Look, you probably won’t believe me when I say I don’t really follow much of the internet scuttlebutt that we will hesitantly refer to as The Online Knife Community. I’ve got a multitude of reasons, not least of which being that during daylight hours I’m actually doing other things with my life. Yes, I know that’s just as unbelievable. But the real crux of it is that over a lifetime I’ve already had my fill of the ol’ WWW. That is to say, not the internet as a whole but rather the three overarching themes looming over literally every hobby-sphere where there really isn’t enough for everybody to say on a daily basis to keep the algorithm happy, so we wind up with a steady diet of:

• Whining
• Whacked Takes
• and Willful Ignorance

It gets even worse if you scroll into the comments.

Anyhoo, that means I probably miss out on most of the “viral” knives that bubble up through the Intertubes unless I happen to wind up with one independently and then find out about it afterwards. Even when I try for it on purpose it tends not to work out. Take, for instance, the Walmart/Ozark Trail TR2203R1-11 V2, the mid-cycle facelift and successor to the TR2203R1-11 V1, the now apparent OG, a sequence of words I never thought I would write in a million years about a fucking Walmart product of all things.

Yeah, I’ve totally got one of those. I bought it with the honest intention of writing all about it, but found myself without anything compelling to say on the topic. It’s just like its predecessor except the clip’s properly reversible now, you can also get it in green, and if you have the orange one the color is a little more vibrant. Woo! I’ll bet I can stretch that out into a thousand words. That’s another column in the books, boys. Wrap it up and print it.

Well, we’re not reviewing that knife because it’s been usurped.

This is the Ozark Trail Valor. That’s right, they’re giving them names now. Not only that, but this is a Walmart private label knife and it doesn’t even come on a stupid hang card. It comes in a real box:

I left the stickers on it for reference, and also for posterity. And for the lulz.

The Valor is one of as far as I can tell the trio of new-ish “premium” named boxed knives now available from Sam Walton’s Big Rock Candy Mountain. The Valor is probably the best deal of the bunch if you ask me, and I also saw its siblings the “Sonder” and “Nimbus” on display but left them alone. The Sonder is a Civivi-esque button locker with green G10 handles which is probably the second place contender of the bunch in the interesting-enough-to-bother-with stakes. It’s 12C27 steel, which is another Sandvik option but one peg lower on the totem pole, but the main reason I left it there is because button lockers aren’t really my forté. If anyone says they care I may pick one up later and mess with it.

For what it’s worth, Walmart is doing a crap job of marketing these. For instance, their listed names aren’t even shown on their own website, which makes them a trifle annoying to track down unless you already know what they look like.

These aren’t the only cheapie Ozarks that have suddenly sprouted names. This seems to be a theme this year with several other of the traditional crapola models typically found on the rotating coutnertop rack or tucked away down the camping aisle also sporting nametags, with such examples of the “Vertex” and “Fauna” low-rent liner lockers, “Eagle Rock” and “Forge” fixed blades, and another Axis locker with injection molded scales, the “Glacier.” At least this makes identifying the damn things in store somewhat possible for any weirdo who really wants to stuff themselves down this strange and awful rabbit hole. I snapped several quick pics of these, which you can see here, here, and here.

The old orange D2 version is still here, too. It hasn’t been given a new name and is still just another nondescript “7.5 Inch Folding Knife.” It’s also $2 cheaper than when I bought mine, damn it. I suspect my retirement fund strategy of hanging onto my unopened one until it somehow appreciates in value is probably not going to pan out anytime soon.

Look At You, College Boy

I spotted the Valor by pure chance in the glass case at my local Walmart. I always look, of course, because that’s the law and you have to. As you can see I also always cruise the cheap peg racks for anything new and interesting, or at least overtly whack and highly suspicious, either of which could be the very leavening from which the dough of content is made. And lo, this stood out to me.

It also marks the first time in my life I’ve ever gone so far as to bother to buy any non-brand-name knife from the Walmart glass case.

