Hello knife people, I (very much not a knife person) have been suckered in by dual_sport_dork’s posts and am finally biting the bullet and buying one of those knives. I know approximately nothing about knives except what weird knife Wednesday has taught me, which is mostly how to shit talk cursed knock-offs, so I’m hoping for some advice on how to stick the landing of my jump into this hobby.
I’m trying to buy HUAAO’s Bugout 535 ripoff, and this knife-buying-experience is off to a rocky start because the Amazon link on dual_sport_dork’s writeup tells me shipping isn’t available to my region. Maybe this is just seller-related, maybe these knives are illegal in Canada, I don’t know and to be real honest I don’t give a fuck. I found knivesprecisionedge.com, which claims to be a “trusted store” and “100% issue-free” - sketchy as fuck, honestly. Has anybody else used this site? How bad am I about to get scammed?
Assuming they’re at least somewhat legit and ship me this knife, and that it makes it into the country, is there anything I should know about owning a knife like this? Care tips, how not to use it, anything like that? The main thing it’ll be used for is as a camping knife, if that matters.
No help on the company, I’ve never run across them.
But, when it comes to your knife, you gotta learn to use a decent sharpening method if you’ll be using it while camping. Even good knives can end up duller than dammit doing camp work, and a damascus knife isn’t usually top pick for steel in situations that require high toughness. Like, if you’re only doing light work like cutting up food, gutting fish, maybe trimming some twigs for fire starting, anything will do. But for much else, you’ll want a stone like the worksharp field sharpener, and a little practice before you actually rely on a knife for real work.
Now, avoid pull through sharpeners unless you enjoy bad edges and damaging the tool you paid good money for. Shouldn’t use powered sharpeners either, they take way more effort to set up to not damage a knife than they’re worth unless you’re buying something water cooled.
Otherwise, keep it dry when not in use, keep it lightly oiled with mineral oil in the moving parts, and on the blade when stored. Damascus tends to be more rust prone than even regular carbon steel sometimes, better safe than sorry with oiling the blade.
Don’t hanmer things with a knife. Don’t stab a lot of harder things, no matter how tempting it is to just jam the point into a log sp you can grab it easy while working. Ideally, don’t let any part of your body cross the plane of the blade during use, opening, or closing (though that’s more knife safety, which you probably already are familiar with. If not, holla and I’ll give that basics of that).
Tbh though? I’d pick up a cheap Mora for the bulk of the heavy work, and save the one you’re talking about for light duty. A morakniv companion is about twenty bucks on the low end, new, and under 30 usd anywhere that isn’t a ripoff. Tough as hell, maybe a tad difficult to sharpen until you get used to the grind, but holds an edge through a day of medium duty work with no issues. Folding knives, even the best of them, tend to make compromises in terms of utility at camp so they can be folding. Won’t matter much if you won’t be doing a lot of wood work though, so it isn’t necessary to have a fixed blade for camping, I just prefer it overall.
Plus, even in strict places, a mora type of knife tends to be so obviously for utility that any but the most asshole of officials won’t bother you about it, even with the stricter of Canada’s laws I’ve read about. But that’s whatever, not really a major factor in picking a primary camping knife.
Damn I really appreciate the tips, thank you! I probably should have mentioned in the post that I’m looking at the other “color” of the knife on that page (the 440C one) and their site just doesn’t have a convenient way to link it lol. Hopefully that’s slightly more practical than the damascus? It’s definitely gonna be for light work (food and campfire wood mostly) but I’ll probably need to sharpen it eventually anyway so thanks for the tips on sharpening.
I’ll pick up some mineral oil - that’s really good to know. Is 440C any better in this respect?
The morakniv sounds good, but the folding is important to me cuz 90% of what I need from a knife is just easy portability.
Thank you again for all the advice, I really appreciate it!
440c is often underestimated. My main knife back when I was survival camping and doing stuff like building shelters was an old, huge bowie made of 440c. Damn thing was tough as hell. You could literally chop a small tree down and while it might be duller than when it started, you could still chop up plenty more, and never get a chip or bend in that blade.
Again, a folding knife can’t do that. But if the 440 on theirs is even halfway well made, you won’t have to worry about the blade taking damage from reasonable use. Nor about rusting unless you abuse the hell out of it, then leave it covered in sap and water. Since the hardest use you’ll be putting it to is kindling from what you said, it should do just fine in all regards.
Even bad 440c tends to at least not snap under use. It’ll bend, but not snap. Since the softer heat treatment methods also mean it’s easier to sharpen, I can’t say I’ve ever objected to that configuration in a beater knife. Wouldn’t want to have to sharpen a ton in the field, but it shouldn’t need more than a touch up by the fire in the evening with the kind of use you have planned, no matter how soft they ran it.