As someone who handles razor-sharp knives on a day-to-day basis, I’ve been cut on the rare occasion (nothing seriously mind you), so when the founder of NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves reached out for a review, I was intrigued.
They sent me three pairs to try out and here’s what I thought.
Purpose of Cut-resistant Gloves
If you’re a casual knife user, you might be wondering why anyone would need cut-resistant gloves. I thought the same until I met my wife. She’s a very competent and dexterous person, but when it comes to knives and food preparation, she’s a mess.
It started when she cut herself with a peeler a few times and grew worse after she sliced her finger chopping a sweet potato. Since then, she refuses to peel anything for fear of cutting herself. Her confidence is shot.
The NoCry Cut Resistant Gloves are the perfect solution for people like her. These gloves allow her to slice, dice, and peel without the fear of mixing blood and gore in with her famous homemade chili.
Aside from the typical use of holding items while cutting to increase confidence, NoCry Gloves also assist in a few other tasks. The folks at NoCry let me know that a large majority (around 80%) of people who bought the gloves use them in the kitchen. Ideal kitchen use for cut-resistant gloves is peeling, dicing, shucking oysters, grating cheese, or trying to cut a whole watermelon in 30 seconds or less.
Although I don’t have a mandoline slicer, many of the reviews on Amazon say that the gloves can also save a trip to the hospital.
The other 20% of users for these gloves are hunters and fishers. When you’re dealing with sharp knives in wet and slippery environments (filleting a carp or skinning a white-tailed deer), your hands become prone to slippage.
Initial Reaction to the NoCry Gloves
Enough background—let’s dive right in. The gloves arrived in a nondescript, resealable zippered plastic bag. Packed with the gloves were a proof-of-purchase slip and a print-out of some general instructions/care tips. You can tell NoCry is a fairly small operation from the packaging, and that’s not a bad thing.
We’ve entered the bizarre and convenient era of online buying. Thanks to companies like Amazon and Knife Depot, I get packages sent to my doorstep almost every day. Whether by a preprogramming from childhood or a general excitement, I simply can’t wait to tear open the box to see my new prize, even if it’s just a nonstick cake pan.
In my rush to open the box, my knife is what takes the most abuse. Whether because I’m impatient (or my wife is doing the opening), my knives always end up with a pile of tape gunk that doesn’t come off in warm water.
So what’s a man to do?
We’ve got that answer for you below.
Method 1: WD-40
Even though tape residue seems to be embedded on a blade, it’s actually fairly easy to remove. You have a number of options to take them off, but we’ll show you two different ways to remove the residue and the pros/cons. The first method we’re going with is the WD-40 way.
When I was a young kid in elementary school, I read Gary Paulsen’s wilderness novel called Hatchet. The story follows the survival efforts of a 13-year-old who crash lands in the middle of the woods, carrying nothing but his hatchet. From that point on, the hatchet became the coolest tool on the planet in my young eyes.
It’s almost two decades later now, but I still hold the hatchet in high regards because of its overall usefulness and feel. The weight of a good hatchet in your hand is unmatched.
In an effort to make the hatchet more accessible to newbies and experts alike, I’ve assembled the five best hatchets found at Knife Depot. If you have any you’d like to add to the list, feel free to let me know in the comments.
SOG Tactical Tomahawk
For those who don’t know, a hatchet is essentially a small axe that you can use with one hand. The term itself is not mutually exclusive, meaning certain axes and tomahawks can be considered hatchets. The first hatchet on the list is the SOG Tactical Tomahawk.
This is the first of a two-part series with survival expert Creek Stewart. Tomorrow, Creek will be sharing his tips on picking out the perfect survival knife. We’ll also be giving away a BlackBird SK5 — Creek’s primary survival knife — to one lucky reader along with two copies of his book. Scroll to the bottom of the article to learn how to enter.
“I like to live what I preach,” said 36-year-old survival instructor Creek Stewart across a cafeteria table at the Cobb Galleria during the 2013 Blade Show. “I don’t just put survival instructor on my resume.”
