The IWA OutdoorClassics is an international trade show that takes place every year in Germany.
It is one of the leading trade shows for guns and knives in the world. Although there is not as much buzz as SHOT Show or BLADE Show, major companies do showcase some of their upcoming knives.
When Eric Glesser of Spyderco sat down with YouTuber Artur Saulin (ARHADYR) to talk about the new knives of 2019, they were all knives we’re familiar with — including a few that appeared in the first 2019 Reveal Catalog.
I’ve been sympathetic to the complicated relationship between the United Kingdom and knives. There’s no doubt knife crime is a major issue in the country and that something needs to be done about it.
I even wrote a nuanced conversation about how to look at knife crime in the country in a moment when everyone was poking fun at the mayor of London for tweeting that there was never any reason to carry a knife (despite my article listing 101 uses for a pocket knife).
But sometimes people go a little too far. Take a look at this tweet from member of Parliament Scott Mann:
Every knife sold in the UK should have a gps tracker fitted in the handle. It’s time we had a national database like we do with guns. If you’re carrying it around you had better have a bloody good explanation, obvious exemptions for fishing etc.
That’s right… he just said that all knives sold in the UK should have GPS trackers built into the handle. Think about that because Mann certainly didn’t.
How many knives are currently in the UK? There are roughly 27.2 million households in the UK. Let’s be conservative and say each household has four kitchen knives (which is about a dozen less than I have). That’s more than 108 million knives just in the kitchen.
Add the countless pocket knives and fixed blades — both those used legitimately and illegitimately — and you get hundreds of millions of knives already in the country. On top of that, what exactly would putting a GPS tracker on a knife accomplish? Then you’d have to make sure they were all charged all the time.
Reviewers on YouTube have made disassembling knives very popular (much to the chagrin of many knife manufacturers I’m sure).
No one is more guilty of this than Nick Shabazz — though his disassembly videos are a public service to teach those about the inner workings of the knife and general maintenance.
You’ll likely notice that when Nick and others put knives back together, they use a substance called Loctite on the screws.
So what exactly is Loctite and is it really necessary to use when putting a knife back together? Read on.
What is Loctite?
Loctite is the brand name for a threadlocker. Loctite is to threadlocker what Kleenex is to facial tissue or ChapStick is to lip balm. Although Loctite is the most popular threadlocker, there are other brands available like Permatex.
Garuda is a mythological king of birds in several Eastern cultures. It is believed that the eagle-like figure is a protector and watchful creature. It’s an apt name for a knife designed to be a used in the outdoors in all types of environments and situations.
The Condor Tool & Knife Garuda series has a few knives, but the one we’re highlighting has a 5-inch black traction powder-coated blade made from 1075 high carbon steel, an alloy that’s tough and takes an edge easily. Its drop-point profile is simple and effective.
Here’s a nice video review from Everyday Tactical Vids
Unlike many of the fixed blades from Condor, the Garuda features handsome Micarta scales with a pinned construction.
Although NASA retired the Space Shuttle program a few years back, there are still grand plans for sending people back to the moon and eventually to Mars.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon (with Buzz Aldrin a close second), we thought it’d be interesting to take a look back at the knives that have gone into space.
Camillus Mil-K
Close-up view of pocket knife, part of the Friendship 7 Survival Kit (A19670176001), August 8, 2013. Smithsonian
Since the first people were sent into space, they have almost always had a knife within reach. I’m not sure whether the first man in space — cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin — carried a knife (though I’m sure he did). However, we do know what the first American man carried into space.
According to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Alan Shepherd carried the Camillus Mil-K Demo Knife in his kit during the United States’ first manned mission to space on May 5, 1961. This was the US-equivalent of the classic Swiss Army Knife made by Victorinox. The version Shepherd carried had a tang stamped with 1959.
Unfortunately, Camillus filed for bankruptcy in 2007 before being bought out by Acme United.
Randall Made Knives Model 17 Astro
This knife has one of the coolest stories. At the time, NASA had this philosophy that if something didn’t exist, it would simply make it. The team needed a survival knife for emergencies and couldn’t find one suitable for them. So astronaut Gordon Cooper and NASA doctor William Douglas reached out to Bo Randall of Randall Made Knives to create a special design.
SOG built its name on producing top-of-the-line knives that excel in extreme situations. The company focused on fixed blades in its early days before jumping into the folding knife genre. The Flash II is the poster child of the company’s goal.
