Seems like prit near every company around has a Box of the Month.
Yes friends and neighbors, for the low, low price of just about exactly what you can afford to throw away every month, you to can get a box of junk no one really wants and companies could not sell.
Yeah. I did. Yeah.
Bespoke. Boxes for men. Customized boxes that are tailored to fit a man's lifestyle. I'd been seeing this for a while. Then one of the boxes offered a knife. I signed up.
Before I could get the knife, I had to fill out a profile. I picked the outdoors profile. That had the knife. I use knives, a lot. I also break and lose knives a lot.
Much to the chagrin of knife purists everywhere, I also use a plain old metal file to sharpen my knives. Fast edge, good edge. Makes me miss the cabbage knives we used when I grew up. Cheap steel, took an edge in a few strokes and I could cut a wagon load of cabbage.
Anyway, the knife arrived today.
https://www.bespokepost.com/store/barebones-ultimate-tool
It is the best $10 gardening trowel you can buy for $50.
1/8th inch thick steel. The plain knife side is sharpened, and not very much, on one side only at one seriously steep angle. You will need a file to re-edge this thing. Or a bench grinder.
Opposite side is a serrated knife which is exactly the wrong size (too big) for being the perfect steak knife and exactly the wrong size (too small) for any useful sawing needs.
It has a bottle opener at the hilt, which is probably exactly wrong too. I've not tried to open a bottle yet.
The whole blade is curved like a gardening trowel. It has depth marks on one side in case you need to know how deep you are poking into the dirt. Not sure exactly how far part the marks are.
The hilt is chunks of bamboo glued together. Not even thin laminate, which is strong stuff. The bamboo will probably swell and split at the joins if it spends too much time in water.
The handguard is simply HUGE, dang near a club. It has a cut one side of the blade guard. That, at least, is handy as it gives you a place to rest your thumb. Well, rest your thumb provided you are right handed and want to use the blade only or left handed and want to use the serrated only.
The pommel appears to be a healthy hunk of the same steel the blade is made from. It looks tough enough to stand up to serious pounding. Except it's held in place with screw which will quickly deform under hammering.
The steel is supposed to be heat treated stainless steel.
The promotional info says it is in "This Old House's top 100 new outdoor living tools for 2015."
The folks running This Old House apparently think outdoor living is gardening.
