strongblackcoffee.net

A minor facelift.

I cleaned up the and streamlined the code a bit. And I like orange. Hope you like it too! More on that later...

As the title says.

Also, I've built in an RSS feed. Let me know if it works.

Don't use a rock for batoning, use a piece of wood.

Well, it does work (as seen on Man vs. Wild, you gotta try these things!), and the knife can take the beating, no problem there. However, using a rock puts little (harmless) nicks in the spine of the knife. So I spent the better part of an hour to remove these afterwards. More importantly, using a piece of wood for batoning is more precise.

I think that Bear Grylls is a nice and cool chap and his show is entertaining. But it has a bit too much jumping around and is confusing at times. Good example of Bear doing funny things for entertainment: After being dropped into the Romanian mountains first thing he does is eating some bear poo...

Les Stroud's Survivorman I found to be a lot better in terms of actually learning stuff for survival situations, as well as portraying what it's like to be stranded somewhere with limited kit. Les Stroud seems to be a remarkably nice and genuine chap, and his new video blog is very entertaining, you should take a look.

Maybe next time I'll talk about Ray Mears.

Patience, young padawan.

I've put up the pages for the other areas of this site, but for the time being, they're all empty. I'll post here when I upload more stuff.

Last week, I decided to swap my 2003 Fällkniven A1 for its smaller sibling, the F1.

Promptly after I offered it to swap, I closed the deal with Andy, a tremendously nice chap. Well, the F1 arrived yesterday, and what a nice little knife it is. It looked like it still had the factory finish on the edge. 15 strokes each side with the fine (ceramic) side of my DC4 and 5 minutes of stropping later, I had it shaving sharp.

Tonight, I had the chance to try it out. Firstly, I prepared a nice vegetarian dinner for SWMBO and me (lots of chopping), then, after dinner, I went outside. I grabbed a piece of wood (a Thuja log, leftover from the spring gardening) and started to test the knife.

Firstly, I split the log a couple of times by batoning, which worked really well. I was expecting no less, knowing the superb batoning qualities of its big brother, the A1. Next, I prepared some feather sticks, and it performed really well at this task, too.

Finally, I shaved some magnesium shavings from my Coghlan's (I used the spine of the F1). Worked a charm. Then I used the spine of the F1 and a fire rod to make a little fire. Whoa! Lots and lots of sparks! Instant ignition, on the first try.

After all this, the knife was still shaving sharp, but I went inside to clean it, and stropped it afterwards anyway.

I'm going to test the knife extensively on my Loch Nevis trip in September, for all sorts of tasks. From cleaning game (hopefully, if we're lucky) to making shelter to making fire. I'll report back on it, watch this space.

Overall I'm really happy with the knife. Many people complain how ugly it is, how uncomfortable the Thermorun handle is and that the blade is too thick, and that it has the wrong grind/ blade geometry.

Well, my opinion is that this is a well designed knife. I like the grip of the handle (I have small hands, and I used basically the same type on the A1 since 2003 and liked it). I also like the fact that because of the handle material, the knife can be boiled in the field to clean/ disinfect it (try that with a custom bushie). The knife has enough 'heft' to inspire confidence; I don't find the blade too thick (yet). I'm a techie by heart, so I agree with the sentiment that 'form follows function', and I think the knife has beautiful lines. Obviously, it's over engineered for finer tasks, I guess therefore they decided to put a convex grind on it (a convex grind is more durable than a scandi). But one has to remember that this is not a camping or bushcraft knife, but a knife primarily designed for military type survival situations.

Fällkniven, job well done!