That’s really highfalutin’. Did you forget your roots, son? Are you gonna tell me you actually washed yer truck before you took your girl to Dairy Queen in it, too? Combed your mullet before you put on that tux, didja? Get a load of this, Bill, this guy bought his knife from the counter! They made him pay for it right there! Haw haw haw.

And yes, when I got home I checked online and discovered that the Internet already went absolutely berserk all over this knife. Every asshole with a mouth and a Youtube channel apparently had a hot take about it around four months ago and as usual I missed it.

I don’t care. The Valor is only $20 and it’s actually pretty nice.

Here’s how you identify one of these. Apparently there’s a hang card version of this as well, but you want a boxed copy. That’s because the box fully protects the article in question, whereas the hang card packaging leaves the handle exposed to get all fucked up in transit.

As usual for Walmart’s own brand stuff, the bumf on the box doesn’t really do a great job of selling you on the product. They blithely list it as a “7.5 Inch Folding Knife” in the headline which serves as no differentiation at all between this and the other crap they sell that’s not as good. The back lists a “slide lock” at least (an Axis lock to you and me) as well as a “belt clip,” once again continuing the proud tradition of misrepresenting the intended use of the pocket clip on your knife, enticing bozos to dangle it on the outside of their pants where it can get hooked on stuff and break, and then prompt the owners to moan about it.

Stop that.

It also lists the recyclability of the box (cardboard) and interior tray (cardboard) as well as an “insert,” (paper) the latter of which was MIA from mine. I have no idea if this was a packaging thing or is intended to be some manner of instructions leaflet, and in the latter case it may have been a deep well of hilarity but now we’ll never know. (The thing you see folded up behind it there is actually my receipt.)

Oh, yeah. The blurb on the back also lets slip that the Valor has a 14C28N blade.

After the Axis lock, that’s the second thing I spotted on this knife when I was looking at it in that glass case. It’s rare enough that Ozark Trail knives even admit what they’re made out of at all, let alone turn up being made out of a steel that’s actually supposed to be pretty good.

So I’ll be damned. There’s my twenty bucks down, and into my pocket this went.

The Skinny

It’s so irresistibly tempting to call the Valor yet another Benchmade Bugout clone that practically nobody seems to be capable of mentioning the thing without saying it. In terms of being an Axis locking folder with a blade of roughly the same length and thickness, I guess that’s accurate in a way.

What’s new here isn’t just the 14C28N blade but also the anodized aluminum handle scales. The Ozark Trail Axis lockers have historically already been plenty rigid enough thanks to full length steel liners beneath their scales, but this one takes it one step further.

Not to come over all like a cell phone reviewer about it, but this makes the Valor feel a lot more premium due to being denser in the hand than the previous outings. It’s 93.6 grams or 3.3 ounces overall, which is up 13 grams and some change from its plastic scaled predecessor. The injection molded scales on the prior editions were certainly functional and by no means bad, but with the best will in the world they always felt a little cheap.

Walmart calls the blade 3-1/4" but it’s actually 3-3/16" from the forwardpost point on the handle by my measure. It’s a modified tanto point and exactly 0.090" thick. The grind is very subtly hollow, nearly flat, but not quite. The open length is allegedly 7-1/2" but once again they overshot, and I measure mine at 7-3/8".

Some punters on the Internet are trying to call this a Kershaw Iridium clone. I don’t see it, personally. It’s not too tough to figure out who Walmart is trying to take a swing at here, yet again.

The Valor is a lot thicker than a Bugout, too, but if you ask me it feels nicer to handle. For some baffling reason all of the jimping has been omitted from this other than that on the back of the blade. The older plastic scaled incarnations had a Benchmade-esque strip of it on the back of the handle as well, but this doesn’t. That plus the smooth scales superficially ought to make the Valor a metal bar of soap, and maybe if you were using it in the wet or with thick gloves on it would be. For EDC use by hypothetical normal people, whoever the hell those may be, it’s just peachy. There’s nothing quite like a smooth slab of cold metal in your hand.

