Fiddleback Forge Five Year Review (VERY Photo Heavy)

[Mistwalker]

I'm sure it goes without saying that I am a knife enthusiast. I've been a member here for some time, and I've written a few threads over the years. I have been fond of knives in general for about forty-four of my fifty years. Having grown up hunting, fishing, and trapping they were just every day tools to me and my family. I have owned a lot of knives over the years, trying out different styles and different geometries in various uses. I have logged countless hours in the woods and fields, and I have conducted a lot of primitive living and wilderness skills experiments with a lot of different types of production knives, but only a hand full of hand made knives. It wasn't until I became a member here that I saw the world of hand made knives opened up for the viewing, and had a chance to talk with the makers about the cutlery they crafted. Today, while I am still a knife enthusiast in general, and own several production knives, I proudly own, carry, and use knives that were painstakingly hand crafted by several of the members of this forum as well. Men whom I have come to know as friends, and respect as craftsmen, having been there to watch them grow into their craft. I look forward to the continued growth of that list of friends.

Today, I'd like to take a few moments to recognize one of those friends in particular, Andy Roy of Fiddleback Forge. I met Andy almost 6 years ago at the Blade Show in Atlanta, but I had seen his work in pictures posted by friends here like Tony M and a few others. I liked the work he was doing. He had a unique style that really stood out to me, and it did impress me considering he had only been making knives full time for just over a year. We talked about knives and knife uses for a while, and I learned that he knew that I had done some tests and reviews of knives. He asked if I would be interested in testing a new prototype he had made, and I said sure I would love to. The knife was the original Bushfinger model, some photos of it follow. For a few weeks I did every thing I could think up as far as bushcraft type stuff. I really liked how it felt in use, and how it performed. So after the initial testing in various tasks, I gave him my feedback and asked how much the knife was going to cost me, because I wanted to keep it. I would continue to use and test that knife for the next few years.

I really liked the look of the natural canvas with the black bolster, and I was just really starting to study the Scandinavian on thicker blades due to the popularity of the British style bushcraft knives I had seen, so when I had a shot at a K.E. Bushie model with a scandi grind on 1/8 O-1 I grabbed it. Soon after I picked up another scandi model, a Hiking Buddy, at another Blade Show. By this time he had started doing the spalted flats, and I really like how that looks on the scandi blades. I would put both of these knives through quite a lot of experiments in general bushcraft tasks.

END Part 1 of 4

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[Mistwalker]

Through the use of these two knives over the next several months I learned two things. I came to the conclusion that I was just never going to be a serious fan of the Scandinavian grind, particularly on thicker blades, and I learned that I really like the ergonomics of Andy's knife handles. Today that K.E. Bushie belongs to a friend in the U.K. Who is a nurse, a combat veteran Royal Marine medic, who volunteers his free time to teach bushcraft and survival skills to youths to give them something challenging to do and keep them off the streets. I had already put the knife in a box in the closet when he complimented a photo of it, and expressed an interest in getting a similar knife one day. I sent it to him as a Christmas present, and I still get a kick out of him sharing photos and seeing it in use. The Hiking Buddy would find it's way to another friend a couple of years later.

Soon I had a pretty special project come up, and I wanted something a little bigger and very robust for some hard use in various wilderness fire craft. It would be tasked with every aspect of wilderness fire-craft: from making all of the components for a traditional bow drill in dry conditions, to splitting pitch-wood knots to access the natural accelerant for wet weather fire starting. This time I would use the Bushfinger's bigger brother, the Hunter. It would be worked very hard fashioning various tools and utensils, and it would definitely earn its keep.

