Best Knife to Break Packages Down

I am not a warehouse worker yet I have found myself doing a lot of work that you would find in a warehouse.  This is the year of online shopping .  A lot of regulations and laws put in place by governments have stopped local shopping from happening all across the country and we are now shopping online to get the goods we are no longer able to get because the stores are not allowed to be shopped at or have closed because of the regulations put on them.  This has left many of us to use the world wide web to do our shopping for us.  What this also brought us was tons of cardboard boxes coming to our homes.  This didn’t seem like an issue until a few months in happened and I found about a hundred in my garage that I couldn’t seem to get rid of.  But luckily I am a man who enjoys using tools.  I picked up the best tool for the job and started to compare my knives to see which was best at taking down the cardboard boxes best.

What I found was that it was really a job for a nice comfortable blade.  The first time I went to break down a few I had my folding knife on me.  This was a Spyderco Paramilitary 2.  This blade is thin, not only in the steel but in teh handle as well.  It fits nicely in the pocket and is really known for slicing well.  The thing was that after a few boxes my hands started to hurt and even get some red spots.  It was ok to do two boxes or so but after that, I had to take a break because the handle was simply thin.   Ergonomic for a folding knife is what this knife is but it is meant for smaller cutting tasks and not a lot of boxes.  I found this to be the case for my other folding knives as well.  They felt great for a box or maybe two which I would break down and put in my trash right after receiving.  But when it came to going after my garage pile, it was not up to the task. 

So then I decided to go ahead and pull out an old buck 119.  This is a well known fixed blade with a rather comfortable handle.  It was a bit large for the task but it allowed me to use a lot of the blade on each cut and it worked well to slice through cardboard.  I ended up cutting up about 20 boxes before I had to stop due to the lack of trash bags available.  I found the larger handle did not give me hot spots and was really good at ergonomically allowing me to do the job.  But after 20 boxes the blade went dull.  This is normal for a 420C blade steel and it needed sharpened.  But since I wanted to then do more on teh next run I went for better blade steel in my knife.

I used a Benchmade Luku with CPM 3v steel.  This allowed me to do all the rest of the boxes.  It was around 50 with no issues. So get the best knife for the job and be free of those packages.