The 2014 Blade Show is over.
A sick laptop prevented me from reporting from Atlanta,
GA. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll
review some of the highs and lows of Blade.
But here’s a taste.
While not the providence of the Blade Show, one has to
reflect on the Cobb Convention Center. I
will say that if the standard of Atlanta is poor service, the Cobb lived up to
it. The adjoining hotel was overbooked,
so everyone associated with the show had to check out Sunday morning because a
new convention was arriving that day. The
breakfast area in the hotel, which was open only for a rather nice, but
expensive breakfast, was torn down and under construction. I don’t know where hotel guests ate breakfast. I was lucky. I stayed off-site and will again.
At the Cobb Convention Center, the escalator down to the
poorly staffed and unorganized food court was partially broken. You could get down, but not back up to the
show. The elevator for wheelchairs and elderly
was also broken. If there were stairs
they were well hidden. So you had to
walk out of the building, around to the front, reenter the building and take
the (soon to be also broken) lobby escalator up to the show floor. Despite it being Friday, no evidence of
workers was present.
The restrooms were poorly managed. Several restrooms off the beaten path were
clean and quickly locked once the staff discovered people were using them. Fortunately there were no riots over toilet
paper. In the hallways there were no places
to sit, except in the one-way food court, and most of the meeting rooms with
chairs were kept locked. Soon people
sprawled on the floor and leaned against walls.
I spent so much time on my feet that they felt like sore marshmallows
every morning despite icing them down in the evenings.
What about the Blade Show, or am I going to just bitch about
the facilities?
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| The VIP line 3 hours before the show opened! |
The first thing you need to understand is there aren’t many
changes you can make to a knife. A knife
is basically a sharpened edge and a handle.
Normally some way of protecting the edge from the environment and your
fingers is included. The two most popular
ways are a sheath and folding/retracting the blade into the handle. Most manufacturers use one or both of these
methods. But not always. Busse Knife Co. sells all their knives sans sheath. Just a cardboard tube to protect you from the
edge.
Given this basic concept it quickly becomes apparent that
most if not all the tables have some variation on this, like everyone else.
The differences become apparent in the types of material
used, the skill of the craftsman, the artistic vision and the execution. Truly originally ideas are rare.
The next most exciting thing to see is the positioning of
each company in the knife market. For
example:
Kershaw has purchased several designs from Emerson. It’s always best to talk to people on Sunday
at Blade. By then they’re tired and
often the true story, or at least part of it, is told. More on that later. Just know that:
- Emerson’s CQC-7 with Wave retails at $225
- Kershaw’s CQC-7K with Wave retails at $60.
Spyderco reports that more and more countries are banning
friction folding knives as well as locked blades. The slip joint market is
growing. New designs like Spyderco’s
PITS (Pie in the Sky) by British knife maker Mike Read show promise. Mike’s design is such that the more pressure
you place on the spring while cutting, the harder it is to close the blade. Was this a purposeful design feature? I asked Joyce Laturi about that. Joyce suggests, “…People decide to do what they can within the
letter of the law so they can carry a knife…”
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| Still waiting! |
Are you a criminal?
Maybe not, but you could soon be an outlaw. The domestic ivory ban, President Obama’s
directive 210 makes it illegal to sell ivory harvested before the 1980s ban
passed by Congress. While the directive
is focused on elephant ivory collected after the ban, enforcement is given
sweeping powers to declare you guilty and force you to prove your innocence. While the US Fish and Wildlife service stated
in Sept 2012, “...Illegal ivory in the U.S. was not significant,” they are now working for the “virtual elimination of all commercial trade
in elephant ivory,” according to Dan Ashe, Director USFWS. You’ll being seeing more on this later.
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| CRKT Imported Knife of 2014. It's a nice knife! |
I learned how to turn an impossibly dull knife into a
workable dull knife with 'mud-on-a-stick.' I'll have more on that too!
The Blade Show isn’t about knives. That’s just the excuse. It’s really about people and their knives.
