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Spyderco Delica review

This knife was a bit of a weird fascination for me since before it I wasn’t a huge fan of folding knives and I’d never even heard of Spyderco let lone would I ever be able to admire their unique beauty.
They’re odd looking knives but they’re so iconic and functional that you have to respect the craftmanship and utilitarian nature and the subtle curves of an effortlessly elegant knife such as a spyderco.
I became fixated on this knife in particular after I saw what was close enough to it in a punisher comic.

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I really loved the idea of such a small nimble deadly little knife like that taking on someone with a machete. That sneaky way you can open it without looking using the spyder hole. Finding the edge alignment just right, waiting for the moment they’re close enough for you to launch one quick strike before they can even raise their knife. The serrated blade cutting evenly and quickly.
The knife is tiny, its probably the smallest folder I own since I collect just for show, so I like bigger flashier folders not so much utilitarian edcs. But something about it’s vicious utility and the idea of such a small knife being so deadly like a spider bite really intrigued me and I had to have one similiar.

The delica is the closest I could find, the blade may be a little rounder, the knife from the comic is more like a smaller version of the spyderco police which has that little top unsharpened swedge. But I never really liked the police and I wanted a three inch hide away type knife and there was something that irked me about having the word POLICE on the side of my knife, and I wasn’t really feeling the stainless steel handle scales.So the delica fit perfectly.

JQqP4eN.pngThe delica 4 is just under 3 inches of serrated cutting mini-samurai sword haha. Made with beautiful vg-10 all the way from seki city japan. The only knife I think I have from seki city so far.

Black frn handles, a tight back lock, and 4 way pocket clip. Its a really snug grip in the hand, weighs almost nothing. I’ve had this knife in my pocket and completely forgot it was there. It chokes up really nice and favors, due to the size, a forward filipino knife grip. That’s like a forward sabre grip with the thumb on the back of the knife. It has some really nice jimping so it stays perfectly still for cutting.

The blade itself is very strong and ridiculously sharp, the serrations are probably the sharpest serrations I’ve ever encountered, kicks coldsteels ass cold haha. Once you have the edle alignment right this little thing cuts like no other knife I’ve ever owned, it’s scary smooth cuts.

Overall I just love how small and compact it is and how much deadly power you can get from such a delicate knife. If you need it for household shit as an everyday carry I’d recommend it, it carves through cardboard and plastic like it’s possessed, it cuts anything. And I wouldn’t be that hard pressed to use it for defence if I was inclined. Not home defence, I’d probably go for the more traditional baseball bat, my personal favourite the cold steel brooklyn shorty. But if you were in a country that allowed legal carry of lock knives under 3 inches, I’d say take this.

Not if you’re fighting the punisher though, fuck that shit haha.RBRLwo2.png

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Review of the Benchmade Harley Davidson LFK

That’s ‘LARGE FOLDING KNIFE’. I know what you were you thinking, you were thinking it stood for ‘fucking’ well now it does, because I say so.

I thought I’d do something a little different, haven’t done a knife review in a while and this has been a nice little show piece for me for a long time. I’ve done these big shiny “zombie killer” knives now I want to bring it down to a nice ‘little’ and I use that word lightly, folding knife.
I know some people have their issues with benchmade and a lot of their knives I think are overpriced but their quality can’t be beaten in my opinion, but never before did one of their knives really jump out at me, until the Harley Davidson LFK.
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Look at this thing, it’s fucking huge!

I can barely fit it on the internet haha. It’s a big folding knife, you get a few of these kicking around and they’re usually ridiculously expensive and completely useless (Cold steel looking at you).
Because they have these big flashy blades but because it’s a folding knife it has to have this big clunky handle for the knife to fold into. Now you’re realising that, you’re looking at the LFK if you’re a knife guy thinking “Wtf? Where does the blade go?”.
I know, take a second look, the blade is longer than the handle, what sort of witchcraft is this you ask? Of course folding knives have to fold into the handle so the handle has to be longer than the blade to make sure the cutting edge is fully covered when it goes in your pocket. So that you don’t need to go home and wash the blood out of your underpants.
This knife is a little different, it actually has this little plastic fin that comes out of the handle when you fold the blade back to cover the tip and top portion of the knife that overshoots the handle.

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The fin in question.

