Episode: 3152
Title: HPR3152: My Pocket Knives
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3152/hpr3152.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:51:03

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3152 for Tuesday, 1 September 2020. Today's show is entitled,
My Pocket Knives. It is hosted by Dave Morris
and is about 15 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
I talk a little about some pocket knives, I often carry.
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Music
Hello everybody.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio. This is Dave Morris.
Today I've got a fairly short show. It's the sort that I quite like to listen to, quite like to do.
It's basically a list, but you might find it interesting.
I'm talking about pocket knives.
Now, when I was a boy, quite long time ago now,
maybe from about the age 10, I was given a pen knife
as they were called. Have they still called that?
It was a little thing with a pearl handle, with two blades in it.
It carried that all the time around with me.
It was pretty normal. I mean, you could take that to school
and sharpen pencils with it. It was very common to do that.
Anyway, since then, I've always carried pocket knives
with some sort with me.
Not necessarily in my pocket, but in a rock sack or whatever.
There were three knives that often travel with me just now.
Though two of them have got a locking function on them,
and UK laws seem to be against such knives for reasons
that I'm not entirely clear about.
Given that a knife is just as deadly with it locks or not,
but there you go. If you have one and you're stopped by the police,
you have to give a good reason for why you're carrying it.
You know, it's to do with your business or something.
Anyway, I'm going to talk about these three knives,
and just in brief, just to summarize what I'm going to talk about,
one's a Victoria Knox Huntsman.
The other one is a duerol French knife,
and the third one is a Roxon knife from China.
Let's talk about the Huntsman, the Victoria Knox.
I expect most people know about these sorts of knives.
They're generally called Swiss Army Knives.
That's what they originally derived from.
There's quite a lot of information about the history of this stuff,
and I've pointed to a few things like Wikipedia article.
They're usually knives which have lots of tools in them.
The number of tools can vary.
It can just be two or three, but can be quite a enormous amount
for the more expensive ones.
Victoria Knox is the predominant brand now.
They used to be others, but they've all been sort of bought.
I'll disappear, I think.
The Wikipedia article I refer to tells you quite a lot.
The model I've got is the Huntsman,
and it's classified as a medium-sized knife, if you'll.
The Victoria Knox website.
I won't list all the bits, but in brief,
it's got two blades, which are really sharp.
There are scissors.
It's actually got a saw for cutting wood,
which I, for some reason, are other in the photos I forgot to open out.
If you open out all the tools on these things,
you have to be really careful on how you think.
So maybe I was just being ultra cautious.
Anyway, yeah, it's a cool thing.
Some pictures of it.
It's also got a couple of little detachable tools in it,
which is a toothpick, which is a plastic toothpick.
Strange thing to have in a knife, I guess.
You never know.
And a pair of tweezers, which are actually quite good for, again,
splinters or fingers, or whatever I've found.
One of the best pairs of tweezers I have.
I recently bought one of these,
a very long time ago in Edinburgh,
from my tool shop near the centre of the city.
And this tool shop was really old fashioned,
by a family, sort of family shop, had lots and lots and lots and lots of stuff,
not organised in any particular way to sort of all around the place.
But you could get so much good stuff in there.
And they had a sale of these knives.
I don't know why, because I think they hold their price pretty well,
but I took advantage of it in bought one, bought the Huntsman.
Love that knife.
Carried it with me a lot in my pocket.
But when I, walking with the kids one weekend,
and we were cutting sticks,
because that's what you do when you're out in the woods with children,
and using the saw.
And I put it back in my pocket,
and it must have fallen out at some point,
because I lost it.
So I felt pretty sorry for myself,
but it was really, you know,
the things that you really like and that you lose,
you do tend to regret this I do.
But eventually I decided, well,
the only sensible thing to do would be to get another one.
So I bought the current one of Amazon,
where the price was not as good as the original sale price,
but it wasn't too painful.
I think there's somewhere around 30, 35 pounds for this one now.
I think in the 20, 25 sort of area when I bought it,
28, I don't remember now.
Anyway, but so I'm very careful with it,
tend not to carry it in my pocket so much.
And it's usually in my rucksack,
but you have to watch out for carrying knives in a rucksack,
because often these days you go into museums and stuff,
and they want to put anything you're carrying through,
and you, in some cases, through a metal detector.
So...
Second knife cut is a duo,
I think it's a duo brand,
and there's a couple of pictures of it.
It's manufactured in an interesting city
in central France called Tier,
let's say, France.
And it's known as the Knife City,
because it's got loads of factories that make knives.
It's the source of many knives that you'll find in France,
and elsewhere I think.
This is a classic design,
and Tier is in...
How do you say this?
Anyway, it's in the over and region,
central, central France.
Never been there myself,
but some might really like to visit one day.
On the Wikipedia page for this,
it says it's about Tier,
is a major historical center of knife manufacturing
with about 100 companies and a cutlery museum.
70% of French pocket knives,
kitchen table knives are manufactured in Tier.
My sort of bass, really.
This particular knife has a wooden handle,
which I believe is ash.
I can't identify myself.
I think the design's been ash for the old fashioned one,
which this is.
There's a metal collar at the top,
which if you picture, you'll see.
And through the collar is a riveted pivot
on which the blade sits.
The blade is locked in a closed position,
and there's a red button on the handle
of the knife, which you press, and you can unlock.
