Knives & EDC

Steel is a trade, not a ranking

Knife steel gets discussed like a leaderboard, and it is not one. Every alloy trades three properties against each other: edge retention, toughness, and corrosion resistance. Push one up and at least one of the others comes down. That is metallurgy, not marketing.

In practice this means the budget steels most people already own — 8Cr13MoV, 1.4116, 4Cr13 — are easy to sharpen, rust slowly, and go dull faster. The mid-tier steels that show up around the $30 to $60 mark, mostly D2 and 14C28N, hold an edge noticeably longer and are more work to bring back. The premium powder steels, S30V and S35VN and MagnaCut, hold longer still, and the first two will fight you on a cheap pull-through sharpener.

The honest conclusion is that steel choice should follow how you sharpen, not the other way around. If you own a guided system and use it, premium steel pays off. If your plan is a $10 pull-through in a kitchen drawer, D2 will frustrate you and 14C28N will not.

The lock matters more than the blade shape

Blade shape is mostly preference. Lock type is not. A liner lock and a frame lock are simple, one-handed and proven, and they wear over years of use — you can feel it when the lock bar creeps further across the tang. A back lock is stronger in the direction that matters and slower to close. Axis-style locks are the easiest to operate with either hand and have the most parts to gum up with pocket lint.

Whatever the type, the test is the same and takes five seconds in your hand: open it, hold it firmly by the handle only, and give the spine a light tap against your palm. If the lock shifts or the blade closes at all, that knife is defective and goes back. That is a check we describe rather than a test we ran — we have not handled these units, and we are not going to say otherwise.

Weight decides whether you carry it

The single most useful number in an EDC listing is the one people skim past: weight in ounces. Around three ounces, a folder disappears in a pocket. Around five, you notice it against your leg all day. Above six, most people stop carrying it within a month and the purchase was wasted regardless of how good the steel was.

The same logic runs through the rest of the section. A multitool you leave in the truck has a functional score of zero. A flashlight that needs a proprietary cable you do not have is a flashlight you will not charge. When we score carry weight and everyday practicality separately from cutting performance, this is why: gear that stays home does not count, no matter what the spec sheet says.

Two brands worth knowing about, for opposite reasons

There is a brand series running through this section covering Microtech and Ridge, and the two pages could not be less alike in what they conclude. Microtech makes the out-the-front automatic everything else gets compared to — and Amazon does not carry them at all. Running every model name through the same product API that prices every button on this site returns replacement screws, aftermarket sheaths and unrelated folders, and not one genuine Microtech knife. So the brand guide covers the lineup, the federal and state law on automatic knives, and what to buy instead, and it links nothing.

Ridge is the opposite case: fully available, fully monetized, and the interesting problem is the pricing rather than the product. At the last price check the identical aluminum wallet ran from $69 to $95 depending on the colorway, with a team-licensed carbon fiber version $25 above the plain one. Nothing about the wallet changes across those listings. Open every colorway before you buy, and take the cheapest one you can live with.

The connecting thread is the same test this whole section runs on: what does the money actually buy, and would I spend it myself. Sometimes that answer is a four-hundred-dollar knife bought direct from the maker, and sometimes it is a fifteen-dollar wallet that does eighty percent of the job.