Now you might be thinking, “That’s kind of dumb, what’s the point of that? Why not just make the handle longer”. Well if you’re familiar with knives and centrifugal force you’d understand that how a knife moves in the hand is relative to the length and shape of the handle. So a big long clunky handle limits your range of motion, slows down strikes and basically gives you less control over the blade tip. If you were using it in wood working or bushcraft it would be annoying, if you were using it in a last ditch effort to defend against a zombie you’re worm food buddy haha.
I can’t say I’d reccomend taking on the undead with a folding knife but you could do worse than this big fucker measuring something in the ball park of five inches (would have been good to get the specs up in hindsight haha) that’s huge for a folding knife. Any bigger than that and you’re entering ridiculous territory of; “Why not just get a fixed blade?”
Essentially this a folder that moves and feels in the hand, just like a fixed blade of the same size. The grip is this rubbery substance (could be rubber, worst knife reviews ever haha) and it just sticks in your hand like glue. The blade came sharp out the box, shaving sharp. It locks up nice with the standard liner lock, so fuck you lefties like me, gotta close it with two hands unless you flip it like I do it. The finish is beautiful, it comes in black but I went for the satin because it’s just a lovely looking knife.
It’s very well made, you can open so fast with that big blade, it swings out like an automatic, it’s just so well made, it opens like a dream and you just have this huge beast of a knife coming out to great you. I mean if crocodile dundee had been held up with this he may have had pause to think.
That’s a lot of blade to walk around with in your pocket, so the question is; “Do you really need all that blade in your pocket?” and the answer is no not really. If you’re using it as an everyday carry or just for folding knife stuff like light bushcraft, you’d be fine with a four inch or lower knife. You could be just as happy with a little spyderco knife like a delica, that would do everything this could do and maybe more due to it’s size.
If you really wanted or needed a knife this size you could just get a fixed blade and not have to worry about that plastic fin snapping which is a massive worry I have about this knife and why I would never use it outdoors unless I really had to.
Also you know on a practical level it’s just easier to clean a fixed blade knife if you were gonna use to hunt or skin animals or something as barbarous as that and not like me who just puts them on a nice shelf to collect dust and show to his mates haha.
For a folder it’s impressive I give it three zombie dicks out of five for it’s potential zombie murder and if I couldn’t carry a fixed blade for some reason and I wanted it for personal protection (if that was legal in the uk or it was the zombie apocalpyse) I would still probably use my spyderco military to be honest haha.
Don’t get me wrong, I love this knife, it’s beautiful and well made, but for me it’s more of a good show piece, a good talking piece. It’s impressive and it comes in this nice little pouch with a belt loop (which is great because the pocket clip isn’t reversible, another fuck you to lefties like me haha) so you can take the pocket clip off all together and just hold it like any other fixed blade.
Overall I love it, but it stays on the shelf.10100sbp.jpg

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Kabar, Big brother in black

Back after a hard christmas, hard on my guts and my wallet, but one that wont be soon forgotten. I really thought I could blog and write and do all that stuff and have a life during christmas, how foolish I was. But back here I am again, back in black with only my second knife review, the kabar big brother in black.

I got this knife after some ‘unpleasantness’ I had in regard to my local law enforcement combined with my neighbours inability to mind their own business and love of stretching the truth. They took everything that might harm a toddler from my house, everything remotely gun or knife shaped just so they could feel like they got a good haul. After that I was feeling a little deflated in regards to the state of freedom and privacy in britain, as without a constitution it seems like the police can do pretty much anything they want. And if a man can’t test huge knives in full tactical gear and skull mask in his own back garden what’s the point in having your own back garden?

Needless to say I felt a little ‘deflated’ in the trouser department, so I set out not to be defeated and got right back on knife centre and bought the biggest meanest knife I could find within my price range and a voila; I found the kabar big brother.

Eventually after much complaining about the orwellian tactics used by my local police to my mp I got all my knives and my computer back (big brother took it just to make sure I wasn’t a terrorist or a peadophile,thus I can assure you all I am not guilty of any terrorism or child buggery or anything to that effect, nice of them to let me know eh).

It took awhile but the kabar big brother (just now realising what a coincidence that name is in regard to the situation that lead to me buying, although not at the time) in my hand, stashed under my bed, made me feel a lot safer for the coming zombie apocalypse.