A few minutes of conversation with Stewart, who founded and operates Willow Haven Outdoor survival school in Indiana, quells any doubts about his survival chops.
The former Boy Scout turned survival guru and bestselling author rarely goes anywhere without his “Get Home Bag,” a pack full of items ranging from energy bars to a Leatherman that ensures he’ll get home safely if disaster strikes.
At the Blade Show, he was wearing a BlackBird SK5 in a leather sheath on his hip and also had a Leatherman and a Spyderco knife in tow.
But what makes Stewart stand out from the pack isn’t his gear, but his survival philosophy. It’s a blended approach, which he calls “prima-modern,” that utilizes both modern tools and primal survival skills to meet the four core basic needs: shelter, water, fire and food.
A Passion for the Outdoors
An Eagle Scout at 14, Stewart grew up on a farm and developed a strong appreciation for both nature and self-reliance skills at an early age. When he was in college, he wrote and self-published a guide on survival that he sold to the Boy Scouts. He began teaching survival courses at 21, but without a full time facility was limited to mostly one day courses in his area.
Then about 4 years ago, he purchased Willow Haven Outdoor, a 21-acre survival school replete with a 10,000 square foot lodge. Stewart now hosts 1-day and 3-day courses every year from May until November and said he serves a huge range of attendees, from 10-year-olds to 80-year-olds. The approach at Willow Haven is somewhere in the middle in terms of intensity and Stewart said he’s developing a niche for instructing families.
“There’s one extreme where people come to a survival course and expect to strip down to a leather thong and only take their knife into the woods with them for seven days and starve, then there’s the classroom survival stuff — we’re perfectly in the middle,” he said.
In a typical class, students will receive hands on instruction to learn between three to five survival skills from each of the core four survival areas.
In addition to teaching, Stewart has also taken his survival skills to the literary world. He recently published the Unofficial Hunger Games Wilderness Survival Guide, which provides step-by-step instructions on how to perform many of the survival skills utilized by characters in the “Hunger Games.”
Update: A few people have asked if they can see emails between Knife Depot and Google Adwords staff. The short answer is yes, if it’s something you’re interested in writing about, then just email me at Dan@knife-depot.com. I also added an excerpt lower in the post, in which a member of the Adwords staff reveals his own disgust at the “double standard” Google is applying to big brands.
For seven years, Knife Depot has been selling top-quality blades over the Internet to the jubilation of knife lovers everywhere. And for the last two years, we’ve been writing about knives and knife culture on The Cutting Edge.
However, recently, something has threatened our ability to promulgate our large selection of knives to the legions of blade lovers across the world: Google has shut down our AdWords Account.
AdWords, if you’re not hip to the Internet jive, is a Google advertising program that allows companies to place text-based ads next to specified search queries. To the user, it looks like this:
Up until late February of this year, Knife Depot had generated a good slice of its revenue from Google AdWords. We’d also been careful to not ever violate Google’s Adwords weapons policy, which prohibits “the promotion of knives, such as butterfly knives, (balisongs) and switchblades.”
For this reason, we were shocked when last month Google told us they would be terminating our AdWords account unless we removed all of our “assisted opening knives,” which are legal, hugely popular across the U.S, and not prohibited in Google’s policy. Assisted opening knives, if you’re not aware, differ from switchblades by the fact that pressure must be applied for them to be opened.
Here’s a more in-depth explanation.
After some deep thinking, we decided that serving our customer base, who legally buy large amounts of assisted-opening knives, was more important than continuing to advertise with Google. For this reason, we decided to not remove the knives and forgo our Google Adwords account
Of course, we expected that our fellow knife vendors would be subjected to the same anti-knife policies, and be forced to make the same decision of whether or not to advertise with Google or sell assisted-opening knives.
We were wrong.
