Why No Gerber Love?

Mystery steel. I'd like to know what I'm getting, and paying money for.
And if Gerber are afraid to tell me then it can't be much good.
 
I think all of the above responses are true. And like some of the other knife makers.... (ahem!) there better be a close eye kept on the factories they choose overseas to make their knives. To me, that was the beginning of the end for Gerber.

Who can keep up with the knives and their names? In the 70s - 80s, I used to buy GERBER knives because they were GERBER. Period. You knew you got a good knife. I have a couple now, and they are still great knives, made by Seki in Japan.

I don't want to keep up with a lot of different makers so that I can buy one knife from them and it is fantastic, and another and it is junk. (Think of the comments on Boker, here on this forum.)

I would like to think of a quality maker as a quality maker, not a quality maker of one particular model or another. I bought a large Paraframe thinking it would be the ideal work knife when I paint as I can just drop the whole knife in thinner or solvent to clean it.

It was made of steel softer than a butter knife, and needed sharpening constantly, even for a work knife. Worse, the pivot worked loose religiously every week, so it had to be tightened or it would work open in your pants.

I replaced it with another of the same model after having been advised I probably got a bad one. Same thing, different day. I could have bought a nice knife for the dollars, plus the time and effort to go back to the store twice to return the knives.

There are too many nice knives out there to worry about buying a crappy one.

Robert
 
The sad reality is that some of the "Made in the USA bygod" companies have gone to pot in the same manner, producing knives that in some Case's are duller than your dullest butter knife, lacking any QC to put the "Made in the USA" tag on the blade, but producing utter junk to meet the markets price points.

Not to single anyone out, because they still make good knives in some Case's.

I've seen some good knives come out of China. That's just reality.
 
Puma and Gerber once made (60's - early 80's) some of the best production knives in the world - unfortunately, most of what they put out today is a disgrace compared to what they made in their heyday.

Here's a couple of great old high quality Gerbers I bought back in the 70's.(folding sportsman w/stag and a Gerber Magnum) Pay no attention to the Bear & Sons sidliner knife in the middle - it was an impulse by on the fleabay. :D

DSC00336.jpg
 
audiopile said:
Coincidentally I handled a couple at the local Cabellas this weekend. Lots of blade play - end of story for me. Daily user for me for years was the LST - great knife. Probably gave away 10 of 'em as gifts over the years.
As a veteran of the stereo biz - it has always amazed me how long a good name can be abused before it looses all value.
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Same here....gave 2 or 3 LSTs away as gifts, still got one around somewhere (probably in my wife`s purse :-) Haven`t purchased any Gerbers since around 1980, so I guess the ones I have are "good ones". Right now, next to the keyboard, I`m looking at Gerber Guardian (Bob Loveless design), first production run, serial # in the 002800 range, complete with optional hideout harness & sheaths....also, a Bolt-Lock folder, nice, simple drop-point design, full flat grind,sharp as a mofo, locks up real tight, and then there`s a mystery piece, looks like a Mk II with a 5-inch blade, with a half-serrated swedge on top (anybody know what this is ?)

P.S.: I`m also a veteran of the `70s Stereo Wars....the name "Fisher" springs immediately to mind as per your reference.... :-)

P.S.S.: I *still* kick myself in the ass for never buying one of those original, beautifully-crafted Paul knives from Gerber back in the mid-`70s....(sigh)
 
I had a 5 inch skinner from back in the early 90's. Back when they were still made in the USA.

Even back then, I was not at all impressed by the edge holding. I have no idea what steel it was, but it seemed I had to sharpen that thing all the time, with very minimal use. It would go from hair popping sharp to dull in just cutting a few sticks for roasting mallows.

I have always been unimpressed with their Applegate Fairbain (sp) folder. One of the flimsiest handles I have felt in a "tactical" folder. It was like almost cooked spaghetti. Some stupid knife sales man tried to tell me that the lock was the strongest in the world, and that it would hold 2000 lbs!!!!!!! I picked it up and showed him the flex both laterally and vertically in the lockup possible with just finger pressure. He took it back, tossed it back in the display and walked away without saying another word about how it was the greatest folder in the world.
 
"...mystery piece, looks like a Mk II with a 5-inch blade, with a half-serrated swedge on top (anybody know what this is ?)..."

it's probably the Gerber Command I
www.militarycarryknives.com/SimilarKnives.htm#CommandII
 
GIRLYmann said:
"...mystery piece, looks like a Mk II with a 5-inch blade, with a half-serrated swedge on top (anybody know what this is ?)..."

it's probably the Gerber Command I
www.militarycarryknives.com/SimilarKnives.htm#CommandII
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Thanks much for that info....it definitely cleared things up. The knife was made from `79 to `81, this one is tool steel, and there were 15,000 of them made, which probably makes it a little on the rare-ish side....
 
PayetteRucker said:
Because they are crap
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I'm going with Payette on this one. Yes they once were good knives but now they are terrible. and "400 series" steel?? What the world is that?! That's like several different options that the steel could be. Some of their USA made knives like the Gators are ok, but other than that Gerber's not worth it.
 
jackknife said:
There is a lot of myth thats kept going about Fiskars, mostly by knife snobs.

The Fiskars factory has a history going back hundreds of years of making iron and steel products. They make some of the best axes, saws, and puuko's used by lots of sportsmen in Finland. With the amount of Finn's that are hunters and fishermen, Fiskars would not stay in business making bad stuff.

Gerber got a bad rep by making some of thier stuff in China, and that stuff is junk. But the Gator line, and the LST line and a few other products are good stuff. I worked with some non knife nuts who beat up those cheap little LST's in the machine shop where we worked, and they held up fine and cut good.

