My biggest gripe about Emerson knives is the G10 they use, which is either the fine texture G10 or their coarse texture G10, both of which rip pockets faster than Rosie O'Donnell cleans the buffet out at the Golden Corral. That said, I like Emerson's designs enough as well to buy some models, and the problems mentioned above can be fixed with equal parts know-how, elbow grease and care attention to detail.
I bought this Emerson Endeavor as a project blade from Knifeart.com for a grand sum of 190$ shipped. That's a lot of money to invest in a knife that you're essentially going to pimp out. It's a risk, I know, but when I get an idea in my head for a knife it's sometimes hard to let go of that dream. The Endeavor is a cool little pocket knife; just small enough to be legal in Raleigh, it has Emerson's wave feature and a very attractive blade shape. The biggest thing that I like about the Endeavor as opposed to Emerson's other knives is the fact that it doesn't use Emerson's hokey thumb-disk, which I really don't care for at all.
The G10 absolutely had to go. While the fine texture G10 isn't as bad as Emerson's coarse texture G10, it still has a tendency to eat jeans, so I swapped it for silver twill. While I was at it, I used some of my new toxic green G10 to make a flush fitting backspacer. Here's what the project came out looking like. I still haven't mounted the pocket clip, but it's a pretty simple operation, just requires a little more drilling.
