I don't blame them... they are knife shopping and seek consumer reviews. We should have some W&SS testing/review threads. Perhaps I am wrong but I never saw the W&SS Challenge threads as a "What's out there?" venue. I saw it as a put up or shut up challenge. There wasn't too many makers floating around in W&SS at the time and we wanted to see what they can do. The problem was that we did too good of a job and caught the attention of many users outside our subforum. Which is really a good thing. By the time we hit the Bushcrafter Challenge we had folks who have never stepped a keyboard into W&SS following along. It's awesome and we should keep doing stuff like that... but I don't think it is in the spirit of the "CHALLENGE" as some of the makers/members saw it. I can only really speak for myself.
Rick
Greets from Jamaica fellows!
I guess Rick's message above hits the gist of it. I think, first and foremost, the W&SS contests were always about the makers rather than the consumers; albeit it is hard to argue that there have not been spin-offs to the benefit of makers receiving good exposure and to consumers able to buy great designs that have undergone vigorous review.
Still, the main point of the contests was to provide side by side comparisons of multiple designs by multiple makers of custom knives with a common set of purposes in mind. The best such contests had 'no-mercy' reviewers who stated the facts without pulling punches which provides the kind of feedback that a maker rarely gets from their customer base. There have been a few cases, as my understanding lies, where makers didn't take too favorably to some of the harsher criticisms given that their entry was supplied at no cost and at the maker's expense of shipping. That said, others have indicated that they learned substantially from the process and the feedback helped them focus where to improve their craft. Any maker who thinks they have nothing more to improve on has probably lost their love for knife making. So I really think this should be centric aspect of the contest even though I selfishly posted otherwise in the original thread. Keeping the creative juices flowing means that our makers must be challenged to do different things even if it is at odds with consumer demands....Who knows, maybe one day you guys will get a challenge to make really good Robinson screwdriver that doesn't slip and doesn't strip?
Now from the consumer side of things, I think we users gain a great deal of insight about what different makers think about application/design when contrasting their ideas across knife contests. The best challenges are those where there is great differences in the look and specs of models and the reviewers have to come up with some set of grading criteria across the tasks. Even though the contests are usually geared towards an 'over-all winner', I think it is highly instructive to see who are the winners in individual task-contests and how that relates to aspects of the knife specs. So I say consumers really do win on these contests even when the contest objective is different then our everyday carry tastes or what we tend to bring with us in the bush.
The sharpened prybar has been an object of ridicule in W&SS for as long as I have been a member - but that was after the sharpened prybar phase was really cresting its peak on the production scene and then following the Noss controversies in bladeforums as a whole. When folks talk about sharpened pry-bars now, it is pretty much a niche market relegated to a small number of custom makers and semi-production companies. People have generated pre-conceptions, many bad drawing from the above mentioned history on the forms, but they also have their rabid fans steeped in the hype and closed community that they occupy themselves with. So in the end, this could be a very interesting challenge. Part of the curious (and somewhat nasty side of me) would like to see how a production knife (or two) of this type thrown in as a control would perform. That might strike unwanted contraversy and perhaps not fully fair to the company in question since they do not get to design their blade ground up tailored to the contest like the makers are doing here. However, if the makers would like, I would offer up a little token knife (Son-of-Dogfather) to be sent along with Rick's knife for some testing with the creative makers here.....lets say, just to put some things to rest.....After all, I really do enjoy stirring the pot sometimes, but even if this is decided as a bad idea, I think I will enjoy the ride on this contest.
p.s. I really wish we could get B. Andrews as a reviewer again. He has a nice fancy new shop now and lots of padlocks to pry open!
I'll shut up now....Gotta go out and get some jerk chicken, before I jerk some chicken.....
