Bushcraft Knives: Jacklore Knives

Description

Jacklore Knives are made to a very high standard and serve well as a solid Bushcraft Knife in the field.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and I'm out shooting a few videos today on this fairly damp day all the snow is melting all around me and it's been an incredibly mild winter so far but at this time of year I quite enjoy it because there are no flies or midges around and you can camp near water sources like this little one over here that's filled up because of all the rainfall and fine water but in this video I wanted to share with you a knife that I've been using for about two months and it's a knife that's been made for me by an English knife maker and I'm sure when I show the knife you'll know who he is so I have the knife in front of me here I'm sure some of you who've guessed he makes it already just by this logo here but we'll talk a bit about that later having a look at the sheath they're handmade sheaths quite sturdy and robust well made nice stiff thick leather but let's have a look at the actual knife itself and this is the knife here and it's a what's really known as a typical bushcraft knife in today's day and age beautifully finished and that's really what I like about his work it's to a very high standard and even though he's an incredibly modest guy I had the pleasure of meeting him he's really modest about his work and open about his mistakes but when you know your own journey you generally are and he finishes things to his best ability into an incredibly high standard it's a one tool steel so a very very forgiving carbon steel in some respects and you want it to be like that you don't want it to be too hard or too soft with a scandi grind so you know oh one tool steel has a very very good edge retention but it's also quite easy to put an edge back on it as well because it's quite a large bevel we don't want something too hard or you won't be able to put the edge back on it too easily out in the field so on tool steel is a very good field carbon steel to have on a scandinavian grind on a knife like this and that makes it very so friendly in many different ways when you're working with it and it's got a 27 degree bevel on it so the actual V is 27 degrees and it's a 4 mil thick blade with a 90 degree a very sharp 90 degree spine so very useful for scraping things like flat wood or bark or even a ferrocerium rod if you wish to do that and I've polished mine with Starkey blue or Smurf poo which I'll show you in a moment I have done a video on that and it's just kind of giving it a bit of a mirror finish and it allows water to just bead off it a little bit easier and stops corrosion and when I get a knife like this with a scandi grind on I find that Scandinavian grinds are quite fragile really they can be quite brittle grinds and a bit of a strop on some polishing compound and a piece of leather really does help just put a slight rounding on that Scandi grind and that'll just strengthen it just that little bit more and stop it being so brittle and it makes it very easy to maintain in the field as well you can always reset the bevel on a stone at a later stage but for maintaining in the field strapping on a piece of leather with some Smurf poo or Starkey blue really does help keep that edge in pristine condition you can see that this is a full tang knife and the tang is tapered so it's actually slightly narrower as it goes into the handle there or as the scales mount to it and that just gives the knife quite a nice weight and it should balance on the halfway point quite nicely you can see it's got mosaic pins as well that's kind of like a signature of the gentleman he makes these knives he uses these mosaic pins and you can have those if or choose not C and you've also got a lanyard hole there which I tend not to use on a on a knife like this and the wood is English you

and these stabilise the English you and polished it and it looks absolutely fantastic it's got a beautiful grain on it and it's a really nice bushcraft knife to actually have alongside you in news out in the field and your I won't really do any testing today in terms of the actual blade itself that doesn't really need to be done you can just have a look on some of the early of it on some of the later videos on the channel and you'll see me using this knife and you'll see me using it in the future as well to accomplish many different tasks but it's a wonderful knife and so well made I've done a number of different jobs with this knife so far and I've been quite a lot of carving with it than some spoon carving also made the frame of a buck saw for a long blade I had which was which was quite a nice project ease the knife for I've started a lot of fires with it got out and done numerous bushcraft jobs with it I mean the tool I use the most to be honest with you as an axe for almost all my work the knife really just comes out for the finer touches a lot of different things I've also prepared a deer with this as well skinned er skinned a deer and it was a it was very useful I've strapped it to a degree where it's incredibly sharp you know you can just lightly rub it across your arm and the hairs will pop off and it's not over sharp in some sense because you can actually do that to certain lives and they just become too easy to roll the edge over but just a bit of stropping at the end of each day with this this kept it razor sharp and it will save me putting it on the stone for a very very long time so it is something worth doing when you buy a knife brand new just give it a strop and it will really save that edge and just make it a little bit tougher any a little bit though but this is a beautiful knife and I have another life made by the gentleman who builds these I'll show you that one as well and it's ER there's a small neck knife so this is the neck knife that I wear and you can see it's made by the same individual and the neck knife traditionally comes hung like this but I've reversed hung mine and just punch some holes in the leather sheath so I can hang it this way