UPhiker;
Good morning and Happy Easter to you sir, I hope that all is as well as can be for you and yours considering where we all find ourselves.
Over the decades, I've packed knives from Buck, Gerber, Spyderco, CRKT and Kershaw/ZT, plus a few more that aren't coming to a semi-old guy's memory just now I'm sure. Oh SOG. Lakota and G96 just popped in as well.
Anyway my name is Dwayne and I'm an addict - how's that for a beginning?
For much of my adult life we had horses or I was dealing with livestock for a friend regularly, so the ability to open and close the knife with one hand was important to me. As such I picked up one of the very first Delica's to be seen up here across the medicine line and for whatever reason didn't trade it off or give it away like most of the other Spyderco blades I've owned.
To your question sir, when it's not hunting season there is a ZT0566 with Elmax in my right front pocket. As well, I carried it's bigger brother the 0560 before that so have been playing with Elmax since it's been available.
When it's hunting season I have a Buck Vantage Pro with the Paul Bos heat treated S30V in my right back pocket, along with a small fixed blade sheath knife, usually a 52100 blade I bought as a blank, but sometimes another one with Cobalt steel and sometimes a very old Kershaw 1030 I believe it is.
If we are fortunate and bring something home to skin, as opposed to taking it apart on the mountain, I'll sometimes pull my old Spyderco Centofante 3 with VG10 out as the shape on it is "about right" for peeling ungulates or black bears in my experience.
Overall I've come to prefer open backed liner lock type construction if I'm using the knife for gutting as the closed back lock such as the Centofante 3 has is harder to clean all the fat and remnant blood out of. Similarly I don't prefer to fill the bearings and springs of the ZT0566 up with fat and blood either, so skinning is okay, but not gutting if possible.
With the sharpening equipment I have on hand, I personally find it easier to get a slightly "toothy" edge on the S30V done by Paul Bos and company than the other steels, though the VG10 on the Spyderco is close.
Elmax will hold an edge which reminds me of some of the carbide and diamond tooling we used in woodworking/cabinet making that I spent 27 years at in that it's sharp, but never as sharp as tool steel. It will however hold that "not quite as sharp as tool steel" edge for a long, long time. For a knock around working blade then, it's great and as carried in the over built ZT frames is quite robust in my experience.
Anyway as they used to say, there's many roads to Mecca - but while that's still more or less the case, we're not supposed to travel them even if that was our current inclination!
Happy Easter to you and yours sir and stay well.
Dwayne
