Sweet onions: Kershaw's custom collaborations with Ken Onion are a hot ticket

Guns Magazine, June, 2004 by Jim Gardner

The 2004 Las Vegas Classic knife show was a blur of activity. This is one of the most prestigious shows in the country, and the number of remarkable bladesmiths present was awe-inspiring. Greg Lightfoot, Brian Tighe, Trace Rinaldi. Jerry Hossom, Bud Nealy; we could go on and on.

If these names aren't familiar to you, suffice to say the experience was akin to walking into a room and speaking with Samuel Colt, B. Tyler Henry, J.M. Browning and dozens of other equally legendary talents. Imagine shaking hands with them, looking at their current work and passing a few minutes in friendly conversation.

Where The Action Is

The entire show was busy, but it was difficult not to notice a consistent crowd at one table. This was the booth of Ken Onion--one of the most influential and successful custom knifemakers on the scene today.

It seems everything about Onion's work delights the custom knife buyer. His sense of style, characterized by flowing lines that look like a work of nature, not of man, as well as the intricate mechanical detail of his designs (such as his revolutionary Speed-Safe[R]) has made his work one of the hottest commodities of the knife world.

I asked my friend Trace Rinaldi for his candid opinion about Onion and his work. "Bottom line," explained Rinaldi, "is that Ken's an innovator. His designs are awesome and the execution is simply flawless. What amazes me is his thought process. He doesn't design something that might be easy to build, but rather he decides what the ideal approach to a particular problem would be, and only then works out a way to fabricate it."

As you may expect though, the prices for Onion's custom knives have skyrocketed along with his acclaim. I looked into buying one of Ken's hand-made beauties--the simplest, plainest version I could find wore an $800 price tag, and they seldom linger at such prices. That's just too rich for a working stiff like me, but luckily, we have an ace in the hole.

Kershaw Collaborations

Some perceptive soul at Kershaw knives of Wilsonville. Ore., spotted Ken Onion's genius early in 1998. His then-new Speed-Safe design would have been a sure winner by itself, but in tandem with Onion's proven sense of style and design, the combination proved unbeatable. The first Onion collaboration Speed-Safe knives bit the market in November of '98, and the demand for them has never wavered.

"It's been extremely important to us." Doug Flagg, Kershaw's director of sales and marketing replied when asked about the Kershaw/Onion collaborations. "And not just Iris assisted knife, but his entire design influence."

"How have they been received by your customers?"

"Fantastic!" he answered. "Our customers love the Ken Onion designs, and we receive constant praise about the sense of style and the ergonomics of his designs."

Best Of Both Worlds

But just what is a custom collaboration? It's a knife design by a noted custom maker adapted with permission to production manufacture. In the case of the knives we're looking at here. Ken Onion has entered into an agreement with Kershaw allowing them to produce copies of his unique mechanical and design features.

What this really means is the best of both worlds for you and me. We can own, enjoy and really use an Onion-designed knife that would otherwise be completely out of reach. But there are other "copies" of custom knives out there that area different story.

A hot topic these days is the flood of extremely poor quality, foreign made knock-offs of custom designs that are littering the swap meets and discount outlets. Believe it or not, these things are often sold wholesale by the pound.

The quality of materials is unbelievably shoddy, and even at the $10 to $20 selling price, they're not worth what people pay for them. Perhaps worse yet, buying one of these illegal copies is akin to aiding the theft of someone else's property. It's really not much different than some Jasper cashing your paycheck without permission.

Okay, let me step off the soapbox and explain why the Speed-Safe mechanism is so interesting.

The Spring's The Thing

When I was a pup, I had a switchblade knife my dad brought home from the orient. It was of pretty poor quality, but pushing the button and watching that blade snap into alignment was magic. I don't think I've ever met a gun or knife guy who didn't find these fascinating. There are very high quality automatic knives manufactured today, but in most states it's illegal to one degree of another to carry of perhaps even to possess one.

Ken Onion's Speed-Safe system is not an automatic knife, but it is an assisted opening design. Pushing forward on the blade's thumb stud (or pulling back on an exposed trigger) requires a certain degree of force as the blade is held closed by the action of a torsion spring. This is an "over center cam" design, and only after the blade has been opened manually a certain distance will the force of the spring change from holding the blade closed to assisting it in opening fully.

Admittedly the "coolness quotient" is probably the reason most of these knives sell, but the assisted opening design has real merit. We must give credit where it's due--Spyderco brought us the one-hand-opening folding knife with the handy pocket clip, and millions of sportsmen. workers and craftsmen have voted their enthusiasm for this idea with their wallets. The Speed-Safe design is simply the one-hand-opening knife taken to the next level.