For the first couple of years that I was in the Navy I carried a fixed blade knife on my belt as a deck knife. I ran into problems deploying it from the traditional vertical sheath, so I redesigned the sheath and wore it horizontally along my belt, an idea I wish I had patented considering sheaths I have seen since, which made it easier to access even if it looked a little weird. Eventually I figured out that a good folding knife was better because you were not holding an open blade the whole time you were handling it, and a fixed blade knife can penetrate its sheath when subjected to the kind of stresses you might run into doing the very physical things we were up to. I figured out a way to deploy the big blade of my Buck Folding Hunter very quickly, and even possibly saved my own life with it once when my life jacket fouled in a line, by cutting away the life jacket, deploying the knife from folded to open and cut the jacket in short enough time to keep me from being pulled overboard. I easily could have done the same with a fixed blade knife, but the folder worked well enough, fast enough.karl wrote:Everyone talks about being able to open a blade with one hand. Why not switch to fixed blade with an in-pocket sheath? I haven't used a fixed blade yet, but it doesn't seem like others have either. Am I missing something?
Later, when I worked for the phone company, the company took away our issued folding knives because people had closed them on their fingers, and issued us sheath knives, which were very inconvenient to deploy when wearing a heavy jacket down below your belt. I did a similar "field re-engineering" of the sheath and wore it horizontally until ordered not to do so by management, so I wore the knife as instructed, but carried a folder which I used, the sheath knife became a display piece.