The blade is coated with some kind of PVD finish which is variously called bronze or copper depending on who you ask. Me, I’m calling it brown. Look, you can try to fancify it all you want but it doesn’t work. Under any lighting, in any condition…

It’s brown.

I’m not a fan of that, only because I’m not a fan of coated blades in general. I think this’d be much more boss with a bare steel blade. The previous D2 models were undoubtedly coated for rust resistance, but 14C28N is way more corrosion proof than so that’s really unnecessary here. Instead, they’ve apparently spraypainted the blade on this one specifically to annoy you once it gets scuffed up.

Or me. When I said you I meant me. (Hey, hey.)

There’s a deep carry pocket clip that they even managed to pull off right this time. Just like the previous D2 folders it’s really stiff, but in this case thanks to the smooth handle scales the draw is very nice. It’s the usual through-hole design but this time around the screws actually are flush fitting.

Well, almost. Never mind the one sticking out there. That’s how mine came out of the box, but after messing with it myself I was able to get it to go right back in and it stayed there. The clip screws are exactly as long as they need to be to sink into the liners, not one molecule more, and thanks to its bodacious spring tension the base of the clip won’t sit flat in its little mounting pocket enough to get the second screw in unless you think to mash the clip down with your thumb before doing up the second screw. Otherwise it looks like it goes in but doesn’t actually grab anything.

I choose to take this as a fantastic sign that some factory worker with cojones like cannonballs finally went and invented the concept of the Chinese weekend. Mine must’ve been made last thing on a Friday.

Either that, or they’re all like this. So watch out.

We didn’t have to wait for version two to come out in order to get a reversible clip this time. There’s a matching pocket in the opposite scale for lefties if you want to swap the clip over. You only get tip up carry, though. This ain’t no Spyderco. You also don’t get anything to fill the empty divot with.

You can’t miss the Axis lock crossbar on this thing. There it is. It looks fine, it feels good, it works. My example has perfect lockup and action. No rattle, no wiggle, no hitches, no kinks.

One thing the back of the box forgot to mention is that this totally is a ball bearing knife. That’s not hard to guess given that the last two versions were as well. Once you have a chance to play with it that’s unmistakable. But still, they could have bothered to say.

I’m really stoked about this, by the way. Not the Valor in particular, but the apparent fact that everybody’s figured out that little thrust bearings aren’t premium and they never were, so everything’s showing up with them nowadays. I’m sure some Nedermeyer will pop out of the woodwork now with a list of cons to go with the pros, but nobody cares. Er, you shouldn’t use them in dusty environments or underwater or in space! Whatever. Ball bearings are a quick and effective path to smooth opening with broadly wiggle-free pivots and that’s better than whatever cut rate bullshit the Chinese have been throwing in their crappy knives for decades. So I say bring it on. Ball bearings in everything. Let’s fuckin’ go already.

There has been much speculation and wild theorizing online about who actually makes this thing. Some extremely hopeful punters are claiming it “must” be of CIVIVI manufacture, or Kershaw, or whoever else. I’m not buying any of it. Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial Co., Ltd has historically been the manufacturer of insofar as we can tell every recent Ozark Trail and Walmart knife, up to an including the myriad Swiss Tech models and so on and so forth. There’s no compelling reason to surmise that this isn’t as well. If your uncle works in the factory or something and you’ve got insider information on it, do by all means let us know. But in the absence of that I’m calling it as the same as the previous versions, especially since the fit and finish of this, not to mention the construction methodology, is highly reminiscent of other knives in similar guises from various faceless Chinese manufacturers these days. Just to name one off the top of my head, this thing really puts me in mind of my HUAAO Bugout clone.

You can spot a shitty knife from a mile off if the blade centering is out of whack. This one isn’t, which stands to reason since it’s not a liner locker and it’s got ball bearings. But it’s nice to see all the same. So on that note, I can’t wait any longer to see what we’ll find inside it.

