A Long Look at the Fallkniven A1
Jon Stokes 07.16.14
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SurvivalCache.com has posted a really, really long review of the Fallkniven A1. It’s worth checking out if you’re curious about this particular classic survival knife.
The Fallkniven A1 is not a beginner’s knife. Of course it would work as such, but the life-saving features of the A1 are not as obvious as an accessory-filled sheath, a blade covered with characteristics more common to a survival knife infographic. Instead the Fallkniven A1 is exactly what you would expect a black ops operator to pull from a minimalist sheath during your rescue. Frankly, the A1 is what I would expect James Bond to wear in his the next movie. The no-nonsense A1 subtly screams that it means business. So much so that the stately design is much copied. And like the RamBowie, the A1’s profile is a meme for “survival knife.”
If the A1 is a little too tacticool for you, I’ve been reviewing the NL series (NL1 and NL5), and the fit and finish on those classic-looking knives is phenomenal.
In other Fallkniven news, I broke the tip off of one of my F1’s, the top one in the picture below:
It was my fault. I did a tip strength test for the Thor (it passed), and I decided to do one for one of my F1s and the Idun. The Idun and F1 were holding up really well, so I decided to give each knife a real challenge. I pulled out an old, very dry, very hard fireplace log leftover from last winter, and hammered the Idun into it with another log. Then I started working the tip side-to-side and breaking off chunks of the log that way. The Idun held up, so I did it with the F1, which did not. About a quarter inch of the tip snapped right off in the log.
What I did clearly qualifies as abuse, but I’m not so sure that I was any more abusive with the F1 than I was with the Idun. I don’t know if something was up with that F1’s heat treat, or I just got it bound up in a particularly tough spot in the wood. At any rate, I’m going to make a small project of re-profiling it by hand on a diamond stone. I’ll post pix and an article when I’m done.
I guess the moral of this story is, you can definitely break the tip off of a stainless knife if you abuse it. A non-stainless blade would probably have bent under that stress, which I’m not sure is all that much better. At any rate, yesterday I broke the tip off a $224 knife, so don’t tell my wife.
