Kizer V4458A1 Begleiter Liner Lock

***SDTL[superdupertoolong]; DR: It's nice to have a concurring second opinion about the conclusions I've come to running backyard tests on different blade steels. Because it's just not logistically possible to test it in a properly unbiased, scientific way, I've always had a nagging suspicion that any difference in performance between different blade steels was due to either my own biases or the myriad of fluctuating environmental variables that a proper scientific test would control for.*** You know...I appreciate you telling me about reprofiling the Boker, because I feel like I'm never quite sure if I really knoe what I think I know. Without sensitive equipment to measure characteristics of steel; and multi-step protocol, carefully followed by different people hundreds, or maybe thousands of times and which would specify blind or better yet double-blind tests, something I've thought over and concluded it would require another person dissamenbling my knives as a first step, and then a whole lot more steps following, each less workable than then last--so in other words, without an actual material science testing lab--testing blade steel in an objective, repeatable, and even minimally scientifically rigorous way is impossible. Not to mention many of the tests would damage or at least alter a blade (i.e., reprofiling being a relatively gentle way to kind of of get an idea about elasticity/toughness). I don't have anything riding on the info I glean from testing blade steel, some friends and I just do it because it's fun (honestly, it's just me as often as not, I'm definitely in deepest with the knife addiction), and in the words of the fictitious yet immortal Emil Faber: knowledge is good. But I can't help but feel at times that it's so subjective I could make the same test cuts with the same knives on the same media, and on another day get info completely different from what I did, just because of a seemingly irrelevant detail that was actually a significantly correlated variable. Maybe on one day I have a little cut on my right hand subtly impacting my grip and ability to press a cut, maybe another day we do the tests after eating at a buffet, so that my 6'11", 275 lb friend for once isn't impatiently trying to rush the task so he can have his next "snack", maybe one day it's cold and the next hot, which would affect both people and materials, etc., etc. And then of course, a knife maker might consciously decide to change the forging process as he becomes more skilled and familiar with a steel. For example, my mini Sabenza was made in November 2017 and the blade's hardness is 61RC. But the exact same mini Sabenza built in a few months earlier has an blade with 60 HRC. This wasn't something Chris Reeve announced, but some knife nuts apparently detected the change (actual scientist-knife nuts, I'd guess) and were speculating online, so Mr. Reeve admitted that whereas he had long thought S35VN would be too brittle if tempered for a pocket knife above 60HRC, he'd been experimenting and improving his forging skills since he first created S35VN, and had managed to come up with a tempering recipe which produced a sufficiently tough blade at 61 HRC. Once his shop could reliably produce it, that became the standard for his Sabenza blades, instead ofthe 60 HRC . Wow. That was long even for me and I'll put a TL; DR summary up top. This was a subject that had been kicking around in my brain not fully formed or explored, so taking the long verbal ramble helped me get a better fix on my own opinions and concerns. The summation is, I think: we're all a bunch of amateurs with our "tests", and likely as not any info we get from them is just going to be random noise. But it's a fun thing to do sometimes, so as long as we remember not to put too much stock in our amateur info, there's no harm in some totally subjective examinations, I think.

This is this price on Amazon every day with free shipping. Mass Drop is dropping the ball on this one.

This knife can easily be found for $52 with no shipping with a 10% discount on top of that. I thin MD thinks they are the only ones with a computer, I truly do not get it. They need to get a new person in their ranks to do the negotiating with these companies. I am going to wait until the mini version comes available in M390.