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| The Rosecraft Appalachian Jack has the best walk and talk ever. |
People
who review knives have a tough job, there isn’t a whole lot to a knife. But they
need to provide useful information and also to fill up the page/video. A two
sentence review won’t cut it. Thus, they often cover critiques of a product’s more
trivial aspects. One of these trivialities in traditional knife reviews is
known as “walk and talk.” It’s an evaluation of the pull and noises made by a
knife when being opened and closed. The triviality of the “talk” seems to have grown
into a serious consideration of a knife’s overall desirability.
I do like a snappy knife, even the ever-levelheaded Jon Gadget recently referred
to the walk and talk in a Kansept Bevy as “strangely
satisfying.” My Rosecraft Appalachian Jack is a personal favorite and has a great sound,
though I use my virtually silent Rough Ryder Working Man Stockman more often at work because it has a pocket clip. Function trumps sound.
Sometimes
sound matters. I remember, years ago, a friend was reading a gun magazine and
laughing. I asked what was so funny, and he said an advertisement for Ninja
Suits with Velcro pockets. “Can you imagine,” he chuckled, “a ninja spending hours
stealthily stalking his target only to pierce the silence opening his 80 decibel
Velcro pocket?”
It is
useful to go back to the basics. A knife is a thin slab of metal with a
sharpened edge used for cutting. The first knives were fixed blades and made no
noise at all. Today, fixed blade knives are often considered the bestest and toughest
knives available, but they still make no noise, nor are they hard to pull from
the sheath. Why would anyone want a knife that’s hard to deploy?
But the traditional folder is often rated superior
if it is not only noisy, but difficult to open. This aspect is not as trivial
in that I won’t buy a knife with a hard pull, to quote Colonel Stonehill,
“…the world as it is, is vexing enough.” And yet many rate a hard pull as a
virtue. The fellow on Baxter’s Blades,
a man with common sense, usually, has come to the conclusion that all knives
should have hard pulls and the reason they don’t is because of old men and their
delicate fingernails. I would like to see some proof of this, maybe a study
from the Institute of Old Guys or something, I know my own nails have toughened
with age. Nevertheless, I will not take a knife with a hard pull to work. It’s
not that opening it once is so bad but opening it many times throughout the
day can get irritating. The problem is compounded by the fact that many knife
reviewers are nice guys who don’t want to consign a knife or its maker to the
infernal regions, so sometimes they gloss over a knife’s drawbacks. They mean
well, but you have to read between the lines, such as when a reviewer says a
knife is “a little hard to open,” BEWARE.
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| The Rough Ryder Working Man's Stockman isn't much on walk and talk but is a superior work knife. |
