just like guns, almost nobody understands how much thought and skill goes into a good knife.
You said a mouth full of truth there. I can't tell you how many guys have come to camp with a gut hook knife and ended up cussing it before he got his game skinned. The gut hooks on their knives keep coming out of the cut and will not stay hooked nor will it cut very well even though it is sharp. Why?
It's simple: the gut hook is too small, is built at the wrong angle to the blade for cutting, and with insufficient hook pilot or lead. But it is in proportion to the knife and it looks good. I made the gut hook on my knife first and then let the rest of the knife go where it needed to and didn't give a fig about how it looks. It
WORKS REALLY GOOD which is what the whole exercise ought to be about. But it's amazing how many people buy a knife for how it looks rather than how it works. If you want to see many examples of that, just read the blade and knife forum below. I don't know whether to laugh or cry after reading some of that. To each his own I guess, but I can't help recall Ronald Reagan saying so much of what some people know is just not true!!!
The first knives with that hook in the back of the blade were not sharp. It was there to use to place or remove pots with bails on them on and off the camp fire. They were intended to be pot hooks and that's all. Then some jazzbo sharpened one and then everybody did. But they didn't change anything else. A hook that works great for pots does not work for skinning. It is at the wrong angle. It is not long enough to stay hooked. It is not big enough to change the angle or the hook design. But knife makers have always made them that way, so guess what?? They don't work very well because they were never designed to do what they are trying to do.
But if you make the hook bigger and increase the angle and the lead on the hook, it makes the knife look unbalanced and out of porportion and ugly, and nobody wants an ugly knife except me because form follows function far as I am concerned. So they make good looking, balanced, properly porportioned blades that don't work very well. Sounds like politicians and I don't want anything designed or made by politicians because it usually doesn't work very well.