Does anybody know that the hook disgorger on the Swiss Champ is magnetic and can be used to select hooks from your tackle box?View attachment 1671097
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The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details: https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is$300$250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
Any love for Swiss Army knives?
- Thread starter Joopie
- Start date
Right next to my red Rambler is a red mini Bic, always. Two of the most essential EDC survival items. I quit smoking 8 years ago, but the lighter stays.
Many years ago, when our son had his first job that sent him out of the county, he got stationed in Costa Rica for a year. Being the great kid he is, he arranged for my wife and I to visit. On arrival, he picked us up at the airport and drove us to the jump off point for the guided tour of the Costa Rican rain forest. Both Karen and I are avid nature watchers and John booked up in the 4 day and three night hiking/camping trip. (Hang, getting to the SAK content.)
By day we hiked some amazing jungle, with streams and water falls and a few swim breaks. Lunch was the guides catering at a nice spot near a road and sandwiches and cold sodas were brought in. Night, we had a real camp, with nice tents and hot dinner prepared over a camp stove by a very competent cook. Good meals.
All the five guides that shepherded us through jungle trails, set up camp by the time we reached the campsite for the night, and mixed our cocktails in the evening, all wore a small machete on their hip. Maybe 10 to 12 inch blades, in nice leather sheath with a smooth mill file for sharpening. They used the small machetes for brush clearing, campfire kindling, cut hiking staffs. The last night in the rain forest, they did a real pig roast, the real thing where the pig was buried with hot coals and cooked all day. When we got to the last campsite, it was all set up for us, tables, chairs, drinks, well cooked pig. The pig was sliced up and served with the small machetes used a both meat slicers and spatulas. The smooth easy was the machetes sliced though the meat it was obvious they were Very sharp.
BUT...I cold not hep but notice, every single one of our guides, all five of them, had a small pouch on their belts. Maybe nylon in some cases, leather in others. And they all contains two items that the guides thought were indispensable. It was a SAK, and a Bic lighter. No one model SAK, I saw a tinker, a pioneer, a spartan. Bic lighters in many colors. Enrique, who spoke the best English, told me when I asked, that the Bic lighter always worked for getting a campfire going. No other brand was acceptable. And they used the SAK's for all kinds of things. I saw Jorge use the tweezers to get a thorn out of a hand, Enrique used the screw driver to fuss over the camp stove one morning to get it running well for frying the eggs, and the smaller knife blades were used for many camp chores like cutting some new tent support ropes or whittling a new tent peg, to slicing up some bell pepper for the nights stir fry.
No, we were from roughing it. It was more like those old safaris in the Tarzan movies where they have all the natives making a luxury camp where the English actually formally dress for dinner. But during the days and nights in the Costa Rican jungle, in addition to seeing some incredible wildlife and birding, I saw SAK's and Bic lighters being used many times a day for all kinds of things. At the end of the trip, our son John picked us up and we stayed at his apartments guest room and he showed us around San Jose. It seemed like every third person on the street had a belt pouch with a SAK init. They are nuts for SAK's in Costa Rica. There were stores that had large displays of machetes, both big and small, ranging from 24 inch blades for trail breaking, to some that were hardly larger than a large butcher knife. But every store that had the machetes, had a large display of SAK's either in the display case, or one of those counter top rotating stand up display cases. SAK's are the hot selling personal cutlery of Costa Rica. Between a small machete and a SAK, they cover all their bases.
After we returned from that trip, I did another huge downsizing of my knives, and took up the Costa Rican model; a couple small machetes stashed around, and my SAK of the day. So far, in the couple decades since that jungle trip, my wife Karen and I have traveled many miles, from the canoe in campsites on the Assateague Island National seashore in Maryland, to camping in Yellowstone, Arches, Badlands, and Big Bend in Texas. So far, I haven't run into anything that couldn't be handled with a 12 inch Ontario machete and a SAK. And the Bic lighter that replaced my old Zippo, has lit many a compfire.
You can go a very long way with a SAK and a Bic! Its the choice of professionals.
