Review of a Casström Woodsman

Last summer I had ordered a Casström Woodsman bushcraft knife. It being a design by Roger Harrington I had been sneaking around that knife for ages now. I had handled the old version,  which was made from O2 steel, almost a decade ago. Fact is,  I loved it then,  but also did not quite understand the concept. 

When Casström announced that they had launched a new version in Uddeholm Sleipner steel,  I decided to give it another try.  Now Sleipner is quite an interesting steel. http://localhost/en/products/uddeholm-sleipner/ is the spec sheet. More than 50% better resistance to abrasive wear than D2(1.2379), not that I would be too fond of D2,  but still. Also a finer edge possible,  and a lot more positive aspects. The steel is an allen of Iron, Manganese,  Molybdenum,  Silicium,  a wee bit of Chromium and so forth. Technically it is relatively stain resistant,  albeit no stainless steel. 

The blade is 88mm long and offers a rather thick spine at 3,9 mm, with a low slightly convex Scandi bevel. It is therefore possible to do food prep or slicey tasks,  but it is of course not optimal. The edge had a really microscopic microbevel and was able to split a fine hair out of the box. It was possible to shave your beard with it out of the box. The blade also offers a  90° really sharp spine. It is possible to use it for debarking branches or create fine resinwood shavings for fire starting. After almost a year of really hard work all it has needed was a leather strop. 

Rather thick spine,  you see... but it actually does the job of food prepping,  too,  if you cut at an angle. Batoning is obviously a cinch with it. 

The long handle also allows for more leverage when using it for mild chopping tasks. It is made from stabilized birch burr and really beautiful. It comes with a small,  but sturdy lanyard included. 

The sheath is absolutely stunning. When new,  retention was so high it was neigh on impossible to draw the knife,  which is a good thing. The seams are made with sturdy yellow twine,  the welt is good and thick. Even after half a year of wearing,  it still has some crisp to it. 

The belt loop accomodates standard common jeans belts,  but also military issue belts and is stitched and riveted in place. 

 All in all,  the knife does do most tasks exceedingly well. Edge retention is almost otherworldly,  and it gets really frightening sharp.  It really excels at most woodworking tasks involved in bushcraft,  and is also suitable for delicate carving in the woods. 

A classic bushcraft design with mythical edge retention and sharpness. As of today,  it is not exactly cheap. You pay up to 199,00 € , if you want a Firesteel. In my opinion, and you know I do not say that lightly,  I could have saved a lot of money had I bought it earlier. 

Btw,  also available in British bog oak... 😜If you can afford it,  buy one.  

But wait until you read my review on the SFK 10 Forester,  which is coming up soon...😜

Sheath for a very old and very weird knife

 Some of my older readers might recognize the knife. 

It has been in use in the kitchen for ages now and it is of course kinda weird. So I thought I would share the story first with you. 

In 'em days in the Bethaus smithy I forged it from junk spring steel I found near the roadside when mountainbike riding to the trailhead. Long story short,  I forged it,  annealed it,  and when it came to quenching,  the lard bosh was nowhere to be found. Volker simply had disposed of it. 

He had some delicious chicken soup in the larder of the Restaurant,  though,  so I used the steel to heat it up and the soup to quench the steel. I have never had to actually sharpen it,  although it has seen at least ten years of hard kitchen work and cut a lot of hard sausage and bacon,  nuts and what have you. 

So I looked it up why this mad prank did work. 

It finally turned out that the fat on top of the soup was solid and served the purpose of a first quench. The salt in the soup created sort of a bainite temper. Of course I just hardened the edge up to two thirds of the blade,  with two different zones of hardness. Of course I was being a bit over the top and it was sort of a mad prank,  but it turned out surprisingly well.

Now I am actually quite fond of the knife, so I just made a sheath for it. Really dirty technique,  but I think it will still be durable as anything. The dangler I had forged from mild steel. 

Looking forward to carrying it into the woods! 

Mora Garberg review

 I got myself a Garberg Carbon, courtesy of www.westfalia.de, who offered me a deal I could not resist. And actually I was a bit shocked by its performance.

Do not get me wrong. I am a knifemaker myself, and while I do not do beautiful, and am my own worst critic, over the years I have learned to make some pretty decent blades for myself. I also do quite a bit of bushcrafty things, nothing fancy, and I am living that way, not doing it, if you get my meaning. I do a fair bit of woodworking and whittling, too. I own a great many knives, and the Garberg always reminded me of the Fjällkniven F 1, and I have next to no funds, so I always was a bit reluctant to buy a knife with a similar concept to that knife.

