One Collector's Rotation Is a Tour of the Custom Mid-Tier
The "state of the rotation" post is a fixture of r/knifeclub: photograph what you are actually carrying this week and list the names. Occasionally one of them doubles as a market survey, and this week's does — a rotation running from a Hog House Model T Gen 2 with honeycomb milling through a raw Cerberus Aurelius F-Type in Vanax, a QP Blades Canyon in S90V, a Maverick Concepts Wren integral, an Oz Roosevelt in raw stonewash, and an Eutsler Mini Neutralizer in S35VN.
Read that list as a set of decisions rather than a flex. Three different steels appear — Vanax, S90V, S35VN — and each represents a different priority. Vanax is a nitrogen steel chosen for corrosion resistance at high hardness, which is why it shows up in small makers' work where a knife may be carried against skin in humid weather. S90V is the wear-resistance extreme. S35VN is the balanced answer, and the fact that it appears on the Eutsler rather than on the more expensive pieces is telling about how the maker priced the knife.
The finishes are the other through-line. Zirblasting, raw stonewash, honeycomb milling, dark-washed blades: these are all surface treatments that cost time rather than material, and they are where small shops differentiate. A production knife is judged on steel and lock; a custom in this tier is judged on how the finish feels in the hand after six months.
The economics of the tier are worth stating plainly. These knives sit in the several-hundred-to-low-four-figures range, made in small batches that sell out before they ship, and they hold value better than production knives because the supply is fixed. That is why the owner mentions two more en route — a full Damasteel three-inch Sham and a Hephaestus Machineworks Virgil — and why he is already anticipating "difficult decisions over the weekend," which is collector language for deciding what to sell to fund what is arriving.
For anyone moving up from production knives, the lesson is to buy the maker before the materials. A Vanax blade from a shop with good heat treat beats an M390 blade from a shop without one, and the rotation above is full of names that earned their reputation on execution first.