I had talked to Andy about his Woodsman model, a model roughly patterned after the old trade knives which I found of particular interest being a woodsman myself. I like the size, and having had to repair a lot of gear and improvise a lot of things over the years I like my knives on the pointy side. So that model was slated to be my next Fiddleback purchase, but money was tight for me at the time. As it turned out and the Blade Show in Atlanta in 2013, Andy had a Woodsman model that was flawed. The flaw was mostly cosmetic, and it would in no way affect performance. He wasn't willing to sell it on the open market, but he was willing to let me use it as a test piece for various uses and experiments, with the one provision that I never let it go unless back to him. It was my first tapered-tang Fiddleback, when he started tapering a lot more tangs than he had been previously. I still have that knife today, and it is one of my favorite knives ever. I have traveled a lot of miles with it in woods in four states, and it has logged a lot of hours in my kitchen. Of all of the Fiddleback Forge knives I have owned I suppose it has been through the most edge abrasion due to the dual role and double duty. It has whittle wood for feather sticks and to make utensils, and it has cut green bamboo for the same reasons. It has been batonned through hunks of pitch-wood, and it has been truncated through dead birch limbs. It has been used to process small game and clean large fish. It has cut every type of meat available, as well as every type of vegetable. I like that the blade has no “guard” and the entire edge can contact the cutting board. Andy take his edges to around RC 60-61 I believe, and it takes a great edge, maintains it well, and isn't a bear to resharpen when it needs it.

END Part 2 of 4

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[Mistwalker]

Having spent most of my time in the south, I have always been more fond of carrying a large knife or machete than an axe in wilderness environments. I find them more versatile and easier to deal with. So I found Andy's Camp knife intriguing. It has a large blade with a lot of belly , and it has a very nice two-position handle. The length of the handle serves to counterbalance the blade really well when choking up for finer tasks, and then dropping back to the rear grip you get more reach and more power from chopping blows. As a tool it felt like an extension of my own arm. It was with the Camp that I really noticed Andy's grind work, it was simply stellar. This knife actually had the honor of getting a fairly large bushcraft knife challenge back underway when four knives in a row, out of 20 to be tested, had experienced experienced failures to varying degrees when cutting large green bamboo. The knife was an inch too long to enter the challenge itself, but after the failures the challenge had come to a stop with people questioning if the knives were being taken beyond reasonable expectation. I threw in the Camp knife, asked the guys to do the same thing with it that they had done with the others. After a few people had tried it in various cuts in the bamboo, the edge was inspected. There was no damage and no outstanding edge degradation. Looking back I wish I had taken photos of them using the Camp Knife, but at the time I was busy asking about what had been done and checking out the knives that had suffered damage. By the time I looked up again Ethan had it whittling with it, and then disappeared with my knife for a while. The bushcraft challenge went forward, and there was maybe one more failure out of a total of more than twenty knives tested. It was just a fluke that the first three in a row had failed back to back. That knife, paired with a smaller EDK would wander several miles with me and would be used for instruction on some of the uses of bamboo in a wilderness environment or a survival situation both by myself and a close friend. It would be passed back and forth between us for year or so. It would also be the first knife to explore a new and alien environment with me in a record-setting winter in northern Michigan. Then due to all of the downed trees on the roads and trails where I was working, I reached the point I actually started packing an axe.

It was a winter unlike any I had ever experienced here in the south. It snowed 6 inches on Thanksgiving day, and we did not see the grass again until the end of March. We had five weeks where the day time highs stayed well below zero and the night time lows would have windchill factors as low as -39F. We had right at 9 feet of snowfall for the year. There were animals dying of starvation and exposure everywhere I went, and I saw more than one instance of cannibalization in the Raccoon population, where the young were eating what the owls and raptors had left of their mother's. I don't normally believe in feeding the wild animals, my thoughts being that it only makes them week and dependent. However that winter, after seeing all the death, and watching the animals eating bark and young buds on branches, I got to the point where I was packing bags of nuts and ears of corn into the woods hoping to give some of the animals the strength to survive. One young raccoon was very thankful. I dropped the corn near it as I passed, and when I returned it had stopped eating the frozen remains of the other raccoon and had taken the corn up into the crotch of a tree to hide and eat.

Now that I was humping an axe on my adventures, I thought it was a good time to test some theories and myself, and see just what all could be done with a smaller knife in such extreme conditions. In the extreme biting windchill I would have to learn a new skill, how to control a knife during finer tasks while wearing heavy gloves. I would also learn that while I could steel cope with a ferro rod in such conditions, that I much preferred fire right now and a good match safe. I also learned that I liked the flatter/taller hump-backed handle of the Fiddleback Sneaky Pete when wearing gloves, it was easier to control than some I had and loved using with non-gloved hands.