I was wrong. How wrong I was. ☺️

The first shock I was in for was when I was first given the package. Now I own quite a few Moras, and maybe that sounds nuts, but all of them have that special Mora feeling. You all know what I mean. While they still feel rock solid, they have that light "carry all day without noticing" feeling and the a very nimble balance. When I first took up the Garberg, I nearly dropped it, it was far heavier than I expected. This is not a criticism, by the way, I was just taken unawares. Balance point is a bit behind the index finger. Mora could better this by machining out the hind part of the tang a wee bit more to bring it a bit further towards the index finger to make it even more dexterous, but this is complaining on a very high level. 

The package, by the way, comes with a sustainability certificate. That is Mora for you. Gotta love them.

Straight out of the box, sharpness left something to be desired, but just three strokes on a strop fixed that. After that it was scary sharp. Not just shaving, hair popping away in every direction. Awesome.

I harvested Chaga with it and rammed the tip into a piece of aged birchwood and levered it out sideways. It was not even warmed up by that kind of abuse.

I chopped antler with it. Now keep in mind that this is a Scandi grind with just a tiny micro bevel. You don't do this to that kind of grind. You simply don't. It came out with no dents or cracks or anything at all. It lost some sharpness, and that was all. You could still do these beautiful wood lock shavings with it afterwards, and in aged boxwood, which is very hard.

Actually I carved some twenty spoons with it, processed tinder conk, harvested Chaga and used it in the kitchen, used it as a chisel and a prybar. Of course it is not a kitchen laser, but it is still possible to make see - through onion rings and make short terms of taters, veggies and meat. Of course, due to the thickness of the blade, carrots and celary are split rather than cut, but if you adapt a bit, it also is an awesome knife for field cooking. The black coating is as good as new after all this abuse. 

To date, I did not have to put anything abrasive near it. Edge retention is very, very good. 

The handle to me is a really comfortable outright treat. Due to the almost symmetrical shape it also excels at in-reverse power cuts when whittling, which hints of an extraordinary performance when skinning. The blade shape would also excel at that.

The sheath comes with a rather coarse diamond hone and a fire steel. Both the spine and the protruding piece of tang are ground to 90°, allowing to use the firesteel with great efficiency. The firesteel snaps into a thermoplastic holder, with an awesome fit.

If I need to find anything not so good, it is the retention of the sheath. The knife can fall out when upside down. Given that this is a very, very good knife also in a tactical or military setting, I would suggest Mora could add some kind of mechanical retention device to secure it in these settings.

Actually this is the one knife. You can throw a lot of abuse at it and it is not even warmed up. But it is not a sharpened prybar, either. You can still - with some compromise, of course-use it for cooking tasks.

I am not impressed easily. But I am impressed.

I know some of you might ponder whether to get one. Do (If you can afford it). You will not regret it. I am aware that there are other knives on the market, like the Condor Terrasaur or several Finnish products. They might be good in their own right, maybe better and with a better value for money. I have not yet had the chance to handle them. But this here is not a comparison test, just a review. I do not get paid for it. All I can do is offer you my thoughts on this here knife. And given I have spent a lot of dough on knives, had I had a chance to get my hands on this, maybe it would have saved me some money. Actually, of course, there is a huge gap between, say, a perfectly able Mora companion when pricing is concerned. I, for one, understood the moment I first handled this. While a companion is really tough, too, the Garberg is neigh on indestructable, at least you get the impression. Even to have that feeling in the woods is reassuring and, at least for me, worth one or the other Euro more.

As I said, I can really stand behind this product. 

Developing a fascination with KC Nepal Khukuris

Now there are a load of Khuk´s around on the market. Some are decent, some are of subterranean quality, so to say. And some are legendary, and some deserve to be. In my humble opinion, the folks at the tiny Kathmandu smithy KC Nepal qualify. Talk is cheap.

Watch.

Enjoy.

And find their website here: www.nepalkhukuri.com

Also take note that I am not getting paid to say this, even if some of you may sense a bit of fish odour ;-). But these folks do it with a passion. They burn for what they do, they work hard, under circumstances most European smiths would mock at. People make fun of me because I use salvaged spring steel and other materials and not some heebie-jeebie-goobalahbah unobtanium steels, and they mock at me for using my hammer, my tongs and not much more, they laugh at me because I do not have hundreds and thousands of money to spend on tempering ovens and wuptity controllers ;-).

Fact is, it´s true. I don´t have the money, of course. But that is not all there is. It does not matter. If you don´t understand the passion, the fire and the fierce desire to always get better, you will not understand. I am fascinated by these guys, not because they are the "significant other". Not even by the quality of their knives, nor the bargain prices they offer. Even if I have little money, I would pay more for their work.

I am just a mere hobbyist, an amateur. But these guys do this shit for a living... and still yet, they burn with a fierce passion for their work. Even if I work with simple tools... I cannot even compare to them. It is not in the equipment, it´s in the mastery of the equipment you have.

