Don't know about you, but in my top-drawer collection, there are lots of shiny, gorgeous, brilliantly designed knives. Sypderco, Cold Steel, SOG, all functional works of art, clean, razor sharp, and ready for the next expedition to Everest.

And then, bottom drawer, there's the "Dirty Harry" series -- they always get the s@$% end of the stick. Otherwise known as "shop knives" around here.

They get the cruddy, greasy, edge-mangling, finish-dissolving tasks. Scraping parts, cutting sod, cleaning oily crud out of crevices, spreading or scraping glue and silicone, and cutting things that ought not be cut with a blade (like metal strapping). Sometimes sharpened with a stone, sometimes dragged through a pull-type sharpener, sometimes abused with a file. Knives that do the lousy jobs and get burned up pretty fast.

(My current set includes a Gerber Paraframe that I got for $15, some retired/broken fixed-blade hunting knives, a $5 Husky folder from Home Depot, a couple of Chinese 440 lockback folders ... etc.)

So, knife users, tell me about your "Dirty Harry" knives -- the models you use, what you do to them, and what you expect of them.

I EDC a Kershaw Leek, and it gets lightly abused during everyday use. I know I should go to the other room grab another knife, but this on is already in my pocket. It's even worse when someone asks me to barrow my knife, sometimes what they do with it just makes me cringe. But so far the Leek has held up surprisingly well.

For the really nasty tasks, I have a Husky folding box cutter from home depot. I use this thing for scraping gooey / crusty stuff, cutting dry wall, wire stripping and cutting, and a great number of other uses I wouldn't even consider using one of my shiny knives for, I abuse the heck out of this knife, but I bought a 100 pack of blades to go with it so it's ok. I keep thinking I'll snap the blade in half, yet so far all I've managed to do is dull it or snap the very tip off. Then again I don't really use it for prying at all.

As I have said more than once here, about 90% of everything I do involves my original Leatherman Supertool. The poor ole blade is a tad shorter than it started out (been sharpened a lot, and a few dings and nicks removed from it), but it still does the job, and is always with me. It is about to be replaced by a New Wave tho...

It's a 20-year-old Air Force survival knife made by Ontario Knife Company. I use it to cut, chop, and pry anything that doesn't need either a chainsaw or a wrecking bar. It's heavy and clunky and absolutely dependable. Most of the original black coating has worn off, and it's been resharpened a mess of times, which is getting harder given the increasing thickness of the blade as you go back from the edge. I'm going to have to grind a shallow bevel on it soon, or it's going to resemble an axe blade in cross section. Come to think of it, I sort of use it as I would an axe, so why bother?