Is a Damascus blade suitable for a carry pocket knife?

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ILikeStilettos
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Re: Is a Damascus blade suitable for a carry pocket knife?

Post by ILikeStilettos »

I sincerely hope that I am not jinxing things by posting this video while I am waiting for delivery, but, here it is. This is a 13" lockback in camel and Pakistan Damascus. I think it looks pretty good. The builder deviated from my designs a bit, probably because of language barriers and his ability to read an engineering drawing, but it came out well and the price was definitely right (significantly less than a standard Campolin in this size.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyJcXYaBEP4

I found this guy through Facebook.
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Luke_of_Mass
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Re: Is a Damascus blade suitable for a carry pocket knife?

Post by Luke_of_Mass »

Wow that does look epic! Looking forward to some proper photos when it arrives!
Knee-deep in the hoopla...
georgyboy
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Re: Is a Damascus blade suitable for a carry pocket knife?

Post by georgyboy »

Luke_of_Mass wrote:Very nice-looking specimens, but I couldn't seem to find any info on their monetary value in your posts (to be fair, one of them I could not view for lack of membership on the sharperdeals forum) ... Looks like a lot more work went into that Damascus Stiletto than the Pakistani ones all over eBay! Although it looks like that one is actually a Campolin and therefore irrelevant to the case you make about the affordability of Eastern Damascus products as a whole ... But for all I know, the billets for the others could have originated in just Paki or even China too! Just because a country gets a bad reputation for ubersellers exporting garbage by the megaton doesn't mean there aren't highly-skilled and respectable bladesmiths within their borders. It just depends on who's making them and what their business ethics/tactics are... There's no telling exactly where the billet was forged, and the exact origin of the finished pieces themselves seem murky at best...

The Pakistani Damascus folding knives selling for under 30 usd are technically Damascus, just like the Milano knives coming out of Taiwan are technically Stilettos - You get what you pay for. If you look at the majority of these Pakistani knives, you will see that the amount of layers is usually less than half of that on the links you provided, and 70+% of the time the pattern is almost completely random. This is the type of Damascus that people likely report rust issues with.

With the minimum wage in Pakistan being what it is (roughly 100 USD per month) it is perfectly feasible to suspect that some knife tycoon is just paying a few workers to mass-produce simple billets with cheap materials, and this has only exponentially grown for them since they only need to sell 15-20 knives per month to cover worker's salaries and material costs.

On the other hand, though, I will concede that I have never personally purchased any of these pieces so I can't tell you first-hand how they stack up to more expensive Damascus coming out of Europe. What I can tell you first hand, though, is that forging high quality Damascus steel is a highly time-consuming undertaking for even a skilled bladesmith, and on top of this uses more than 5 times the amount of resources than an ordinary forging project, from the gas or coal used to heat the forge, to the amount of metal needed, and most of all the time it takes to do it right. To make this endeavor slightly more economical, I believe a lot of modern blacksmiths will produce much larger Damascus billets than they need for any one project, and then later break it up to use in 5-6 smaller projects (not a whole lot of metal goes into that of a stiletto blade).

I'm going to use Damascus stilettos as an example because, well, I like stilettos, and so do you! :)

A highly-skilled forge-welder (far more efficient and competent than myself) could probably make enough damascus for 5-6 stilettos in roughly 40 hours. Now assume that they are only working for a minimum wage of $10/hour, and that's almost $70 for each stiletto blade alone, not including all the time it would take to forge these finished bars into the actual blades, nor counting the finishing process/acid treatment required, and then you still have the cost of the other parts of the knife, assembly time and quality control. All told I would expect an 11'' Damascus stiletto on the cheaper-end of the genuine Italian spectrum to be in the realm of $130-$200 compared to its $80 standard satin bayonet counterpart at bladeplay. Losses/screw-ups/manufacturer error is also something to take into account. Suddenly the Maniago bladesmith's almost unilateral reluctance to offer refunds in general is a little more understandable, if only by a little :oops:

This is why most of the 'affordable' Damascus is coming out of third-world countries like Pakistan, China and India. Again, just because a country is known for its exploitation of cheap labor doesn't mean there aren't respectable bladesmiths in the region, but this biased, judgmental, and most of all less-than-professional-caliber bladesmith has his reasons to be skeptical of such cheap knives when the true definition of "genuine, legitimate Damascus" is so subjective. As a rule of thumb, if a deal seems too good to be true, then it probably is. But I digress...

I would love to hear some input from anybody who has purchased this Pakistani Damascus and actually tried using it for everyday carry purposes!
i own some very beautiful pakistani damascus pieces,fully hand crafted!
Fishtail Picklock
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Re: Is a Damascus blade suitable for a carry pocket knife?

Post by Fishtail Picklock »

Are they useful, or are they just "play pretty" pieces?
Fishtail Picklock
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