Those who know me and have followed my blog know that I don´t just do "Tribal knifemaking" as a mere fashion fad (oh, yes, there ARE people around like that), but had the privilege to have had, one must sadly say, several "true" "tribal" knifemakers (they would whack me if they knew I called them thus) as tutors, the late Mielenko Bednarcz from St. Petersburg and Viktor Paukow, a smith from Kazakhstan, who was a tutor of mine from 2004 until 2014, both of which taught me a lot with sparse words, some brawls, a bit of Vodka and a lot of making me watch in awe.It was definitely no formal training I received. What they taught me, first and foremostly, is respect. 

And thusly, it is not that I would not, with a bit of time and preparation, be able to make a knife that would do similar things. It is not that it is about the "product". It is a matter of respect and modesty.

I don´t like the words, but for me it is part of Bushido. I don´t like the words, because they seem not to apply. Maybe you can see it that way: We live on a planet, and there are several different kinds of human beings on it. Some do what they want, some do what they can, and some do what they must, some do whichever is force-fed to them. 

I do not want to define them, because, even if I have the privilege to call Ambar a friend, even though we have never met in actual and most likely never will, which tells a story in itself, I know that we might have many similarities, but that there are differences, too. But this is exactly the point.

Sometimes I feel a bit ashamed of my fellow Westerners. I mean, while of course there are loads of guys and gals doing a really, really great job with so-called "modern equipment", most of the blades they produce go to fatcat, overweight nocturnal predators who would rather cut their own head off with a knife than peeling an onion. A knife somehow has become sort of a fetish, to be polished and admired, but not for actual use, for the rich. And then there are some of those knifemakers, mostly amateurs like me, who as I said sneer at a lack of equipment.

Try this, BSTDs... I doubt most of them would be capable to make a knife like this with modern equipment, let alone with the traditional setup. Don´t get me wrong... there is nothing romantic about forging that way. It´s back-breaking labour.

I know how it is to forge that way. I know how a herniated vertebral disc feels like. Tried that, tickles.

And this is why this will not be the last you have read about KC on my blog. Because they make excellent knives. Because they burn with passion for what they do. And because they fucking deserve it! 

Steampunky survival tribal tactical whatnot...;-)

 This is a recent experiment I made.. it started as a bush knife with a socket construction... I did a quick linen wrapping and stabilized that with epoxy. In  atime consuming process it then was stained with coffee, dragon´s blood (daemonoropos draco) concoction and finish. The blade is forged to fit with less than 1 % stock removal from leaf spring steel and selectively tempered.

 Thickness is 6mm. Due to the wide blade, however, cutting prowess is quite good in spite of the thick blade.

Storage room for gimmicks... I plan to fit in some matches and a firesteel and a diamond hone... we´ll see how it goes... I´ll keep you posted!

A day in the smithy with Willy

 On Sunday, weather was great, so I saddled my steed and rolled out to the smithy. It turns out Willy was already there and was doing some work. There were few customers, but still, children came along and we did a bit of forging with kids. Willy is currently going strong, what with his own smithy he always keeps with him on his car trailer. The progress he makes is great to see, and he is doing some big-scale work such as garden handrails and -doors and other big artisan blacksmithing stuff.

 He told me he wasn´t that much into knifemaking anymore, and I can much relate to that. It´s simply not that challenging anymore to pound iron flat and put an edge to it. I have taken other challenges, such as Damascus and those leaf-handled knives, but still, sometimes you just want something more eloquent. I try to combine artisan elements with my knives and have just started some reconstruction projects, but Willy is currently going huge with either tiny, extremely eloquent jewellery work - in steel, not silver- and classical artisan work for garden and home. In my opinion, this is a great way of learning from each other. Bro´, it´s always inspiring!

 Contrary to all my talking, I had little time and, as I freely admit, little energy, so I just made one of the highly practical bush knives while I waited for the kids to come.

 Willy made a coal shovel for his own forge.

 Oh, and this is Noris, kind of a blacksmith´s groupie already, dropping by frequently to do some small projects. We forged a little ring for the collar of his little doggie. It certainly shows he´s got practice, and he was righteously proud of his achievement!

 This is what I made, the bush knife from ancient spring steel with a high-tech ferrum oxide high density desert destroyer tactical operation high endurance forte TM coating for the blade;-), meaning, I left the oxide on. Also a chain link and a belt hook for a sheath system.

 I was thinking of making the handle a flower, but there was too little material - I was a bit spontaneous in making this blade. I also did a quick paracord wrap.

 The spine thickness is quite moderate, the knife has seen little stock removal. It´s well balanced, and the steel keeps a great edge, very fine and well hard enough. I love that steel.

We had a coffee and a piece of cake, cleaned up, and parted, as the sun sank. Nice day.