Serials system on Butterfly blades

UpSideDownCarl said:

Yeah. The important information has already been presented.

I think the biggest thing that changed is that the OEM that made the black tag Viscarias is a different factory and company than the OEM that has made the silver tag Viscarias.

But when people buy into certain myths, they tend to fall hard for them. So, on line you see these crazy prices for black tag Viscarias.

I personally think the thing that distinguishes a decent amount of Pros blades is that they get to try as many as they want till they find the 3-5 that they want for main and backup blades. Whereas most of us get one blade and hope we get a good one of that kind of blade.

Part of what makes a Viscaria a good solid product is that there are a decently high percentage of them that are better than pretty good.

But if you get 20-30 Viscarias, of any serial number, and try them all, there will be a few that you try that will feel REALLY GOOD. And most of the rest will feel pretty good. And then there will be 2 or 3 that will be clunkers that just are really not very good.

And someone tries one that says K and it was a good one. And then there is a rumor floated that the K series is the best and that certain pros use the K series. And it may even be true. But the blades from the K series that those pros rejected may not be any better than one from a different series.

But a person who has one of those series could feed the rumors and try to charge a lot of cash for them. Without trying many of those blades it would be hard to tell if it was one of the really good ones.

And since WOOD is wood and wood is a substance that was living, a blade maker can increase the likelyhood of making a good blade by selecting good wood. But you can't really say that all blades with a serial number starting in H or I or J or K are anything in particular. And if you tried 20-30 of them there would MORE THAN LIKELY, be the normal variations of some being better and some being worse.

Wood is wood and there really is no way of magically getting around that for manufacturing blades.


Sent from The Subterranean Workshop by Telepathy

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Baal said:

I have no experience with the JM sZLC.

My experience is that there was something about Viscaria blades with an H or and I date of manufacture that nearly every one of them from those productions runs that I ever got to hit with was really good. This is a sample size of about six blades, not huge, but still enough for the impression to be pretty strong. I like those better than older ones or the more recent ones, so I don't think it was necessarily because the earliest production runs were made more carefully or anything like that. The explanation could be some of the following:

1. It is all in my head and hence total self-delusional nonsense, and H and I blades are not actually better.
2. At that time they got a shipment of wood that was particularly good.
3. The blades from that time were made in a specific factory that has changed since.
4. There was some different guy in charge and he switched a setting on some machine at some point in the production process or used a slightly different way of gluing things together or the blade balance inside the handle was machined in way that made it especially good.
5. Some other thing I haven't thought of.

I don't know if any of this is actually true. Just throwing it out.

It is possible that some aficionado of JM sZLC blades with ST handles has a special love for blades of a particular series for a similar reason. Unless he tells us though, we won't know why he wants one of that age.

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