I dare say this knife alone could do a fair job of fending off the zombie hordes. The first kabar I ever bought, I liked the look of the classic usmc but had heard mixed reviews so I wanted something a little more impressive looking. The big brother is essentially a huge version of the classic usmc, with a whopping blade just over eight inches in length, it’s a hefty large knife/small machete.

With any kabar knife you get I believe over a hundred years or so of knife making expertise and it shows despite seeming a little common place today, a little more mainstream than a handmade knife.

The blade is as I said huge but it’s not thick and bulky, it’s actually rather light and delicate and it makes for excellent movement in the hand and a very sharp edge out of the box. The serrations on the back as I’ve heard with most kabars are useless, almost just for display or maybe notching or some other bushcrafty type thing, an alternative to toilet paper perhaps. Completing the blade is a very sturdy clip point making an almost false edge on the back swedge of the blade.

The handle is probably my favourite part, it’s rare to get such a good grip on such a large knife but due to the weight of the blade, the shape of the tang and the handle material being some kind of rubber it makes for an almost adhesive grip even without gloves. The round metal pommel also lends a little more balance as well as the ability to see the end of the tang.

The guard is a thin and pointless and I’ve heard they’re prone to come loose but that doesn’t really bother me for the price, it was about £80 with shipping and duty and all that. It’s no handmade ancient japanese swords with magical runes but it gets the job done and it looks really nice and comes complete with a lovely leather sheathe.

Overall I really like it, I think if holding this knife in your hand doesn’t make your balls grow, nothing will. It’s just a big knife that swings really nicely and cuts very well. It’s also one of the few knives I’ve seen tested on the youtube channel zombie go boom. They pitted it against ballistic zombie skulls and it did as well as any knife it’s size could, decapitation in two hits if I remember correctly.

So if you want a knife that could probably cut someone head off in two hits but also looks really nice, is really light and probably nimble enough to be used for any number of bushcraft tasks I’d pick myself up one of these.

First proper blog back, mini-rant in there, that’ll do.

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First knife review; Tora tora tora!

I was a little hesitant to write a knife review, mostly because what the fuck has it got to do with writing? Nothing really, I just like it and I know what you’re thinking; ‘Oh so you’re a school shooter?’ I can’t tell you why I like knives any more than someone can tell you why they like collecting stamps.

It probably ties in with my obsession with the zombie apocalypse, of which I know isn’t coming, but at one point I sort of did. I haven’t always been sane and don’t really claim to be now, or even that there is such a thing to cling to. A little Lovecraftian? Yeah maybe.

Nevertheless I still fantasise about zombies ravaging the world for some reason. I wrestled with this a long time, I know it’s a little sad and childish but I did really fear that it would happen and I started collecting knives preparation. I literally almost breathed a sigh of relief when I bought my first cold steel gi tanto, so sad ha-ha.

But I remember when I had a dream about zombies and I started to realise that what I really needed was a crossbow or a gun or something but then I realised that that would take all the fun out of it and also be more than I was willing to pay. I realised that I realised it was just a fantasy and I didn’t really think it would happen because otherwise I would get a crossbow or learn to use a bow or something but I didn’t. I just wanted to collect cool knives and display them. It was a way of using cognitive dissonance to justify my collecting of something I liked, like I wasn’t just collecting shiny things like a magpie, I was assembling an arsenal to survive.

I used to watch these shows like doomsday preppers and I realised I wasn’t like these people, I didn’t really think it was going to happen, my brain wasn’t as broken, I didn’t feel the need to horde food or learn to eat bark or something, it was just a hobby not a way of life or an actual reality.

But it still intrigued me and wanting to understand and satirise that mentality is what drove me to start writing Green Sunday, not another zombie apocalypse story but one that tried to get into the heads of the people that actually want this. I didn’t want to write another zombie story as just a framing device for some pointless drama, I wanted to get into and satirise the minds of people not too dissimilar from myself and try to understand the fascination with zombies and more broadly the end of the world.

