Your favorite worn-out knife

[not2sharp]

As a whole this members here are careful with their knives and try to maintain them in excellent condition for as long as possible. However, eventually knives do wear and will get to the point where they should be retired. This happens especially swiftly with commercial sharpening services that aggressively grind away knives and are more interested in selling additional product than maintaining knives or when the uninformed user tends to habitually sharpen their knives with a powered grinder. As much as those cases are regrettable, the results can be interesting and often when I come across one of these well used (abused) knives I wonder where it has been and why such a well worn tool is still among us. Clearly, someone had found a use for it or it would have been trashed long ago. So lets see some photos of knives that have been drastically worn down and are barely recognizable.

Here is a quick example that I plucked from the internet:

n2s

 

[not2sharp]

This is the only example that I own. It may have originally been a Green River style skinner. Obviously, whatever markings may have been on the tang are long gone. It is still sharp.

I came across it at a flea market and couldn't stop starring at it.

n2s

 

[K.O.D.]

Well worn, yes, worn out, not really. I have an old SOG X-ray Vision mini from 99 that is no longer really a tanto after many sharpenings and poor sharpening skills. I keep it in a drawer for nostalgia of my days as a 20 year old mall ninja.

Clip broke, and Sog no longer makes the clip for the first gen models. They changed the clip design in 05 I believe and doesn't fit mine.

 

[killgar]

The closest I've come to wearing out a knife is this one. It's a little Valor brand lockback that I bought from a friend back in around 1981. It was a treasure and I carried it everywhere. I lost it twice, away from home, but we were reunited both times. It saw a lot of use, so much use that the lock wore out. Now it's a slipjoint.

Originally the knife had white micarta handles with brass handle pins, but the micarta turned dingy yellow, and green corrosion from the pins bled into the micarta, it looked horrible so I replaced them with some random black plastic I had that was the proper thickness and had texture. One of my first knife mods. I attached the handles with super glue, and all these decades later they're still on there (that stuff really works).

As far as my other knives, I wish I could wear them out, but I just don't have that much cutting to do (almost none these days). I always feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of something when I use it to the point of wearing it out, and I don't really like the idea of my belongings "outliving" me.