What is Quality?

This wasn't my school.....butthat
would've been AWESOME!

When I was in uhm.....(what's the english equivalent of a HBO?) college I suppose at one point I had a class
on "Quality". The class started with the teacher asking a simple but very difficult to answer question:

What is quality?

I'll tell you me and my classmates brainstormed for a long time on that question and never really got to a clear cut answer.

A couple of years later I was hired to be a Test Consultant in training. The CEO (Who is an awesome guy) of the company had all trainees in his office on our first day to talk about what we were going to do in our capacity as software testers and just testers in general.

At a certain point during that meeting he held up one of the pens with the company logo to show it to us. Then he gave each of us one of those pens and told us: "Go ahead, test this pen". In our enthusiasm some of us started writing with it, others worked with the balance, some checked the pen for manufacturing flaws and we experimented with it in all sorts of ways for a few minutes. But all the while we got the feeling that we weren't doing it right somehow.

(We may or may not have looked a little like in the video while doing it....I'll never tell)

Worms, full of healthy proteins.

Offcourse the fact that our CEO had a sneaky smile on his face the whole time didn't help. We just knew we were doing something wrong but couldn't put our fingers on it. Then out of nowhere someone in our group came up and figured something out. He asked the CEO "Well.....what do you want it to do?"

And that was exactly the purpose. That was what he'd been angling for.

You see, quality is a tough subject. Because it has so many aspects. Offcourse this is a knife blog so we'll talk about knives here.

Soo.....a good car should always be able to
 withstand a 1000ft drop right?

To some Quality might mean that a knife takes the sharpest edge. To someone else Quality means that there's no flaws in the construction. A third user might not find any of those important but DOES care that it stays sharp for very long during usage. Then the fourth chimes in and says that quality is more about high end materials. A fifth might claim that a quality knife has to LOOK like it's high end. And we could go on and on and on probably for a long time.

You see, determining whether something is a quality piece is dependent on the specifications and the demands placed on that piece.

Gotta take those boxes to the box flattening area first!
Or is there a special box slicing area?

Are you someone who cuts down carboard boxes all day  at work? The specifications for you would then say that something has to be

1. Comfortable to work with for extended periods of time
2. has high edge holding capability (because cardboard is very abrasive and will dull most knives pretty quickly)

Are you more of a woodworker? Then your knife would have to be

1. Comfortable when a lot of force is put into is
2. take a very fine (very sharp) edge and maybe edge retention is important for you too. (Edge retention is important to most people who like knives)

This is what hunters wear right?

Maybe you're someone who hunts and field dresses a lot of animals. In that case:

1. You want something that won't get slippery/is easy to hold on to when it gets wet/bloody
2. Maybe you prefer something that can be easily sharpened

In short, everything in life is pro's and cons. You just have to figure out which ones are more important to you. And it could very well be that in those cases...you'd be willing to spend a little extra to make sure you're getting exactly what your specs were.

And trust me, there's nothing like getting EXACTLY what you wanted. Most knife makers will try to make sure of this. I was recently "accused" of being obsessed with details when I make a knife for someone. Well, that's because I want to make a quality piece and in order to do that I have to make sure that I know what it is you want.

So my advise to you when buying a knife (or spending money on anything that costs a little more or that you'll be using a lot):

Make sure you know what you want.

 Followed closely by:

Be prepared to spend a little extra to make sure it IS what you want.

After all that's why they say "Buy cheap, cry all the time, buy quality cry only once."

Alexander Noot

www.lxblades.com

Here's some gratuitous knife making pictures :-)