and actually draw the knife downward which I find much more comfortable I've put a leather breaker in there as well so these holes will rip out if the Perigord gets caught on anything so I don't hang myself I've got a little whistle that hangs on the end there as well a bone whistle and the sheath you can see again is excellent quality much the same as the full size knife I just showed you if we pop this knife out this is really just a secondary knife to accompany your axe or you know your main cutting tool the ears for majority of your jobs and it's really just a scraping tool for me I do use this for smaller jobs I've used it for skinning things like rabbits and squirrels and it's been very effective for things like that just small jobs where you need to tuck away and again excellent for scraping things like birch bark fat wood and for striking a ferrocerium rod as well so a very nice utility knife and I believe this is a three mil with a twenty five degree bevel on it and again oh one tool steel so the gentleman who makes these knives and I'm sure a lot of you know by now his name sandy and his company's called Jack lure knives and easie is really a solo English knife maker and he lives in the southwest and builds knives I've been to his workshop and if you're interested in his process Zaid from Zed outdoors is sure a lot of you know is made a two part video showing his workshop and the whole process of the knives that he makes and it's really quite fascinating and the work that goes into them is truly phenomenal and he puts a lot of work into them and he really doesn't stop until he gets them right or to a level that he's satisfied with and from talking to him and meeting him he's a very modest guy but an excellent life maker I'm really impressed with these knives and can't fault fault this one that he's made me I've really loved using it and wearing it on my hip while I've been out working at work also out in the field practicing bushcraft say you know it's a really lovely life say Thank You sandy sir it's everything I hoped for and more the neck knife has been even more useful in some respect as probably more years than this one here for smaller jobs but I'll just show you a little bit on maintenance of knives on what I do to maintain them because when you first buy a knife it's always good to just put it on the strop straight away even though I've covered this in another video I think it'd be good just to reiterate so I've got a tool kit here and this is just a tool bag that I've made out of an old music piano sheet case it used to be about that long but I've just modified it and in here I keep her a lot of different tools you know all sorts of different things really in here I've got the strop book I've got some some bits and bobs there I've even got a little case and these are the tools that I really used to maintain knives out in the field so if I open up the strop book here you'll see that it's just a piece of leather and being mindful that the surface I'm working on is far less than ideal I would want to be on a hard surface and I would generally split a log down with my axe and make almost like a half board that I would make for a friction set a friction fire set and I would have that underneath because I always strop on a hard surface I've done stropping on belts and things before but it's not very good practice and it rounds the edge of the blade it's okay for smaller bevels but I'd probably probably steer away from doing that really if you care too much about your knives so strapping on a nice firm thick piece of leather this is a 2 mil piece of leather here and you know it's just right really in terms of size you don't need anything too big and on a flat surface is ideal but there's a component that I put on the leather to really assist me in making it a little bit better and that's this stuff here it's called Starkey blue or Smurf Pooh and as I say this is really reiterating what really been done in a video and you can rub this on the leather until it goes kind of a pale color imagining I'm on a hard surface I would drop my blade like this keeping that bevel nice and flat so the piece of leather you know not not rolling it at all and that would just give me a gradual rounding very gradual rounding in the edge of the knife but also remove the most minimal amount of metal as well and it just strengthens that blade a bit more and makes it far better I mean if you looked at the knife under a microscope it probably looks similar to a saw so what's dropping does is it just removes away those microscopic pieces of metal and gives you a bit of better edge retention you don't just need a Scandinavian grind to do these kinds of things either I mean even if you had a convex grind or a high flat grind or even like a full zero grind you could use the same process but if you've got to come back strange you might want to if you're sort of sharpening your knife just put a very fine piece of wet and dry sandpaper on that and on the soft leather it would sort of maintain that convex crime but you could just drop it as well so there are many many ways of sharpening knives out in the field for me I generally use a Scandinavian grind because it's you know excellent for carving bushcraft generally revolves around wood carving of green wood in my case and obviously a blade profile like that is absolutely ideal for that and the Scandinavian groin really excels in that area so maintaining it just like this is very easy because it's so one tool steel it can corrode so I have a pot here that's almost completely empty and this was goose fat you know I used duck fat as well you can use pig fat you can even use tracks which is a vegetarian option and just a bit of this on the blade you know can really just help the end of the day just fight any kind of moisture but it might see overnight while you're sleeping or working throughout the day and you can cook with it as well make candles out of it even maintain your leather work with it so this is a very useful sort of piece of equipment I do carry a stone as well but more often