I've tried several brands of folding saws for the outdoor emergency kit, and the sliding blade Fiskars/Gerber is one of the best I've tried. My Gerber hatchet is several years old, has been used a ton, and is still going strong. The Fiskars fillet knife I have has cleaned enough fish to feed an army. No problems.

Yeah, Gerber makes some junk, but they also make some very tough servicable knives. The edge holding of the steel is about as good as a sak, Case, or most of the other factory stainless steel knives of the 440a series in that price range.

The reason Gerber was bought by Fiskars, was that under Pete Gerber they were stagnating. He wouldn't modernize the line. Thats why Pete Kershaw and Al Marr quit and went thier own way. Gerber was foundering, Fiskars kept them from sinking. Pete Gerber had no choice but to sell as he'd mis-managed the company.
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I will grant you that Fiskars makes some good products. I will even stipulate that it is possible they put the Gerber brand name on some of them. But I must say that comparing the recent production Gerber knives I have purchased in the last ten years to the older Gerber knives that I have owned for twenty years or more would not make a very convincing argument to that effect. I have no desire to squat by the product line and pan for nuggets of good in a flowing stream of crap. From what I have seen available in this neck of the woods, I wouldn't say that Fiskars kept them from sinking. They only prevented the name from dying with dignity.
 
If they're now owned by Fiskars, that's all I need to know. I've had poor performance from Fiskars shovels and loppers and will not buy anything from them again even if their hatchets seem okay.
 
Mystery steel, poor fit and finish, sloppy action, clunky designs, hair-brained designs (folding hatchet? really?), and just about everything is bead-blasted. Bead blasting is a big pet peeve of mine. Not only does it increase susceptibility to corrosion, but it's usually done to hide surface finish flaws, so it's kind of a cop-out. :(
 
J_Curd said:
I still have an EZ Out from the early 90s. Good knife.

The edge retention on everything I've seen in the last 10 years has been poor.
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I had an EZ Out in the early 90s as well, and carried/used it everywhere for years. Now, one of my good buddies has it, and it's still going strong.
 
There's very few select folders that I like from Gerber, but it is terrible to have to weed out the good ones. I don't mind their fixed blades though, I have the Gerber Big Rock and Freeman Hunter and they do their job. I don't expect my fixed blades to hold a hair whittling edge (that's what my high end folders are for ;)) so they hold up for fine for batoning, and looking half descent :p
 
Howdy,

I have a Taiwan made Gerber Freeman Fixed Blade Hunter that I liked, but wanted a better steel. So this summer, I bought a USA made, S30V Stag handled fixed blade version.

I am disappointed. The quality is actually quite a bit better on the Taiwan blade. The USA S30V stag version quality is quite low.

The shape of the blade is not even uniform from side to side - IE the flat above the hollow grind is deeper on one side than the other, the relieve bevel on the top of the drop point is longer on one side than the other. The edge itself is to centered in the thickness of the material. All the corners are rounded, but not uniformally the same radius. Even flat areas are not completely flat. Very disappointing!

As a rough use knife, it works. It was one of two knives I used to skin my bull elk a few weeks ago. It did get pretty dull, however, and really needed a complete sharpening afterwards. The other blade I used, a custom made from a planer blade (D2 tool steel) was still sharp after skinning and only required stropping to bring it back.

All in all, compared to the older Gerbers I own, even the USA made Gerbers are very poor!
 
You have to put these things into perspective. By that I mean the perspective of the end user. 20 years ago, Gerber knives were of high quality, made in Oregon and the cat's pajamas to people who knew knives. I have a 20 year old Gerber in my pocket at the moment.

With the purchase by Fiskars, there was a change in target customer. The target was no longer knowlegeable knife knuts but rather people with little or no knowledge of knives - people with a lower budget for their cutlery. It has been successful. We certainly sell more Gerber knives than we did prior to the Fiskars acquisition. But it is fair to say that they aren't going to collectors or connoiseurs of cutlery. They are going to people who just want a knife to cut things.

But more interesting to me is the mystery of why some companies do well with imports while others do not. CRKT, of course, were really the innovators of providing well designed imports. They have been copied by nearly every other knife company in the country - some successfully and some not so successfully. Buck, as an example, has never been successful with its imports. I don't know why. Their imports have been as good as anybody else's. But they have finally given up importing for the most part. I think that's positive but leaves the question. Why didn't it work for them? Boker, on the other hand, has done amazingly well with well designed Asian imports in their Magnum and Boker Plus lines. Back when I sold Benchmade, I did pretty well with their Taiwanese models. Spyderco hasn't done as well as some. The Byrds - which are as good as any other Chinese knives and better than most, have never been strong sellers - at least on the internet. We know it isn't the designs because the regular Spyderco designs sell just fine. Gerber has done well with imports but only by changing the target market.

This has always been a mystery to me. Why does it work for some, but not for others?
 
yablanowitz said:
Some of us old geezers remember Gerber from the 70's, when they made some of the best knives around, and I for one feel they are worse than dead. The name has been sold to a company more interested in making a buck than making good knives.
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Exactly. I've had a 2 or 3 each of the Gerber BMF, LMF, and Yari knives (among other well-made Gerbers) back "in the day". Now, I'd rather buy (cheap) Smith & Wesson knives than Gerber.
 
I guess the point has already been made in this thread that when it comes to Gerber knives, the place of manufacture is more important than the Gerber name.

Their mainland China knives aren't very good at all, their Taiwan knives are decent, their Scandinavian and USA made knives are generally pretty good for the money.

But none compare with the quality USA made knives of the 70's upon which the company built its name and reputation.
 
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