The Loadout Room
Professional Gear Reviews
Building on an 85-year tradition handcrafting knives designed and tested in the outdoors, Helle unveils its latest collaboration with Les Stroud, star of Survivorman. Named for the vast wilderness park in Ontario, Canada, the Wabakimi knife is designed for self-reliance in nature. The third in a series of Helle knives designed with Les Stroud, the Wabakimi combines Helle’s 86 […]
Flint and steel have been used in starting fires for centuries. In the days before matches were invented, flint and steel offered the ability to start a fire without having to carry a hot coal wherever one traveled (and worrying about losing it or having it go cold). Starting a fire using flint and steel […]
I wiped my brow and looked at my students going through S-V80A, more commonly known as SERE training or Survival school. It was a bitter, cold afternoon in mid-February, the snow was a minimum 4 feet deep and we had pulled into camp several hours before for our first day of Survival training in the […]
Fans of ESEE will remember we recently covered the Expat Cleaver. The Expat Cleaver was the first of many planned Expat knives designed by ESEE forum member and world traveler “Expat”. Like all Esee knives, the design comes from folks who are noted survival experts. At SHOT Show 2018 I had the chance to connect […]
A bit earlier this week I received the ESEE-4 made by Randall’s adventure and training out of Alabama. The ESEE-4 is a fixed blade knife with a 4-inch blade, and the blade itself is made from 1095 carbon steel. The ESEE-4 is a full tang and feature two grip panels. The first time I pulled […]
This year I had the opportunity to attend the European IWA conference, which is the European version of our SHOT Show. One of the companies there that caught my eye when walking the isles was Nordic Pocket Saw. I’ve heard of it but seen very little of this product. We decided to stop and talk to […]
I have carried a Gerber multi-tool for many years and still do so I was excited to check out their StrongArm fixed blade. I got to test it in the field through a couple of training operations and it withstood everything from opening MREs to some light bushcraft in the form of shelter construction. To […]
The country of Sweden is world renown for the durability and quality construction of their hand tools, especially their axes, and knives. In fact some Swedish manufactures have been in existence since the late 17th century when America was still a colony of the British. The northern reaches of the country routinely see temperatures as […]
No badass knife is complete without a badass sheath to sit in, and you can find a worthy-enough sheath from Sagewood Gear. Sagewood Gear is a small outdoors equipment manufacturer whose gear is tailored for wilderness adventurers. A majority of their products are made-to-order leather sheaths for a variety of popular bushcraft knives such as […]
TOPS Tanimboca Puukko: A New Take on a Classic Design Mike the Mook TOPS Knives, more known for their tactical fixed blade designs, has produced a knife of the puukko style in collaboration with Goran Mihajlovic. The puukko is a traditional Finnish knife design which spread throughout Scandinavia in the 19th century. It sports a thick, round wooden […]
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