumber for the outdoors had done the some thing. The fatal flaw in the design had got Ryan's tinker. He noticed the slop before it got too bad, and finished the job using the larger flathead screw driver/bottle opener using the inner corner like it was a combo tool. The flathead used that way suffered no damage.
Apparently the back tool pivots are notably weaker than the regular tools, let alone the tool rivets on the alox models like the pioneer. So with the awls not as good as the inline, and the Phillips driver being a weak point, why bother with back tools? I think about the few decades of steady use my old Wenger SI has stood up to, and I have no complaints, and its never suffered any damage in spite of me asking more from it that it was designed for. Like the army issued MIL-K-818D, it seems pretty bomb prof.
Maybe the Boy Scout knife had it right in the beginning.
Lo and behold, the army in its infinite wisdom issued me a scout knife. They didn't call it a scout knife, but a MI-L-K-818D, knife, pocket utility type. It had plain steel handle scales with a pattern stamped into it, but it was a scout knife for all intents and purposes. One spear shaped blade, screw driver/bottle opener, can opener, and awl. It even had a shackle for attaching a dummy cord so it wouldn't get lost. A scout knife by any other name.
I carried that MIL-K-818D knife through a tour in the Southeast Asia fiasco some call the Vietnam war, and it was good. Then in Germany, in a little knife shop in Rothenburg, I discovered SAK's. My world was never to be the same again. There were big SAK's, little SAK's, and I left the shop with a small assortment of SAK's. A huntsmen, a Pioneer, and a secretary for just slicing.
It didn't take long to find out that I didn't like the huntsman. I didn't really need a saw, and it was too think for my fatigue pants pocket. The pioneer was just like my scout knife and my MIL-K-818D. It got to be my first pick of pocket knives. But what annoyed my about the huntsman was the back tools. The awl was like floppy. if you leaned to much into the drilling motion, it moved over to the other way a bit like it was unstable, for lack of a better word. It just didn't work out as well at its intended task as the inline awl on the pioneer. And it's position on the knife didn't make it work as well as an alternate cutting edge like on the pioneer. The corkscrew was just okay, as I'm not a wine drinker but stick to beer and/or whiskey. Just didn't need a corkscrew that bad.
Then I discovered the tinker. I liked the tinker, it had an extra knife blade, and still had an awl even if it was on the backside. I thought the dedicated Philips driver would be handy, and it was for light duty, but soon I discovered a flaw. A potential fatal flaw.
I'd bought a slightly used 1966 VW bug. The former owner was another young soldier that was shipping out and he sold it. I was getting his old plates off he car and the screws were a bit rusty. I was using the tinker and a small pliers. As they were rusty, it was hard to unscrew them from the nuts on the back of the plate mounting, and had to put some elbow grease into it. Halfway through the job, notice a weird feel in the tinker as I twisted, and found out the Phillips driver was now having almost a quarter turn of 'slop' in the tool. The pin that was holding it had twisted and deformed and pushed out the liners and had almost had come part under the twisting torque. Not good.
This was all a longtime ago, and I'd almost forgot why I had a slight mistrust of tinkers. Yesterday I get a call from my grandson in California, and in the course of conversation he told me about a project he was working on with a friend, and his tinker was being used. Some wood screws being put into some treated lumber for the outdoors had done the some thing. The fatal flaw in the design had got Ryan's tinker. He noticed the slop before it got too bad, and finished the job using the larger flathead screw driver/bottle opener using the inner corner like it was a combo tool. The flathead used that way suffered no damage.
Apparently the back tool pivots are notably weaker than the regular tools, let alone the tool rivets on the alox models like the pioneer. So with the awls not as good as the inline, and the Phillips driver being a weak point, why bother with back tools? I think about the few decades of steady use my old Wenger SI has stood up to, and I have no complaints, and its never suffered any damage in spite of me asking more from it that it was designed for. Like the army issued MIL-K-818D, it seems pretty bomb prof.
Maybe the Boy Scout knife had it right in the beginning.
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