Opinel Safety Mod and Penny Knives

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

afternoon guys Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school what I want to do today is I want to talk to you about a couple of folding knives and I want to show you a modification to a very good inexpensive folding knife that will help improve your safety when operating with this knife stay with me guys okay I have two knives here on the table this one is a reproduction of an 18th century what was called a penny knife and this one was made by my buddy Steve critter Davis for me and it's a replica of an 18th century pocketknife that was called the penny knife it was often kept in shooting bags and things of that nature and basically it's just they wouldn't handle with a slot in it that has a hand forged blade and it has a collar around the outside where the blade folds it's pinned so there's a pin it drives right through the blade and that makes the blade fold in and then that collar keeps it stabilized side your side from snapping the handle when you're carving with it or working with it now starting in 1890 opinel from France made a knife that looks very similar to this and this is an open L number 10 high carbon steel it is a very very similar knife to the penny knife it's almost an exact duplicate of that knife in his form and function however what they did with the open L is they put a sleeve that rotates side to side just like this and it can go left or right and what that does is it locks that blade from shutting on you that's a great safety feature of that knife the open L number 10 and high-carbon is a very very good bushcraft back up blade for your pocket you're shooting bag or haversack whatever the case may be it has a really really nice ground Scandinavian type edge on it it's a full Scandi grind all the way to the top it says open l France right on it this is the number 10 like I said in high carbon steel I like my blades to be high carbon steel I like them to be high carbon steel so that they are multifunctional I also like them to have a 90 degree spine on them to be multifunctional and I'll show you what that does with this knife we're going to talk about one more modification to this knife to make an even better knife than it already is for a price tag of about sixteen ninety five on most places on the Internet all right there are two things that I really want my knife to be able to accomplish besides being a good cutting tool the first one is I want that knife to be good for striking a ferrocerium rod for that to happen it has to have a good 90-degree spine and the heat-treat has to make that metal hard enough that it will scrape shavings from this ferrocerium rod and there are knives out there they're high carbon steel that still even though they have a ninety degree spine will not scrape the ferrocerium rod because of the heat treat so I want them to be very good at that

as you can see once we get the coating off of that rod or the oxidization that thing is just throwing tons and tons of sparks and that's exactly what I want the second thing that I expect from my knife as I expected to act in the same manner as a flint and steel and that high carbon blade is what gives me that ability as long as I've got a good solid heat treat in the back of this blades very hard I can hit this with a hard rock like flint chert quartz things like that and it will throw sparks just like a flint and steel fire steel so I've got a nice belt pouch here that's made by Justin Wolff I just received this in the mail stuck a chart in in it and it's gotten four nice rivets on the back for your belt you can slide it in sideways this way if you wanted to wear this way it doesn't matter and you just pull on this loop and that allows us to come open and unfold three ways like this holds an Altoids tin just perfect so it holds a nice little fire kit in there just right and in this tin I've got my Flint my steel it's a charred material here lamp-wick charred lamp-wick material okay

so I don't need to carry this if this will do the same job for sure you asking see that barn okay so we have the ability with this now to start fire in two different ways as well as being a good cutting tool the only problem that I have with this tool is that as it gets old and this one's a couple of years old the blade becomes a little bit loose in the handle and that's okay when it's open because you're locking it off but there's no lock off when it's in the closed position and I'm afraid if I put this thing in my pocket and bounce it around you can see that blade fell out now if it's sitting like this in my pocket when I go to reach into my pocket to get it or sitting like this it starts to open up and slice through my leg I got a big problem

I'm going to show you a very simple fix to that to make it so this thing will not open in your pocket I have to wrap something around the blade all that messing around we're going to make a safety device out of the current safety device that's already on there okay the safety device is on this tool is basically just a piece of spring steel that is slipped right over the top of the single ring that's holding the blade in so if we get underneath that with a screwdriver and just push it sideways a little at a time kind of like that it'll pop right over the top of that rivet right there is holding the blade in so now this knife is exactly like this knife as far as that goes these two knives are now pretty much the same thing or both a penny knife don't worry about that

ferrous cerium rod stuff on your blade because it'll come right off so what we want to do with this is we want to make this a locking device in both directions and to do that what we're going to have to do is when this blade is closed on here I'm going to show you this real quick I'm going to pop this back on here you can't turn this what we're going to do is we're going to cut a small channel out of here so that we can turn sideways and it will put a shoulder in there it's going to lock this blade down so that it can't open unless we move it out of the 'we just liking we lock it open this won't close until we move it out of the way we're going to do exactly the same thing so that we could keep it closed we want to so again I'm just going to slip a screwdriver underneath there like this and move it sideways just like that and we're just going to cut a notch in here with our grinder now the exact same thing that I'm going to do right now could be done with a file I'm going to find a good edge over here now I just want to cut a real small shoulder in here so I'm going to find a good cutting edge here it just got a real small shoulder in here

you see what I've done there I just got a real small shoulder in right there just like that and again I could do that with a file probably

but this will work just as well now you can see all I've done is cut a little hook in there that's going to hook around that blade that's all I'm gonna need

now when I snap this back on my tool just like this as long as I made that hook deep enough which I did you can see now that it rotates right over the top of that zoom this in just a little bit okay so you can see right there's our hook and that's going to keep this knife from coming open in my pocket now the blade doesn't move the most it can move is there right there as long as I've got that locked over so now I can lock it this way I can lock it this way and when I shut it I can lock it this way so that the blade cannot come open no matter how much wears on this knife and how floppy this blade gets it's now not going to open in my pocket and be a danger to me and that takes just a few seconds to make that modification but it makes all the difference in the world in your safety carrying this knife all right both long Dave can break the path our school I appreciate you joining me I heard Dave for this short video a little history lesson about these folding tight penny knives talk about the open L in a quick lesson on how to make a safety device to keep the knife closed while it's in your pocket hammer sack or belt pouch I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for the thing you do for me for our school for our family for our business for all my affiliate sponsors and friends I'll be back for another video as soon as I can thanks guys