While Google shut down the AdWords account of a few other Internet knife vendors, it has continued to allow large brands such as Walmart, Amazon and Bass Pro Shops to sell assisted-opening knives and advertise on Google Adwords.
Just check out the images below from Amazon.com and Walmart.
Yes, the world is unfair. And yes, we have contacted Google on numerous occasions about this blatant favoritism toward big brands and despite assuring us that they would rectify it, they haven’t. In fact, even their own staff was sickened by the hypocrisy, as you can see from this February 28th email excerpt from a Google employee.
“I am still waiting on an answer to my reply where I asked for a universal enforcement of the policy OR we allow knife depot back online. I replied and said, I refuse to tell knife-depot they need to remove a product category that 7 other competitors are advertising & selling the same products. I then named each domain, called out the double standard, and requested that they state the clear differences that allows these competitors to serve & knife depot to be suspended. Still waiting on this reply.“
So for these reasons, we wanted to let you guys, loyal Cutting Edge readers and Knife Depot fans, know that you might not be seeing Knife Depot ads peppered across the Internet. However, rest assured that it’s not because we’ve softened our commitment to build the world’s most badass knife store, not even one bit.
It’s just because The Man tried to put his foot on our throat and say, “Hey, stop selling those badass assisted-opening blades,” and we refused, so The Man shut down our ads.
However, what the Man didn’t realize is that though he might be able to shut down our ads, he’ll never crush the desire of knife-loving men and women across the country to own perfectly legal and totally badass spring-assisted blades. And he’ll never stop us from selling them.
We appreciate you being a part of the Knife Depot family and we hope, despite our absence from Google Adwords, you continue to buy knives on our site. Oh, what’s that, you want me to end this blog post with a razor-sharp video of our top-selling assisted-opening knife?
This is the third installment of The Cutting Edge’s new article series: Hot Kitchens, Hot Knives! Cooks and foodies almost love geeking out about their knives as much as they love food (and at times, even moreso!), so we’ll be sitting down with chefs, kitchen crews, and bloggers all across the world to ask them about their knife collections and the culinary workhorses that they know and love. Check out this series every Tuesday if you want to find out what kind of heat the guys and gals in the kitchen are packing in their knife rolls.
Luisa Weiss is the brilliant mind behind The Wednesday Chef, a gorgeously shot and executed culinary blog. It’s been featured as one of Gourmet magazine’s favorite food blogs as well as on The Sunday Times’ list of the 50 best food blogs in the world. The blog chronicles Weiss’s adventures cooking along with recipes she’s hand-picked from the internet, books, and newspapers, as well as her struggles with finding just the right meals for her little son, Hugo. She’s also penned a sensational recipe-filled memoir called My Berlin Kitchen. No matter what the subject, she handles it all with a sense of humor that we really appreciate.
Naturally, we figured she’d have a lot to say about her knife collection. More on that after the jump! Continue reading
From the man who brought you the pleasantly absurd machete slingshot comes his latest masterpiece of destruction: the chainsaw made of steak knives.
On his YouTube channel The Slingshot Channel, Jörg Sprave creates a variety of innovative devices, mostly slingshot-related, for fun. Like all of his creations, the steak knife saw is surprisingly simple. He took a power drill purchased through Amazon, attached it to a wheel, which is connected to yet another wheel, and affixed a slew of razor-sharp steak knives around the smaller wheel.
He got the idea for his homemade steak saw after someone suggested he find different ways to weaponize household products. So, he went through his cabinet, saw a steak knife and decided to make this unbelievable device.
Whether you find his feats of wilderness survival awe-inspiring or his heavily-accented narration downright irritating, Bear Gyrlls is undoubtedly a survivalist star.
Back in April, we ran a contest in which our readers were asked to give Bear a hand in a sticky situation (he was stuck on a rock in the Amazon River) in order to win a Bear Grylls signature Gerber multi-tool.
Now, the folks over at Solo (it’s a lemon soda, in case you didn’t know) are holding a contest in which you can face off with Bear for a chance to win 10k.