Then when it's in the open position,
it locks again,
and the red button does the job.
The knife design is documented
as possibly being derived from the other
a classic French pocket knife,
which I assume it must therefore be...
have been created before the Dural.
And that's the Opinel.
And just so having that Shane Shenan
did a show on this knife,
and a few other things showed 2650.
Partly what gave me the idea to talk about my knife.
I think it's actually a nice subject.
There's something to be thinking of doing a show
and you're into knives, then.
That might be a fun thing to talk about.
So this model is the basic one.
Yeah, I think it is the bottom version.
And there are others with different colours,
plastic handles, more accessories,
like coarse-groo, or bottom-loading,
this sort of thing.
So I tell you the tale of how I came by this knife.
I bought it in France in the 1980s,
somewhere, not quite clear when, exactly,
but to 82, 3, somewhere like that.
We used to go to conferences.
I was working at local university at that point.
We used to go to conferences
because there was a budget for doing that.
My boss tended to chair various bits,
like to be on management committees and stuff for us.
We were going to Paris.
We were driving from Edinburgh,
which was an interesting thing to do,
but something he did fairly often.
It was being a great flank of file.
And I made some footnote here thinking,
maybe you might have been interested in this.
Footnote says,
to get to, from Edinburgh to Paris,
we drove in my bus's car.
It's not surprisingly a French car.
And we took share, we shared the driving.
We drove to Dover on South Coast of England.
And we took then hover speed hovercraft service to Calais.
So that was, that's long gone now.
I think it's closed down.
The link is a link here, which we'll tell you.
I don't remember.
I think it closed down in about 2005,
having been running from the early 1980s.
Hovercraft were more cool and they seemed to be...
It was a great massive thing that came up ramp on the beaches,
I recall.
You could drive a car into an upper ramp and into the usual thing.
It got strapped down.
Then you sat in a thing that felt a bit like an aeroplane,
seating area.
And it was a reasonably smooth crossing.
I don't think hovercraft were very good with choppy,
sea conditions.
Certainly heavy, a heavy swell would stop the service,
as far as I understand.
And they were incredibly noisy too,
with sort of big aircraft engine on the top to drive the fans.
Anyway, we took the hovercraft to Calais.
We just ran up the beach and we then drove from there
into Calais, itself.
We drove to Paris from there.
But on our way through Calais,
there was... Calais was famous.
I don't know if it still is for these
Heeper Maashe hypermarkets,
which a lot of brits tended to visit,
because it's a good place to get cheap wine and cheese
and all sorts of stuff.
I don't know what the status of that stuff is now,
but at that particular point is a very cool thing to do.
And we went in one to see what it was like
and to get some stuff for lunch.
And I bought a bit, get some cheese
and there are the usual things that you do
and you're in France.
There's some smelly cheese, because it's...
And I saw this knife available in the...
in the hardware, and thought,
oh, that'd be good for...
because you can use it for spreading stuff
and you can use it for cutting stuff.
So, I'm gonna have that.
So, I bought that there.
And it stayed with me ever since.
So, it's pretty, pretty old.
It doesn't look too bad at it, actually.
It's used to throw a bit.
So, that's my tail.
So, the third knife is called Rockson,
ROXON, and I saw it on Amazon
and thought it would be quite cool.
It's a single-bladed knife
and you can open it with one hand
because it got the button on the blade
that you could swivel around.
I've never owned such a knife before
and thought it would be quite a stylish-looking thing.
You can see, if you've got access to the pictures,
it locks open and then when, as it opens,
it reveals an unlock button,
you can press and close the blade up again.
It's not spring loaded or it wouldn't be with it.
I'd say it was a right-handed design, though.
I would imagine it'd be quite difficult to open it
and be left-handed in the way I can do it with my right hand.
But, I don't know, I've never been left-handed,
so I don't know.
It's got a belt clip or a pocket clip on the rear,
which you can detach, apparently,
looked into doing that.
From that side, there's a pair of scissors.
Scissors in knives, nothing very special.
These are massive, given the size of the knife.
They are really junky and very robust and sharp and effective.
What little experience I've had with them.
You could prune small plants and that sort of thing with them in the garden.
You could cut heavy fabrics and so on and so forth.
I got the knife from Amazon, as I said.
It was about 25 pounds.
I found that it's made in China when I looked at the box.
It's hard to find out where it's come from on Amazon.
They don't always tell you random stuff, nothing that you want to know often.
The rocks on the website don't set telly very much about where it is.
Anyway, it's getting different as a very limited.
It seems quite well made and it's quite comfortable to hold and to use.
My only concern is that the knife has got two bevels to it.
It's got a usual sort of cutting edge, long cutting edge,
and then rather than curving to the tip, there's a turn to it.
I don't know how easy it would be to sharpen just that we tip it.
But, of course, use a wet stone or some sort.
In conclusion, if I had to choose one knife to take with me on a trip,
I think I'd take the Victorian Oxford, which has got so much versatility
and all the gadgets with it.
But most of the time, I have all three of these in pretty proximity bag in a pocket.
On the desk beside me, isn't it?
And so, don't really have a strong preference.
So that's the end.
Hope you find that interesting.
As I say, if you think it's a subject worth adding to, then do so by all means.
Okay, then, bye.
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