Caly III 100,000 Mile Stress Test
Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:47 pm
You know how the car magazines sometimes run a car for 100K miles then evaluate it? Well here is a report after a year’s hard use on a Caly III. (I’m amazed I didn’t lose it during that time.) A year ago I started an extensive refurbish of a house (almost a rebuild). At the time my Caly III was my favorite knife, and I considered laying it aside and using something else for the hard work ahead. The back bevel was a thin 12 degrees per side, with the sharpmaker putting on the edge at 15 degrees. Thought that might be too delicate.
Plus, on this forum, I read any number of comments about the Caly III being a ‘gent’s knife,’ perhaps not up to hard work, with people occasionally expressing doubt of its strength. (Never read anybody reporting Caly IIIs were easy to break, but the innuendo was always there.) So I decided a ‘torture test’ would be fun, and this is the knife that rode in my pocket to work every day. (See how the pocket of one of my work pants is shredded by pulling it in and out so many times.)
The knife was used for all the things you’d encounter rebuilding a house, including opening bags of cement, cutting drywall, carving wood, cutting down cardboard, notching plastic, cutting templates, scraping paint, taking insulation off of wire, and when clean, cutting fruit for lunch. Sometimes I'd loan it to another worker and I don't even want to know what they did with it. Sometimes I would use the butt of it to hammer on stuff (when I was too lazy to get a hammer). I did not abuse the knife by prying with it. And, I did not use it for jobs where a disposable blade was clearly called for. So in summary it got hard use, but not abuse.
Here it is over a year later. Yesterday it was coverred in white drywall powder, and would not lock open because of the amount of drywall powder in my pockets getting into the locking mechanism. Plus, it was starting to take a long time to resharpen on the sharpmaker, so today I cleaned it up, oiled it with mineral oil, and finally reprofiled it back to 12 degrees…which took less time than writing this post. A couple of swipes with the fine sharpmaker stones, and we’re back to free cutting paper.
It still locks up with authority. The black in the spyder is worn away, there are scratches on the blade, and yesterday (before reprofiling) there were a few notches in the belly of the blade. The vertical blade play is around 1mm at the tip. There is wear under the G-10 under the clip.
My conclusion is, this is a hard working knife. Call it a “gent’s knife” if you will, but it just keeps on cutting in a harsh environment. I think this real-world test of endurance should help put to rest its undeserved reputation as a potentially fragile knife. It's more of a mini-mini-Manix, in my opinion.
Hard Use Caly III...still going strong:
Plus, on this forum, I read any number of comments about the Caly III being a ‘gent’s knife,’ perhaps not up to hard work, with people occasionally expressing doubt of its strength. (Never read anybody reporting Caly IIIs were easy to break, but the innuendo was always there.) So I decided a ‘torture test’ would be fun, and this is the knife that rode in my pocket to work every day. (See how the pocket of one of my work pants is shredded by pulling it in and out so many times.)
The knife was used for all the things you’d encounter rebuilding a house, including opening bags of cement, cutting drywall, carving wood, cutting down cardboard, notching plastic, cutting templates, scraping paint, taking insulation off of wire, and when clean, cutting fruit for lunch. Sometimes I'd loan it to another worker and I don't even want to know what they did with it. Sometimes I would use the butt of it to hammer on stuff (when I was too lazy to get a hammer). I did not abuse the knife by prying with it. And, I did not use it for jobs where a disposable blade was clearly called for. So in summary it got hard use, but not abuse.
Here it is over a year later. Yesterday it was coverred in white drywall powder, and would not lock open because of the amount of drywall powder in my pockets getting into the locking mechanism. Plus, it was starting to take a long time to resharpen on the sharpmaker, so today I cleaned it up, oiled it with mineral oil, and finally reprofiled it back to 12 degrees…which took less time than writing this post. A couple of swipes with the fine sharpmaker stones, and we’re back to free cutting paper.
It still locks up with authority. The black in the spyder is worn away, there are scratches on the blade, and yesterday (before reprofiling) there were a few notches in the belly of the blade. The vertical blade play is around 1mm at the tip. There is wear under the G-10 under the clip.
My conclusion is, this is a hard working knife. Call it a “gent’s knife” if you will, but it just keeps on cutting in a harsh environment. I think this real-world test of endurance should help put to rest its undeserved reputation as a potentially fragile knife. It's more of a mini-mini-Manix, in my opinion.
Hard Use Caly III...still going strong:
