L to R: Reylight Mini Pineapple v3 and Benchmade MBO in S90V Note : This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters. I don’t think there is much of a need for a full review here. It is not because the knife stinks. It…
The app I used to write the blog recently changed. This looked like it went up on Saturday, but it didn’t. Sorry for the delay. It has been a very good summer weather wise. With only a handful of days over 95 or under 75 and enough rain to keep things green but never flood you out, Summer 2026 has been nice. As a result, my carry has basically been completely unconstrained by clothing. There were…
I have reviewed quite a few different versions of this knife and this iteration is just a steel change, so, as with tradition, it is getting a midi review. A similar fate befell various versions of the Bugout and the Para3 (which is still, to this day, the most overrated knife on the market). Also, this is coming to you from vacation and I have VERY spotty Internet so I am limited on the…
It’s late July, early August, so it is time for the annual Light&Saber Listicle. To clarify language here is my article about the price brackets. The goal of this article is to recommend to you a knife and a light that This year represents a huge shift for two reasons. First, a lot of my favorite gear is no longer in production. Second, inflation has destroyed the market. I feel like those two…
As I wrote in the review of the Systematic Tools Knipex Multitool Sheath 2.0, Todd Parker’s obsessive kit overviews on his Youtube page inspired me to not just make a kit of my one, but make the toolbox too. This, in turn, helped prompt me to finally, after years, fix my small parts storage. This article is an overview of that system as the toolbox and the small parts storage work together. I love…
Note : This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters. This batch of mini reviews involves multitools. Just to remind you, here is the multitool scoring system. It works for plier-based multitools (like a Leatherman…
NOTE : This post contains AI-generated content. The images are both AI-generated as is the part of the text below that offset with quotation marks and starts with “Concept…” and ends with “cutting tool.” The rest is knife nerd generated by me. Here was my prompt: Create a fictional version of the Spyderco Brouwer with carbon fiber handles. Here is what Gemini spit out (and yes, I would buy one):…
Note : This review, as with all content I write on this site, is my opinion. It does not reflect the opinion of others, including the American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI), the cutlery trade group that I advise on legal matters. In grad school I attended a debate between Stanley Fish and Alasdair McIntyre . McIntyre was serious, well-spoken, and had a proper British accent. He was exactly the…
So I thought now that I do a little politics on the site by covering government issues that impact knives, I would wade into another controversial topic—parenting. I have two boys, one is 15 and the other is 10. Both have knives and both have used knives to varying degrees. My youngest son regularly uses his knives, as he is quite fond of going into the woods and hacking stuff down. We own the…
In 2000 the Minnesota Twins won a meager 69 games. Talk of contraction was everywhere in baseball and the horrible Humphreys Dome was an awful place to watch and play baseball. These things, plus the comparatively small market of Minneapolis/St. Paul area, made the Twins a likely choice for contraction. The team seemed lost as they had no prospects coming, the roster lacked the big boppers, and…
Whoa, what a strange place we are in right now. I am not even sure what kind of product this is. Is it a tool or a sheath or a container? Which scoring system works best? As it turns out, none of them work, so this will be an unscored review (well, even those get a recommendation level of not recommended, recommended, and highly recommended). And here is the weirdest part of this entire…
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for this design-related emergency. If you want to see how to do a brand extension with a new product correctly, look to the CRKT Squid II . If you want to see how to destroy a brand, look to the light. The Ferrari Luce (LU CHAY or “light” in Italian) is a huge design mistake. It is also a mistake that has lessons that resonate in the gear world. The…
On March 20, 2026 Bark River closed its doors. Here is my article from Gear Junkie covering their closure. It was an ignominious end to the brand. Here is a Reddit post with the Facebook post from Mike Stewart detailing what happened. The TLDR is that Bark River bought Chinese knife blanks, modified their shape, removed the country of origin markings, and labeled them as 154CM steel. This caused a…
Minimalism, as a design trend in knives, was an answer to the tacticool trend of the Aughts. Those gilled, curvy, half pound clunkers were terrible in the pocket and only slightly better at cutting. It is easy to see how, in response to that trend, we would get wave after wave of very sparse cutting tools with no extra doodads, gizmos, curves, cuts, or gills. And while I greatly prefer the easy…
My wife wants a new headboard, after we got rid of our traditional mattress in favor of an adjustable one (because we are old…make fun all you want, I haven’t woken up in the middle of the night since it was set up a month ago). As a result the ambling pace of the knife station build had to be accelerated significantly and so two weekends of focused work brought the project to an end. The final…
If you haven’t found Jon Gadget on Youtube , you need to go subscribe now. Jon is probably the best exemplar of what I like to think of as “European EDC.” The heavy restrictions on knives and the easy travel from country to country has resulted in an entirely different perspective on EDC. Jon’s perspective is heavily informed by both these things—the knives are all slip joints (mostly SAKs) and a…
When you think critically about something for a long time, you come to a certain understanding about that thing. And you recognize others who have done the same by their opinions and preferences. This is why art critics can look at something like Mark Rothko’s Seagram Murals, with its simple bands of color and understand via a strong consensus that it is a masterpiece. When I first saw the Seagram…
In New England we have Pre-Winter, from Halloween until Christmas, Christmas Cold from the 25th until January 1, then True Winter from New Years until the end of March, and after that Post-Winter for most of April. Spring starts in May. And this year, we had snow on the ground, and quite a bit of it, from basically Christmas until the end of March. This was the second snow-iest winter in the past…
State of the Industry There are more lights and light brands than ever before, but the quality of lights is dropping. One simple indicator? Zebralight’s UI is now “not terrible.” In a field that had the HDS Rotary, the McGizmo Haiku, and the JetBeam RTT0, it was atrocious, but now, with Anduril 2 and the dials, sliders, and knobs on many modern lights, it looks streamlined. Things are getting…
Just a head’s up—this article contains references to both sex and violence. For some that is a warning, for others an invitation. Just be aware of which kind of person you are. Image from Wikipedia This story takes place in Lesotho, a landlocked kingdom in southern Africa entirely surrounded by South Africa. It is home to one of the few ski resorts in Africa and, it, not Switzerland or Nepal, is…