The Flash I became an instant hit among knife nuts everywhere after being called an “outstanding reference EDC” knife. Well, SOG managed to improve upon the highly acclaimed original Flash with a few upgrades.
The WESN Microblade initially launched on Kickstarter back in late 2017, and the brand is back for more with its next Kickstarter release called the WESN Allman.
Check it out:
The Allman is a compact EDC knife (not as compact as the tiny Microblade but pretty darn small) with a 2.75-inch S35VN steel blade that opens with a flipper tab. You can get the knife in either titanium handles with a frame lock or G-10 handle scales with a liner lock.
Here are the specs:
Blade Length: 2.8” (7.2cm)
Closed Length: 3.8” (9.7cm)
Open Length: 6.65″ (16.9cm)
Handle Material: Grade 5 Titanium Scales or G10 Scales
Blade Steel: S35vn
Hardware: Stainless steel Frame-lock or Liner lock
Pocket Clip
Lanyard Hole
Lifetime Warranty
The design itself is a bit bland. The blade profile is a sort of drop point design but with a less piercing point and a swedge. The blade also seems a bit stubby and relies on the wider handle to fit the whole thing.
There is something about the sleekness and simplicity that makes this knife appealing though. It removes the bells and whistles and sticks with a stripped-down design. They removed the unnecessary thumb stud for just the flipper.
This post was originally published in September 2014 and updated in February 2019.
An old saying goes something like this: “Stars: they’re just like us.” Except for the whole money and fame thing, it’s largely true.
Celebrities, like us, have their own obsessions and collection habits. While some celebrities collect really strange and impractical items (such as Johnny Depp’s disturbing Barbie collection), some are reasonable people who, like many of you reading this, collect knives.
A surprising number of celebrities are really into knives, including Keith Richards, Steven Seagal, Ziggy Marley, Wayne LaPierre, Kid Rock, and Pamela Anderson, but the following are among the most notorious and well-known knife collectors.
Sylvester Stallone
We’re all familiar with John Rambo’s love for awesome knives, but the man who plays Rambo is equally enthusiastic about knives. Sylvester Stallone has been a big collector of knives for a long time and continues to be one to this day.
I’m not sure if it’s Stallone’s influence or just the movies he acts in, but Stallone always manages to get some amazing knives into his movies, such as a Spyderco in Cliffhanger, the unique Herman Schneider knife in Cobra, and, of course, the Lile Rambo knife.
A sage isn’t just someone who possesses wisdom but someone who transcends knowledge and strives for perfection. That’s what makes “sage” such a fitting name for our latest Badass Knife of the Week.
The Spyderco Sage represents a decades-long process of learning what makes the ideal everyday carry pocket knife. Because there is no such thing as a perfect knife (since each person has their own view of perfection), Spyderco set out to create a series of similar designs with different locking mechanisms.
The Sage 1 uses a Michael Walker liner lock, which has become one of the most ubiquitous locking mechanisms out there. The 3-inch blade opens with the patented Spyderco Round Hole and stays engaged with a steel liner you can disengage with your thumb.
Made from premium S30V steel, the leaf-shaped blade has a piercing point and curved belly for easy slicing.
Many of the iconic and classic knife companies have closed their doors. Imperial Schrade Company went under in 2004 (though it lives on in some form after its name has been bought and sold by a few other companies) and Queen Cutlery called it day in 2018 after nearly 100 years in operation.
While traditional knives have been seeing a resurgence, especially with places like Great Eastern Cutlery committed to keeping the past alive, Case has been around for a long, long time and have been making largely the same knives for more than a century.
2019 is still young, but Case has been active in announcing new projects and even recently released its 2019 catalog.
Interestingly, this year is full of a lot of reworked knives and classics that were brought back to please the audience. Case is still in full blown going electric mode and I love it.
Feel free to skip to the actual knives, but hear me out if you want more Dylan deep dives. 2019 Case is the live at “Royal Albert Hall” bootleg era — completely reworking classics, revisiting old stuff, and continuing with the new.
In case you didn’t catch that (and why would you if you aren’t a Dylan fanatic), that’s a line from this:
Similar to the way Dylan completely transformed that song from its acoustic folksiness, Case strips the old Shark Tooth to its bones and rebuilds it into something modern and sleek.