Giblets

Nowhere does Walmart or Ozark Trail or anybody make any mention of whether or not the Valor’s got any kind of warranty. Maybe it was on the insert I was supposed to get. Well, either way mine probably doesn’t anymore. Bombs away!

There’s stuff in here I like. There’s stuff in here I don’t like, but I’m not too surprised by. But for what it’s worth my Valor wasn’t difficult to take apart at all. The major screws are threadlockered, but they let go with a minimum of drama.

The aluminum scales are single piece machinings, and they’re made pretty well. The anodizing obviously comes after the machining and surface texturing. The outsides are lightly textured, presumably being bead blasted or similar.

The liners are plain steel. Everything is gooped up with corrosion inhibiting oil of some variety and I left these exactly as they were for this photo. But there are already tiny rust spots on mine, which is discouraging. Only the nerds and the obsessive compulsive will probably see this, but still. Would it cost that much more to make these out of cheap stainless? Or chrome plate them?

Actually, forget I said that. It probably would.

If you were paying attention you’ll have noticed that the Valor has a driverless head on one side of its pivot screw. If you weren’t paying attention, now’s your chance to pretend you were.

This caused me some trepidation initially, but I soldiered on anyway. It turns out the pivot screw is an anti-rotating one with a flat on it, and the liners are broached correctly for this and everything (for once), so no tricks are necessary to get the screw off.

Inside is the usual Axis lock arrangement. Omega springs, single piece crossbar, you know how it is by now.

What’s more interesting is the Valor’s lack of endstop pins. Instead there’s a captive pin pressed into the blade itself which runs in a semicircular track in the liners. That’s pretty unusual, and I wonder if this is some sort of patent avoidance thing, or what. Truth be told I didn’t notice that there’s no endstop pin until I took it apart and saw this. Right now is when you’ll realize that where that pin would be, in a traditionally designed Axis lock folder, instead they’ve cheekily cut away that part of the handle and left it as a stylish 45 degree chamfer.

The older D2 Axis folder did have an endstop pin, and it was cheap and horrible and not held in by anything, and liked to fall out as soon as you took the fucker apart. This is better.

The pin in the blade is apparently pressed in. It’s not coming out without a fight, probably by whacking it with a pin punch, so I left it alone.

There is also a tiny little burr on the tip of the pivot screw on mine, which made pressing it out about 2% more inconvenient than it needed to be.

The Valor uses incredibly thin thrust bearing assemblies. The balls are steel and the carriers are Nylon, so you’re not getting anything super fancy. Still, they do their job well. Presumably because of this, neither the liners nor the blade are pocketed to accept these bearings.

In fact, the bearing assemblies are so thin that they’d probably be thin enough to act as drop in replacements for the ordinary washers found in a non-bearing knife. That is, if only you could figure out where to get your hands on a bunch of these with identical specifications. Now there’s an interesting idea.

There’s a full aluminum backspacer. The lanyard hole is here as well and this sticks out proud of the aluminum scales when the knife is assembled. This is much unlike the true Bugout clones which only have little diabolo screw spacers here instead. I like this idea better which seems sturdier and less failure prone, plus it looks cool.

Here’s most of the ensemble. I didn’t take the other scale off because there’s no difference between the two sides and I’m lazy.

Per-formance

Oh boy, where the rubber meets the road. Here’s where the fuckin’ opinions always start.

Written columns like this one and, indeed, every single user written review of every stupid knife in the universe always have the same problem. A knife’s sharpness is basically impossible to accurately express in text, and so beyond exceptionally egregiously bad examples it’s really not even beneficial to try. “Real sharp,” declares every single quasi-literate chump who’s managed to figure out how to swipe at his phone’s keyboard. We should all hope so, because that’s how knives are supposed to work, innit? But these are also the same bozos who on average are likely to use the tip of their Gerber as a screwdriver or chop vegetables on a glass serving tray, so they may or may not know what a sharp knife would be like if you dropped one on them point first from a helicopter, nor be able to gather up enough articulation to cut their way out of a brown paper bag in order to tell you about it even if they did. Unless you have the opportunity to demand that any given keyboard warrior present to you his credentials before you either consider or outright discard his assessment, none of this is likely to be useful.

