>>1139362Funny thing is, the Paki's are actually good metalworkers when you get out of the backstreet beater market, quite a lot of the worlds scalpel blades are made there and hell, they've been blacksmithing for fucking centuries.
One more important factor is those blades like the a-typical pattern welded knife from them is that the edge geometry is generally way too steep to make a good slicer and being all flat grinds, kind of hard to make for a good chopper... a sword, forget it!
But at the prices and cost of labour of having someone run a power hammer or press for $200 a week, its fairly hard for someone to come to me and go "well that 'same' knife is $30 on ebay, why are you going to charge me $6-700?" and then we get into the spiel about certified steel sources, my time/labour costs, all the other incidentals, why its not shit etc. Pretty hard to compete with the 3rd world on a manual tradeskill, especially when cheap and pretty is what most people want.
Pattern welded steel when its done right and tight is ok, but its mostly just done for looks as all our current, modern steels far exceed the need to combine them with anything else, add in a few centuries of documented heat treatments, techniques and so forth, you'll get a good consistent product with a mono steel knife with no risk of imperfections, delams or other messiness. Plus its just a lot of extra work, no one wants to actually pay for that work at a premium level, so Pakistan is pretty safe to continue making pattern welded stuff for a while yet.
