Solve the thing once
Get into carry for long enough and you end up down a very pointy rabbit hole. Knife carry is wild, y’all. Knives have been optimized with an inch of their existence, with new alloys doing things that once seemed physically impossible and new handle materials doing things that feel horrendously overcompensatory at a minimum. One can spend thousands on a knife now. One can blow $70 and get the just-enough version. At the bottom of the rabbit hole, though, is one single word: Sebenza.
With flashlights or bags, you must make some major trade-off in order to have some form of the best. Baffling, unwieldy battery systems. Products that work well in one place and poorly everywhere else. Affordances that fit a mental model, but not yours. Not so with knives. They are mostly a settled matter. Behold the Sebenza: a knife so famous, influential, and popular that it has its own Wikipedia page. It invented at least one major innovation in knifemaking: the integral lock handle that flips outward to safely lock the blade in place when fully opened. It has been slowly innovated upon over the course of its thirty-plus-year existence, each change pored over by scores of feral collectors. When you ask Knife Guys what the best knife is, they will offer a six-paragraph essay on trade-offs, cult followings, and value for money. They will hedge that there is no real perfect knife, that knives all have their own specific applications & trade-offs. Then they will throw Sebenza on top, anyway.
Fractal societal collapse has done many things, including making pocket knives more popular than they ever have been. As a result, if you want to buy a Sebenza from Chris Reeve directly, you now have to wait four-plus years for one. The answer is to go to one of Reeve’s many third-party retailers, which get Sebenzas stocked frequently but sporadically. Alas, most in-stock Sebenzas have ugly, expensive sheathings that mess with the sheer design beauty of the original. And some of them are left-handed(!), so you need to pay careful attention to what you actually buy.
I have done this research so you don’t have to. You want:
- The small Sebenza (unless you’ve got big hands)…
- …31 (the latest version, marking its thirty-first anniversary)…
- …Titanium (meaning nothing else is in or on the case)…
- …MagnaCut (the kind of steel, which is The Best One™)…
- …in the handedness that fits your body…
- …for $425 USD as of press time, meaning the store didn’t hit you with a horrible markup.
There are three kinds of blade shapes to a Sebenza, and I’m not going to even try and weigh in on which one is best for you. The drop point is the most common, I think, but I’m new to this planet. I got my Sebenza here, and as of press time it is profoundly sold out.
None of this is confusing at all. It’s completely fine. Are you having fun yet? You aren’t. You have questions.
Why doesn’t Chris Reeve make more Sebenzas? Because skilled labor is in short supply. Finding the right people and training them takes time.
Why is Chris Reeve not stocking more Sebenzas for themselves? Because they have long-term contracts with third-party vendors, and Sebenzas sell just fine at any store. They’re Sebenzas. People put in the work to find them.
Why are there so many more-expensive Sebenzas with weird handles? It truly beats me, y’all. If I were Chris Reeve, I would make the OG titanium handle and be done with it. It is a staggering object in its purest form, comparable to a Leica, Nomos, or Lamy 2000 in its shape, texture, geometry, and patina. Embellishment of any kind diminishes this object, and you get to pay more for the privilege?
Did you really say $425 USD? A Sebenza isn’t cheap. But: weigh $425 against an average Knife Guy’s collection. They own, like, four Sebenzas worth of knives for what it would have taken them to buy a single Sebenza and never have to think about their knife again. Would you rather blow $425 and be satisfied, or way more than that to be unsatisfied? I suppose the answer depends on your sense of adventure, but there feels like an element of masochism exists in this particular quest.
Why aren’t there other knives like the Sebenza? I feel like the real answer to this question is something more existential about the way that we craft the objects we put into the world. There truly should be more Sebenzas. But right now, in this moment, it either takes a nonzero amount of time & effort to find the right knife that works for you, or you get a Sebenza. A Sebenza is a safe-bet sort of object. You put in the work & spend extra for the convenience of knowing the problem is definitively solved for you, for knowing that a literal generation’s worth of talent has gone into the craftsmanship.
And that’s what sort of blows my mind about all of this. Is it weird to say that you hold a Sebenza and feel that there was real hunger put into the making of it? Even now? Even after they pioneered so many of the crafts of contemporary knifemaking? They are, in 2024, building knives like they continue to have something to prove, still, because they do, because you cannot put anything fake past a Knife Guy, ever. Put another way, if Chris Reeve slipped in quality, they could no longer charge $425 for a Sebenza. And they must charge $425 for a Sebenza. The price is the price. They have earned that. And they must keep earning it, over and over, with the knife that’s now in your hand, forever.