It gets worse when you start asking people about edge retention rather than just plain old seat-of-the-pants sharpness. Because good lord, everybody suddenly has nine different opinions and hazy half-recollected soundbytes about how this steel is better than that steel is worse than the other steel, most of which is bullshit and all of which smells a lot more like dogma than science.

So. What to do about this.

I am versed in CARTA edge retention testing, at least as far as knowing what it is and broadly how it works. But I’m not making this my job to the extent of actually ponying up the cash to purchase the requisite equipment. I’m also aware of the BESS sharpness testing methodology, which is, ah, certainly something that indeed exists. I’m too skint to get into that either, but it’s also clearly a “system” that seems to exist largely to sell proprietary consumables and that just ruffles my feathers the wrong way.

But there may be a kernel of usefulness, there. I considered this for some time, and eventually determined we can surely come up with something achieving 80, maybe 90% of the functionality and silliness of the BESS system with only about 1% of the cost.

So meet this fuckin’ thing, which is my own invention.

We’re all familiar with that Youtube staple, the standing paper cut test, right? What you do is take a piece of random paper and fold it in half, stand it up on a table or something, and then lop it in two without supporting it in order to show off to everybody how studly your sharpening skills are. And if you want to cheat, just carefully select your paper to be thinner or thicker or more rigid or whatever it is you need to make yourself look good, slap it on Tiktok, and rake in those like’n’subscribes.

This standardizes that somewhat. Instead of random paper it accepts normal square Post-It notes, which I determined by probing sheets from several packs of them with my micrometer are actually of remarkably consistent thickness. They’re also always the same size, and you can steal them from work. Perfect!

I’ve paired this with the cheap digital desktop scale I use to weigh all the various trinkets in my writeups. The BESS scale you can buy for $170 is allegedly much fancier than this, and may just at the periphery have a couple of genuinely handy extra features like locking its readout to the highest read value, which my $10 weed scale can’t do. But I’ll bet you it’s not objectively any more accurate, and we can record our stats simply enough by just pointing any of our myriad cameras and the display and taking a video recording. That ain’t too tough.

What you do is crease a Post-It into a V, stick it in the slot standing up, and place it on the scale. Tare the scale so it reads zero with the weight of the holder and Post-it on it, place it on a rigid surface, and chop that sucker in half. Note how much force it takes (I used grams) to make the cut. Just like golf, lower numbers are better.

In my head I’ve long decried the lack of hard data in our little enterprise, here. Now the flashlight guys don’t get to have all the fun.

Here’s a chart of how much pressure it takes to cleave a Post-It in twain with the Valor’s stock edge. It peaked at 127.7 grams with an average of 80.38 grams of force required. So what the fuck does that mean?

Not a whole hell of a lot, without something to compare it to. So here with the gold line is the same test done with my Benchmade Bugout, which has been personally sharpened by yours truly and not used for much (insofar as I can remember) since. It’s profiled at a 30° angle which matters because in the realm of knife sharpness goddamn everything matters. How easily a knife will cut any given thing depends on how the knife’s profile is shaped, how acute the edge is, how well it’s sharpened, and how much of that edge has been folded or chipped or abraded away in the meantime, i.e. how much dulling has occurred.

I figure this all ought to be self-evident. But you never know. There are a zillion variables to control for, and I’m going to go ahead and account for none of them. Thin skinny knives cut better than fat lumpy ones. That’s a fact. In this test, a skinny little knife will score better than a thick one. And so what if it does? That’s how it’ll work in the real world, too.