than not these days I actually use a little bit of wet and dry if I want to reset the profile on a blade and it would often be done at home it can't be done in the field but while I'm in the field it's usually just maintenance aspects rather than you know full jobs on blades resetting and reprofiling angles so but that is carried as you know it does help me actually do some work with my axe and sharpen the axe but you also want to make sure you clean your strop as well and I recently bought myself er a Mora 162 I believe this is more a 160 hooked knife not a crooked knife as it's something a bit different this is a hook knife or a spoon carving knife and this knife here I use for doing bowls and various other things and also making runs for tree saps and you can use it for lots of jobs really but once I die strop to a very very sharp edge where you can shave with and this is really a chisel grind so it's just ground on one side and flat on the other much like saw blades are or the teeth on saw blades and it allows you to get very very close to what you're carving and put an enormous amount of pressure down much like a a chisel but one side I leave slightly dull because I don't I only really use one side you know but the other side I use for cleaning the junk off of the striping pad because what happens is over about a period of a month of using this strapping pants all this material from the Smurf poo well the Starkey blue builds up and it gets so thick that the leather the leather is not present anymore so what you can do is just take your leather strop and you reset it back to leather again and then reapply the Smurf food Andrey strop again it's just a nice way of cleaning the strop I wouldn't clean the strop at this point I wouldn't have even done it just then you know while I clean the strop is usually when is that half a mil of Smurf poo on there and you know you can't really see it you let it get a bit out of hand it needs to be scraped off and you set it back again so there's just a few few tools there that can be used for maintaining your knife and various other aspects out in the field a lot of these handmade bushcraft knives can be very very expensive and if you're starting bushcraft it can be quite daunting to go on some of these bushcraft retailing websites and look at videos and think blimey how am I ever going to afford them together he had a good knife I want a good knife and sometimes the depiction of a good knife can be a bit incorrect the reason knives like this is so expensive is because they're handmade and if this was a production knife and you know had like a plastic handle and everything it would be a lot cheaper if it was made on a machine and it probably performed exactly the same it's just a handmade bushcraft knife and you're paying for someone to hand make you it and that's why you're paying a lot of money for knives like this when you've been doing bushcraft a long time it's nice to have a knife like this there's a lot of sentiment attached to it and it can be you know a good tool to work with and also you get a bit of control on what you're asking for but you don't need something like this to do bushcraft it's far from it bushcraft is about improvising and using what's around you and if you're new to bushcraft this knife here the whole surface carbon steel craftsman is an excellent knife to pick up for under five pounds and it's carbon steel Japanese tool steel is of a very very high quality steel and it's a Scandinavian grind all the specifications are online but you know I took this knife to Norway and did a couple of weeks out there with my other half

did a lot of hiking and tracking up in the mountains and wild camping in the hills and now we use this knife to do almost everything with and I've seen a lot of these night fail I won't lie use them at work we issue them to students and occasionally you get blade wobble but only really on the hardcore ones that have been going for five or six years we've got some knives at work that have been going like this for twenty years and they're absolutely fine and there's no blade wobble it really just depends on how much battling you do because it's not a full tang knife it's a push Tang tool see the Tang ends somewhere around there and it's cast into the the plastic handle but they have really comfortable knives I mean the blade is set quite far back from the thumb guard there but it's because it's a knife really designed for people are starting out and you know you don't want to sort of slip your hand pass there and chop it so you don't need any sort of silly tactics like that anyway you really don't want to be using a knife and doing things like that it's just a tool for for carving but this is an excellent life halter first carbon steel craftsman more and make some excellent ones as well if you want something a little bit better than this in some respects in terms of you know a different contouring on the handle or more options or slightly wider blade stainless option and do a stainless option for this as well so I thought I'd show you those knives that I've recently started using made by Sandy from Jack floor knives had a few questions from some guys in the States they are asking where they could get a handmade English bushcraft knife from and there are a lot of companies out there a lot of individuals out there so you know sandy as I say doesn't need my help he's very well known and he's not asked me to do this video I'm just doing it because I was asking questions about the knives I've gone and the beautiful knives and Sonny's a great guy I just wanted to to show those lives there just to really show how how good his work is you do have to wait a bit for his work because he he opens up his books a couple of times a year from what I know and he gets filled up pretty quickly but soundly if you're watching this obviously correct me if I'm wrong in the comment section that and I'll put it in the description as well but I hope you've enjoyed that video and thanks for watching and I'll see you very soon for another video so take care guys