Ok rambled enough, bullshit ceased, now for the review for the;

Tora WW2 1/2nd Battalion Kukri

This isn’t my first Khukri/kukri/Khukuri? Fuck it, big shiny leaf shaped knife! I was kind of ambivalent towards them since being a zombie film lover I’d see their love affair with the knife and being a little contrarian hipster fuck I naturally rejected them and samurai swords and anything else lots of people liked and poopooed them. But then someone bought a samurai sword and I fell in love with Khukris after watching an episode of ultimate warrior and I’d been going through this phase and still am of loving anything WW2 related that can be used to hurt people. Pretty much anything that resembles something that killed Nazis interests me. I would collect some Nazi stuff too just for balance but it’s either a tacky replica or a ridiculous expensive antique, there doesn’t seem to be a happy medium of knife makers making quality replicas, could be the stigma I guess, guilt by association or some such silliness.

So I shopped around and I skimmed through condors and your cold steels and all manner of KLO’s (Kukri like objects), my brother has the cold steel Kukri machete and it’s functional but nothing special. I hovered over the condor and kabar but I kind of wanted something really authentic so… I bought a Khukri house. Now I know if you’re a seasoned knife collector or a Khukri lover that was probably a punch line. But I liked some of their designs and they had great prices for knives that were actually handmade in Nepal, not china or Taiwan or America, actually from their country of origin.

When I got hold of it, I quite liked it, it was a little heavy for a ten inch knife but I liked it, seemed nice and tough, I thought, ‘shit if it’s blunt I could just throw it at them’. So I was happy with that. But after a while I stumbled on Tora and realised what a twat I was.
And now holding a tora in my hand I understand the extent of my twattishness. When I first picked it up, it felt like I was picking up a piece of a downed alien space craft, made from some eldritch unknown metal. It was so unbelievably light for a twelve inch ww2 replica kukri. I was amazed by how light and agile it was.
It made me realise how pointless the Khukri house knife was in terms of its use, it’s over built with the full integral tang and the thickness of the blade and it makes it cumbersome to a point where it becomes almost unusable when you go above ten inches. Those two features are purely to sell it to American tourists who want some big knife and see the tang when really having the tang visible all the way through the handle doesn’t denote the quality of the knifes construction. So I’m not trying to shit on Khukri house and as a collector they make handsome knives and I will definitely buy from them again because they go beyond the standard replicas and make their own styles which I love.
But if you want real quality replicas, a real Khukri made to the specification of world war designs of authentic Khukris I’d go with Tora.

The blade came fairly sharp but to be frank, Khukris are like axes in how they chop, it’s all leveraging of the blade angle, it doesn’t need to be hair shaving sharp to cut, but I appreciate a little bit of an edge. The mirror polish is lovely, the sheathe is very nice quality, well stitched, I remember with the Khukri house one I could see where it was glued but it’s still functional.

The blade feels great in the hand; it has a partial tang, so the handle isn’t bulky like the Khukri house Kukri. I think the wood handle is a slippery and it takes a little practice to get the edge alignment right for cuts. But as you can see I’m a weirdo who likes ruining his expensive knives by wrapping the handles in masking tape, I’m just too lazy to use paracord and I think tape works better and I think it looks cool but I’m a retard so don’t listen to me ha-ha.
Overall the knife is great quality, I noticed a bit of a bend at the hilt but it’s to be expected from a handmade knife, it doesn’t really affect the knife; it just irked the perfectionist that lies within.

I think what amazed me the most about the Tora is something that just caught me off guard and that was the point; it actually has a functional point. Which is something I had come to expect was not something you could get with a Kukri, which is why most of them don’t come with hilts or any form of guards because they’re not knives that are meant for thrusting (Which is sort of interesting since most people seem to think they originate from the Greek kopis which has a really extensive guard for stabbing… yeah it’s the 300 sword… philistines ¬_¬).

I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually quite pointy, I’m sure it’ll come quite a shock to those hapless pumpkins.

The only negative points I could say about it is the waiting list, you have to wait quite a while to get hold of one because they make them in batches and also they use parcel force, I think it was, and they’re about as useful as an arsehole on your knee. I’d have preferred something like ups or FedEx but as it stands I’m very happy with it and I would recommend it to anyone.

I haven’t actually taken it out and whacked a tree with it and I don’t plan to (well I hacked the shit out of the box, but that’s because my daddy didn’t hug me enough as a child), but it makes a beautiful addition to my collection and I hope to get many more, salary willing.IMG_20150922_112518IMG_20150922_112521IMG_20150922_112525IMG_20150922_112537IMG_20150922_112603

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