There is something very compelling (to me) about the sodbuster pattern slipjoint. It is old (some say back to the Romans but that seems very suspect) and very utilitarian. A good working knife. It was compelling enough to Case Knives they got a trademark for “Sod Buster” and built a whole line of knives around it.
If you’re interested in one telling of the history of the sodbuster pattern, this video is informative. (I have no way of verifying accuracy however.)
I’m pretty sure Case also popularized the yellow synthetic handle. At least enough that others copied from them. Imperial/Schrade* certainly did.
The Imperial Sodbuster, or as it’s affectionately called “IMP22Y”, is an inexpensive knife to be sure. I purchased it a year and a half ago during a brief “how close can I get to $10 and still get a good knife” phase. (See previously reviewed Watchman and Duratech.)
In terms of matching the sodbuster pattern and the classic yellow handle it gets high marks. It claims to be 7CR17MoV steel and it cost $7.99 at the time. After that everything goes down hill.
Out of the box a few things were noticeable:
- the brass pivot and pins came pre-tarnished, with obvious green rings around each one, staining the handle.
- the grind was pretty far off
- very stiff opening with a pronounced gritty/grinding feel. There is no need for a half-stop with this knife because every part of the movement could be considered a stop. This is not a knife that will accidentally close on your fingers. This is a knife that will barely close at all.
It’s this last part that gets us back to the title of this post. For you see, that gritty/grinding feel was not left-over debris from manufacturing, but indeed, is the rounded tang of the knife blade and the back spring slowly but surely grinding itself to death.
As best as I could do with the macro function on my phone (and some cropping) you can see the pivot end of the knife. You can clean the knife to perfection and within a few times of opening and closing it, you’re left with a mass of metal shavings and a shiny knife tang. I have no idea if they are wearing equally or if one is going to “win” but in the end we all lose with this knife.
Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail, is meant to represent infinity and the cycle of life.
This is not Ourorboros. This is more Pizza the Hut.
The knife sits on my desk as a reminder of the fact that no matter how bad something can be, there’s always a way it can be worse.
- (The muddy history of Schrade and Imperial knives is probably best left to Wikipedia.)
As an aside, I’ve moved accounts from lemmy.world to piefed.world. I have no idea how this is going to post to the community. sorry in advance for any weirdness.
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Your knife converting itself to iron filings like that probably is indeed due to one of the components being much softer steel than the other, and if I had to hazard a guess I’d say the blade steel is probably much harder than the backspacer. The latter may not even be hardened at all.
If you really gave a rat’s ass you could attack both of them with one of those graded hardness file sets and figure out which one is softer, but that’s probably putting pearls before swine given that even a knockoff set of one of those is around ten times the cost of this knife. Other than pure curiosity I don’t think there’d be much benefit, and nothing you learn would be any more functionally useful than already knowing that this thing is apparently crap.
That point profile is the worst I have seen in a long time. It’s almost an achievement all by itself in how awful it is. I’m almost feeling nostalgic over it. It’s just like I’ve gone back to when I was a lad, pawing over the rows of lousy Pakistani cutlery on the tables at the local flea market back in the day.
If you really gave a rat’s ass you could attack both of them with one of those graded hardness file sets and figure out which one is softer
Hey, any excuse to buy something new and probably single use for my needs is good enough for me. 😆
It’s just like I’ve gone back to when I was a lad, pawing over the rows of lousy Pakistani cutlery on the tables at the local flea market back in the day
I know the feeling. For me it was a store in a tourist town that was just wall to wall crappy weirdness. In the back was a glass case with knives even a gas station would think twice about carrying. And of course I just stood there wishing a large bag of money would drop from the sky so I could buy them all.
Did your $10 knife phase ever have a real winner?
Welcome to piefed btw!
Of the 3 folders, the Duratech is the runaway winner. I did get a decent fixed blade as well but it hasn’t been put to the test. Thanks for the welcome!
Looks like there’s no way to include a thumbnail when posting from piefed.world. That’s a bummer.