The contest rules are pretty simple. All you have to do is find something you can do better than Bear and challenge him on the Solo website. Users will vote on the best challenges and a handful of winners will eventually be chosen to face off with Bear in Sydney, Australia.
The man above (Tom) is a gymnastics instructor who will be going one on one with Bear in a gnarly handstand competition.
The contest is only open to Australian residents, but there’s 10k on the line, so if you’re thinking about expatriating, this is probably the time.
The New Hampshire knife rights preemption bill was finally signed into law by Gov. John Lynch meaning the law will take effect in 60 days, according to Ammoland.
For anyone who’s been following this story, the bill passed the state’s senate and house of representatives a while ago thanks to the effort of Rep. Jenn Coffey, author of the new book “Knives, Lipstick, and Liberty One Woman’s Journey.” But, with Gov. Lynch’s signature, the bill becomes law after 60 days.
New Hampshire is just the third state to enact knife law preemption, but the bill is another victory for the Knife Rights’ National Knife Law Preemption Campaign.
Essentially, what knife law preemption means is that counties or cities within a state cannot enact local ordinances prohibiting the use of certain knives. For example, a person with a several inch hunting knife might be fine in one county, but in the next, they might be breaking a local ordinance.
The following is an essay written by Eino Hill, the winner of the William William Wallace sword contest held in April. The Cutting Edge does not endorse, comprehend or validate in anyway Mr. Hill’s medieval fantasies, delusions of grandeur or other strange musings, though we do think that his experience is a prime example of the awe-inspiring power of a sword.
Eino Hill celebrating with his William Wallace Sword
The elongated cardboard box with my name on it could only mean one thing:the Sword of Galleon had arrived.
Alas, the quest was now over. After many years of searching for the fabled sword, its whereabouts having been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a signature was the only thing left standing in my way of its possession. I signed and ran to my room, box in tow.
Flipping through the scriptures, I read again The Passage of Righthood for the One in Possession of The Sword of Galleon.
Turn any man of dust and sand, from across the land o’er yonder, Who once a pawn thou now shall spawn a mortal man no longer.
There is the Fountain of Youth. And then there’s Immortality! Who wants to be young their whole life when they can have everlasting omnipotence? Powers we, as man, cannot even conceive due to our paltry, insignificant existence?
“Just call me God Jr.,” I said to the heavens above.
Cleverly disguised on the Cutting Edge Blog as the William Wallace Sword, obtaining the Sword of Galleon was much like capturing Bin Laden. It took years of searching, just to discover it was hiding in plain sight.
“It’s too bad I didn’t obtain this sword a month earlier,” I mused. I would’ve gone to that compound in Abbottabad myself and turned him into a Taliban Kebob with this damn thing!”
I wasn’t fooled though. I followed the path. I did as the Scriptures told.
Follow the pen, whose might shall rise, Not that of swords, but in disguise.
It took me some time to figure out.
We, as children, were always taught that the pen was mightier than the sword. But let’s get serious. They clearly weren’t referring to the Sword of Galleon! The Sword of Galleon will bust a pen up! I don’t care if it’s ballpoint! I don’t give a damn if its a Mont Blanc or even a Bic?
So that part made sense. The sword was still mightier than the pen. But how could a pen’s might rise and be in disguise?
I Googled it. Specifically, “How could a pen’s might rise and be in disguise?” Google had no answers for me, Ask.com had no clue. It did, however, lead me to this woman with a drawn on beard evading the police. Wikipedia wanted me to learn about Optimus Prime. “Robots in disguise” was what triggered that one. After countless minutes of frustration, I realized not finding the answer to this all-important question was a good thing.
“If someone had the answer, they would already have the sword,” I thought.
Then I started thinking. Pen. Writing. Words. A pen writes words. Words form sentences. Sentences form paragraphs. Paragraphs form chapters. Chapters form books. Books form libraries! I must go to the library!