Anyhoo, what I’m more interested in as a quality benchmark is edge retention. And if there’s one thing knife bros get super hot and bothered about more than anything else in the entire universe, it’s edge retention. When we’re nattering away about a steel’s performance, this is almost invariably what we mean. “Better” steels have more of it, “worse” steels have less, and when is it worth the tradeoff for more or less edge retention for more or less corrosion resistance, or ease of sharpening, or more toughness that’ll translate to you being less likely to just snap your blade like a piece of glass? Oy, vey. We never shut up about it. Holy wars and crusades have been started over less. Ask three people about this and you’ll inevitably get nine opinions, six of which will actually be wrong because the claimant is parroting some half-remembered factoid or oversimplification of how alloys work. Two of them will just be some idiots bleating “it’s all in the heat treatment” on a loop because they’re desperately envious of everyone else’s high performance knives and trying to stave off buyer’s remorse of their own cheap 420HC blades. The ninth opinion may well be something quoting Larrin Thomas and thus actually hold some weight. But then only maybe.

And hey, Mr. Thomas says right here that 14C28N is his top pick for a budget knife steel, so this thing ought to do pretty alright.

Right?

I boldly set off to find out, and along the way I discovered a few things about the Valor and its edge.

First, I don’t have one of those fancy Rockwell hardness testing machines, either. But I do have a cheap set of allegedly Japanese graded hardness files, with which I gleefully attacked the Valor’s edge before sharpening it. Mine only go in 5 HRC increments, so what I can tell you for sure is that the Valor’s steel is between 55 and 60 HRC at the edge — not at the spine or anywhere else, which even if we had more decimal places would not necessarily result in a number producing any kind of useful performance prediction.

55 is kind of on the low end of allegedly optimum hardness for 14C28N, and the high range is 62 which is higher than what my files imply it is. So if one thing is for certain the actual value can’t be up there. It’s possible that the Valor’s heat treatment leaves its steel on the soft side, I suppose, but without more precise equipment it’s difficult to be sure. I can tell you that a truly catastrophically bad heat treating job would have been immediately apparent, registering on the next grade down’s file (50 HRC) and it seems that’s not what we’ve got on our hands here. So that’s hopeful.

While we’re at it, here’s what the edge looks like as received right out of the box. This is a pretty typical factory edge grind for a not-too-expensive knife. The Valor has no ricasso at the base of the blade, and there’s an equivalent of a choil back there even though there’s no stop pin or mechanical reason for there to be one. Regardless of the reason, the edge runs all the way from the tip to the base.

Except.

The thumb stud on this puppy is non-removable. Oh, I’m sure it gets mounted at the factory by screwing its two halves together, but the stud hasn’t got anywhere to insert any kind of bit driver on either side of it, and even if it is a threaded assembly it’s definitely glued together as well. You could attempt to grip this with padded pliers and probably not succeed, or simply clamp either side in a duo of Vise Grips and possibly succeed but definitely mar the finish. I decided against either strategy and left it alone.

But that means with where the thumb studs are positioned relative to the edge, and how tall they stick up, it’s going to be quite annoying to sharpen all of the Valor’s edge all the way down to the base at a shallow angle without also striking the studs with your stone and scuffing them up. You could do it with some manner of rod sharpener perhaps, or with a bench stone if you held the thing at rather a rakish angle with the stud held out in space. I couldn’t be bothered with either.

The tip is acceptably pointy, and as usual for a cheap tanto pointed knife the edge angles between the main grind along the length of the blade and the secondary section of the edge up at the point are not quite the same.

The edge trueness isn’t bad, but it’s still not the same angle on either side.

To get a known starting point, I dutifully clamped the Valor into my Ruixin sharpener and bullied its edge down to a consistent 30°, 15° per side. I went down to 2000 grit on my diamond stones, and then lightly finished up with some DMT 0.5 micron diamond stuff on a strop. Here’s what that wound up looking like:

This is down near the base of the edge, so notice the unsharpened bit all the way on the right hand side. That’s the short section of the edge that was blocked by the thumb studs, and is maybe a shade under 1/4" long. I could have messed with this further. I decided against it.

