My knife passion began at the age of about 5 years I guess because as long as I can remember I was fascinated by knives. My father hunted quiet a lot when I was young and I always went with him and it seems that I often competed with our hunting dog as to who retrieved a shot rabbit, pheasant, duck or pigeon faster.
I was introduced to knives naturally because they were needed to clean downed animals. My father didn't use fancy knives and the only "fancy" knife he owned was a German nicker a typical drop forged stainless slim blade with an antler grip and a sheath that just fitted around the blade. A hunter carried this in a special knife pocket of his hunting pants.
I inherited this knife and although it has been used a lot and is not worth that much for me it's a link to "times gone by".
Since about 10 years I've started buying quality knives directly in the USA mostly through colleagues that worked in the USA. The knives I acquired I would have never bought in Holland because they are just to expensive over here.
I love folding knives the most because I can carry these on a daily basis to work without people noticing. At the moment I have folding knives from Spyderco, Benchmade, Microtech, Chris Reeves, Opinel, Cold Steel, CRKT, Al Mar and a bunch of SAK's from Victorinox and a few from Wenger.
The fixed blades that I have are mostly production knives with 2 exceptions being a Hill Knives KCT002 Military Survival knife custom made by Frans and Albert van den Heuvel (father and son) who are well renowned Dutch custom knife makers. The KCT002 has been tested and adopted by the Dutch Commando Troops, it is made in ATS34.
The other knife is made to my design by Chuck Hallberg in CPM440V and has a 4.2" blade with an hollow grind and Desert-Ironwood grip plates fixed with mosaic pins. The design is almost a copy of Ray Mears personal outdoor knife the only difference being the use of a hollow grind on the blade and my blade having a tapered tang. Chuck build this knife for about half the money that the Ray Mears knife costs and uses better materials and very nicely figured desert Ironwood.
The rest of the fixed bladed knives I own are from:
Cold Steel; Master Hunter in Aus-8, SRK, Kobun and a Bushman knife.
Camillus; Talon Talonite knife and an original Pilot Survival knife
Benchmade; Nimravus
Tom Mayo; Small Bird & Trout knife
Busse;
I sold the lot because after many months of waiting for my Zero Toleranc 3 knife
set and the personal promiss from Mr. Jerry Busse himself to see to it that I
would get very good finished knives, as he would check them himself! I still got
3 badly scratched and below par finished knives. When I complained about
it I got a threatening email from the man himself.
In the future I'll buy from real custom knifemakers like R.W. Clark, Rob Simonich, Tom Mayo, Chuck Hallberg or Trace Rinaldi.
These knifemakers, will not send you $800 worth of knives with scratching on them like you can see below, whether you buy a collectors grade knife or real user knife from them.
Below are some pictures of the ZT 3 knife set and how scratched up it arrived at my place, mind you none of my friend who transported the knives back to Holland has pulled the knives from their sheaths, I was the first person to take the knives out after they were put in the sheaths at Busse.
ZT Natural Outlaw right side ZT Steel Heart left side
ZT Steel Heart right side ZT Battle Mistress right side
The Battle mistress had the least scratches, acceptable but the Natural Outlaw and Steel Heart well look for yourself and that for $800+ for NEW knives.
Mr. Busse said they were intended as 'users' and not to have a finish comparable to the custom versions he makes, but a 'satin' finish like the Zero Tolerance set has is not to difficult to do and one could expect the knives to arrive in 'unscratched-up' condition.
Nowhere on his site when he promoted the Zero Tolerance 3 knife set did he show pictures of them scratched up like this with a note saying that this is the finish one could expect.