- Joined
- Jul 3, 2012
- Messages
- 100
I was outside today working on a bow drill fire and my wife came home and said it looked like Christmas for me on the front porch. I received a Snow Peak solo cook pot (thanks to Bill Cox for posting a review about it that made me have to have one). I also received the squirrel cooker I ordered from Wolf Creek Forge and I got a Kephart knife from DP Knives. Seemed to me, the only logical thing to do was to make a one stick fire to test all this stuff out!
The DP Kephart was much better than I had expected. I didn't expect a bad product from DP Knives, I just didn't expect a knife this good. Here is the knife:
The handles are singed osage orange, and they match some of my other hard use gear:
The fit and finish of the handles is excellent. From the pictures I saw I wasn't expecting a mirror polish on the blade. The cosmetics of the knife exceeded my expectations. The sheath is a little rough looking, but it's sturdy and I bought this to be a hard use knife, so the sheath is more than adequate to get the knife into the woods and back home.
I grabbed a sassafras stick that I had intended to use as a walking stick, but never got around to working on, to use for the fire.
I sat the stick on the seat of a lawn chair and rested it on my shoulder and began to make shavings. I was amazed at the shavings I was able to get from this knife. The last shavings I made were ones that I struggled to make with a Ritter Mk 2 Perseverance knife. The DP Kephart gracefully glided through the wood, making very tight curls. I was so impressed and caught off guard by this that I stopped after the first few curls and took a picture of them:
Look at how some of those curls are so tight they don't just curl, they spiral inside themselves. That is what you want for fire starting. With a little practice I was able to make Shirley Temple curls like my Tracker's quarter round does:
After close to a cap full of curls, the 1/8" thick 1095 steel blade was still shaving sharp.
I then cut the sassafras to size with my Silky saw
and started batoning.
The wood split apart with very little effort. I've never split sassafras before so I don't know how it behaves, but this was breaking apart like basswood. The knife made very short work of the wood. When the wood is split to small pieces you can no longer baton it without risking breaking the pieces in half, so I like to lay them flat, put the point of the blade against the wood, and hammer it with either my palm or the baton until the tip of the knife sticks in the wood. Then I pick up the whole thing and slam it down to drive the tip of the knife through the wood and start the wood splitting. This is hard use for the tip and pommel of a knife, but the heat treat of the DP Kephart was spot on and I did this over and over without worrying about the tip of the blade breaking.
Finally I had enough prep to make a fire:
I lit the fire with a fire steel and the spine of the knife. I wasn't expecting the spine to throw sparks, but it did. It dug into the mischmetal rod I was using and threw gobs of molten steel all over the fine shavings I made. Just a few tries and the sassafras shavings were lit. I started feeding the fire.
When the flames were more than high enough I assembled the new squirrel cooker from Wolf Creek Forge and hung the Snow Peak pot over, or rather in, the flames.
In no time I had a nice cup of tea brewing.
How did the DP Kephart handle this test? It was still shaving sharp when the fire was out.
Wow! What a lot of knife for a little bit of money. This is an amazing knife and I absolutely would not hesitate to buy another knife from Doug P Dart at DP Knives. Doug's communications were excellent, I received the knife two days after purchase, and the knife really exceeded my expectations.
Thanks for looking.
The DP Kephart was much better than I had expected. I didn't expect a bad product from DP Knives, I just didn't expect a knife this good. Here is the knife:
The handles are singed osage orange, and they match some of my other hard use gear:
The fit and finish of the handles is excellent. From the pictures I saw I wasn't expecting a mirror polish on the blade. The cosmetics of the knife exceeded my expectations. The sheath is a little rough looking, but it's sturdy and I bought this to be a hard use knife, so the sheath is more than adequate to get the knife into the woods and back home.
I grabbed a sassafras stick that I had intended to use as a walking stick, but never got around to working on, to use for the fire.
I sat the stick on the seat of a lawn chair and rested it on my shoulder and began to make shavings. I was amazed at the shavings I was able to get from this knife. The last shavings I made were ones that I struggled to make with a Ritter Mk 2 Perseverance knife. The DP Kephart gracefully glided through the wood, making very tight curls. I was so impressed and caught off guard by this that I stopped after the first few curls and took a picture of them:
Look at how some of those curls are so tight they don't just curl, they spiral inside themselves. That is what you want for fire starting. With a little practice I was able to make Shirley Temple curls like my Tracker's quarter round does:
After close to a cap full of curls, the 1/8" thick 1095 steel blade was still shaving sharp.
I then cut the sassafras to size with my Silky saw
and started batoning.
The wood split apart with very little effort. I've never split sassafras before so I don't know how it behaves, but this was breaking apart like basswood. The knife made very short work of the wood. When the wood is split to small pieces you can no longer baton it without risking breaking the pieces in half, so I like to lay them flat, put the point of the blade against the wood, and hammer it with either my palm or the baton until the tip of the knife sticks in the wood. Then I pick up the whole thing and slam it down to drive the tip of the knife through the wood and start the wood splitting. This is hard use for the tip and pommel of a knife, but the heat treat of the DP Kephart was spot on and I did this over and over without worrying about the tip of the blade breaking.
Finally I had enough prep to make a fire:
I lit the fire with a fire steel and the spine of the knife. I wasn't expecting the spine to throw sparks, but it did. It dug into the mischmetal rod I was using and threw gobs of molten steel all over the fine shavings I made. Just a few tries and the sassafras shavings were lit. I started feeding the fire.
When the flames were more than high enough I assembled the new squirrel cooker from Wolf Creek Forge and hung the Snow Peak pot over, or rather in, the flames.
In no time I had a nice cup of tea brewing.
How did the DP Kephart handle this test? It was still shaving sharp when the fire was out.
Wow! What a lot of knife for a little bit of money. This is an amazing knife and I absolutely would not hesitate to buy another knife from Doug P Dart at DP Knives. Doug's communications were excellent, I received the knife two days after purchase, and the knife really exceeded my expectations.
Thanks for looking.
