By Joe Berk
Sue and I were in Reno last month to visit the National Automobile Museum. Like most places, Reno isn’t what it used to be. The downtown area is a bit sketchy and I didn’t feel comfortable at all walking around. That said, we had a good time at the Auto Museum and a good time in Reno. As is my habit, I checked online to see if there were any interesting gunstores in town, and the online info for one in particular caught my eye: Willey Brothers Firearms. Unlike the others, Willey’s ad emphasized the kind of guns I’m interested in (blue steel and walnut, not the black plastic tactical junk one mostly sees in gun stores these days). Willey Brothers lived up to its ad: The firearms were interesting, including the used guns.
Nothing in the gun offerings was interesting enough, though, to make me want to go to the bother of shipping it to the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia, but I noticed the store had a few used pocketknives for sale. One in particular caught my eye: An old Imperial Kamp King that was in nice shape. I was interested in it because it has the same four-bladed configuration as my old Cub Scout knife. At $25, it looked like a good deal, so I paid the asking price and Sue and I were on our way. When I got home, I cleaned it up with a bit of Kroil penetrating oil and 0000 steel wool. I think it was made in the 1950s or 1960s (that’s a guess on my part, although if I studied the video included below, I’d probably be able to narrow it down more).
That got me thinking. There’s a company called Rough Rider (not the condom company) that makes a current version of the Kamp King. I recalled seeing that knife when scrolling through the offerings from Chicago Knife Works (which is actually located in Marion, Virginia). The CKW Kamp King was only $16.94, and the more I thought about it, the more I knew I had to have it (admittedly, the thought process did not take long). Move to cart, buy now, and in went my credit card number.
Chicago Knife Works has great prices and terrible shipping. It takes 10 to 12 days from the time I’ve placed orders with these guys until whatever I order actually ships. I don’t mean until it gets here; I mean until it actually leaves the CKW facility. I don’t know if that’s because CKW is just pokey, or if they don’t keep much in stock and they order their knives from China when I place an order. I suspect it’s the former, as every time it’s taken an inordinate amount of time to ship and I send them an email to complain (I did that every time I’ve ordered anything from them). Then I’ll get an automated response from Chicago Knife Works telling me they’re sorry (which I already knew) and they have so many orders they just can’t get to them all in a reasonable amount of time. And every time when I wrote to complain about taking to long to ship, well, CKW ships my order the very next day. I should get smart and complain about the shipping delay as soon as I place an order, I guess.
My new Rough Rider Kamp King arrived a few days ago and I’m impressed. It is a really nice knife that dimensionally is pretty true to the older ones that were manufactured in America. The quality on the new Chinese Kamp King is really good. The fit and finish are superb, and it just doesn’t look or feel like a cheap knife.
The other reason I ordered the new Kamp King is that I wanted to compare it to a Marbles Scout King I had purchased from Chicago Knife Works about six months ago. I thought it might be the same knife as the Marbles, but it is not. The Marbles knife is a bigger, heftier version of the Kamp King. I suspect they are both manufactured by the same knife company in China, but I don’t know this. The appearance of the two new knives (even though the dimensions and the scales are different) is so similar that I’d bet both come out of the same factory somewhere in the Peoples’ Republic (and I’m talking about China now, not Kalifornia).
I Googled the topic and although I couldn’t find the specific Chinese company that makes these knives, I learned that China’s primary knife-manufacturing region is Yangjiang City in Guangdong Province. It’s been China’s knife-making center for more than 1,400 years and is home to several knife companies. I’d sure like to visit that area someday. I’ve been to Providence, Rhode Island (where the original Kamp Kings were manufactured). A visit to Yangjiang City would be interesting. I’d probably come home with a suitcase full of interesting and inexpensive knives.
Join our Facebook ExNotes page!
Never miss an ExNotes blog:
Help us keep the lights on:
Don’t forget: Visit our advertisers!
