Camillus Les Stroud SK Arctic Fixed Sport Knife
Reviewed by
jeff zuptich
+209
March 19, 2015
I'm not a survival expert or anything but this is a great, solid knife that does exactly what is says it's going to do. Very simple design without all the extra doodads. When I saw Les Stroud had put his name on this I was confident that this would be a good piece of gear.
Pros
- Good grip when wet
- Very good steel blade, holds edge, batons well
- Fire steel integrated into sheath
Cons
- Blade kind of short for batoning thicker branches
- Fire steel difficult to remove from sheath
I haven't tested this in a real survival situation, but I didn't think that would be a good idea so I have taken it on a few car camping trips and tried to beat the heck out of this knife.
I used it to chop wrist thick logs about 5' long into 8"-9" sections for a campfire. I used a fist sized piece of limestone to pound the out of the box blade through about 15 or 20 of these before it started to dull. The spine of the knife did show a little wear from banging on it with a rock, but it just dulled the finish a bit. No real damage to the knife. 
This knife doesn't have any serration on the blade so it's easy to sharpen in the field. The butt plate on the knife has a little bit of an angle to it, and me being left handed made me have to hammer with my right hand to do so comfortably.
The fire steel really showers sparks and there's a little notch in the spine of the blade that's designed for this purpose. For really delicate work I had to use the edge or else I tended to knock my tinder all about because of the pressure that I had to apply to get a enough sparks.
The fire steel is also very hard to get out of its holder on the sheath. This is good because it's definitely not going to fall out and be lost, but if one is in real survival situation and has injured an arm or hand it could be nearly impossible to remove it and therefore use it.
The sheath itself has a little webbing pocket on the back that comes with a waterproof sheet of things to do in a survival situation. It's actually a handy little sheet. The things it suggests are all good ideas.
There are probably better knives out there, but for the price this is a great little knife that isn't so large or heavy that tossing it into your kit would necessitate a lot of dithering.
Source: bought it new
Price Paid: $35