While I was at it I discovered that a short portion of the edge down near the tip, and only on one side, is dished. You can see as it catches the light that the edge isn’t straight and there’s a small wiggle in it. Not anymore; I ground this out along with everything else.

After sharpening and polishing down to that 30° angle, the Valor’s cutting performance increased dramatically. Although, you’d bloody well expect it to.

That’s the red line there. The blue one is the data from the factory edge. On the first cut it required only a maximum of 55.5 grams of force to cut a full Post-It, and an average of only 39.94. Yowzer.

Now what? Well, we need to see if it stays that way after cutting a bunch of stuff.

Spoiler: It won’t. No knife ever will.

Plain old corrugated cardboard is a cheap and abundant cutting medium, especially at this time of year. It’s also shockingly abrasive, as anyone who cuts a lot of boxes in a day can tell you. Using it to dull your knife in a consistent manner is dead simple, just prepare some sheets of it in a consistent width — I settled on 12" — and get to slicing. If you want quicker results, be sure to cut against the grain of the corrugations. Or, if you’re a little diaper baby who isn’t confident of their sharpening job, you could cut along the grain instead and have this take a lot longer.

I pitted my Valor against the obvious competition, a Benchmade Bugout, in what ought to be superficially at least much more performant S30V. After ten rounds each of hackin’ and whackin’ in 12" increments, i.e. ten linear feet of cutting, I took a reading at the scale. But because I ran out of cardboard, I only did this twice per knife.

The Valor diminished to needing an average of 70.94 grams to complete its cut test after 10 rounds of cardboard, and 113.09 grams after 20. The Bugout, meanwhile, started off before any cuts at an average 48.21, dulled to needing 56.11 after 10 cardboard cuts, and 83.78 after 20.

The blues are the Valor and the golds are the Bugout, and if you’re colorblind I’m very sorry but I can’t help you with that. The numbers don’t lie, the Bugout started off requiring slightly less peak pressure to complete its cuts and remained sharper longer than the Valor did. Maybe that’s to be expected considering the much fancier steel, but the other thing to keep in mind is that a Bugout costs nine times more.

At the end of the day the Valor lost a lot of its peak sharpness but still wound up being about 74% as sharp as the Bugout at the conclusion of the test. Both knives are still objectively sharp at the end, being able to shave off arm hairs with only a little more noticeable effort required with the Valor. If you absolutely need your knife to remain 26% better at cutting cardboard over time, is it worth a 900% premium in price? If I keep going, will the gap widen even more?

I don’t fuckin’ know, you tell me. I ran out of cardboard in any case.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Oh, and while we’re at it, this is what the cardboard cutting test did to that brown finish on my knife:

All this is permanent. I mitigated it somewhat by scrubbing at it, but it’ll never go away. However it came out of the box is as pristine as a coated blade will ever be, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to keep your stuff looking nice this is going to piss you off forever.

Not that I’d know, or anything.

So here’s the thing. Up until now, every Walmart knife has come with the same kind of apology preattached to it. You know how it is. Yeah, well, it’s only ten bucks, or seven bucks, or even five bucks. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, right? It’s not a proper knife, so what can you expect?

This doesn’t.

The old advice is evergreen, but to the point that we’re all getting sick of saying it: It’s great for what it is, but if you’re willing to spend just that little bit more you can get something better.

Well, now I don’t think you can. Not anymore, anyway. The mic has well and truly been dropped. Gauntlet, flung down. Treatise, nailed to the cathedral door.

For $20 you’re going to be hard pressed to get your hands on a blade made of 14C28N, let alone in an Axis locker, and with ball bearing pivots. That makes the Valor a hell of a deal even with its baffling design decisions that piss me the hell off.

So now its in a category where I don’t know what the hell to do with it. All I want for Christmas is two things: Sell it with a bare uncoated blade, maybe tumble finished if you can afford it, and put some Torx heads in the thumb studs. I think that’s all they’re going to have to do to break the whole damn internet.