END Part 3 of 4


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[Mistwalker]

After the worst part of the winter had passed, when the day time temps were back up into the 10s and 20s, I went into other experiments. This time glove-less and using another K.E. Bushie model, this time with a higher convex grind on 1/8 O-1 tool steels. One of the experiments was to fashion all of the parts for a two-stick hearth and bow drill set from dead-fall. This would require whittle cuts, abrasive cuts in a technique I call ring-and-break, truncating and batonning. Somewhat abusive work for a small knife in some people's opinions, but after other experiments I was pretty sure it would do ok as long as I kept things within reason. In all tasks the knife performed in stellar fashion. The bow drill set was easily accomplished, though time consuming enough to confirm my earlier decision to always keep a match safe in my pocket.

over the last 5 years I have used varied Fiddleback knives in bushcraft tasks, edc tasks, for food preparation and for food consumption, and not once have I ever been disappointed the handle ergonomics or the performance of the blade geometry in the given tasks, and I have definitely noticed the factory edges coming sharper over the years.

I have watched as Fiddleback Forge has explored their creative side, as the line of knives grew, and as the knives themselves became more refined.

In fact I hung out in the Fiddleback Forge forum so much I had friends kid me about dragging me out of there when I would post in other forums. But I was enjoying the development and kept watching with great interest. So having used and tested Fiddleback Forge knives in every task I could think of in environment I could get to, and having always been very pleased with the results, it was no surprise to me when the time came that Andy was accepted into a very special organization within the knife making community and became a voting member of the Knifemakers' Guild.

Congratulations Andy, it is an honor well earned my friend.

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[swonut]

You really do like your meat... Seriously, thanks for sharing

 

[HogWylder]

That was an AWESOME review, hugely informative! I'm going to share this on my Twitter page today...

Could you do me a HUGE favor?

Could you give me the measurements of the original bushfinger & hunter is these photos? I just need 2. The blade height, measured right at & up against the bolster and the blade length. If you wouldn't mind doing this on both blades, I would be very grateful..

 

[Mistwalker]

You really do like your meat... Seriously, thanks for sharing

and vegetables, a legumes, and cheeses I'm a devout omnivore

That was an AWESOME review, hugely informative! I'm going to share this on my Twitter page today...

Could you do me a HUGE favor?

Could you give me the measurements of the original bushfinger & hunter is these photos? I just need 2. The blade height, measured right at & up against the bolster and the blade length. If you wouldn't mind doing this on both blades, I would be very grateful..

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it. I may have those measurements from old reviews, or I know I can get them from the friends that have them. Those two were among several that ended up getting sold that winter when nature doubled our propane usage and the propane company doubled the price of it...

 

[Fiddleback]

WOW! Mist that was an awesome set of pics my friend. You sure have worn some of my knives in well. Thank you for the support! Lets keep cutting stuff up!

 

[Mistwalker]

WOW! Mist that was an awesome set of pics my friend. You sure have worn some of my knives in well. Thank you for the support! Lets keep cutting stuff up!

Thanks Andy, glad you enjoyed the post! I have done a lot of experiments the last six years, and I had more photos of a couple other knives...but they may have been on the laptop that crashed or the old PC hard drive that died a while back... Yeah, forty-four years of having a fondness for knives and I haven't grown one bit tired of them yet

 

[JTC]

Awesome Mist, that's a great write up. Thanks!

 

[xxkcxx]

Awesome thanks for sharing

 

[Tekton]

Great post Brian.

 

[Mistwalker]

Awesome Mist, that's a great write up. Thanks!

Awesome thanks for sharing

Great post Brian.

Thanks guys! I was hoping I didn't make it too photo heavy.

 

[Texas_toothpick]

Excellent as always mist. I love the reviews you do, keep them up.

 

[prom52]

Great read Brian, and as always, incredible photos. What a great way to start the day.......thanks for sharing :thumbup:

 

[ncrockclimb]

I love the knives with the pins in the bolster. Not something I want on every Fidddleback, but would jump on one of those if it came up for sale. Great thread, Mist!

 

[Mistwalker]

Excellent as always mist. I love the reviews you do, keep them up.

Thanks man, I'm really glad you like the posts.

Great read Brian, and as always, incredible photos. What a great way to start the day.......thanks for sharing :thumbup:

Thank you Peter, glad it made for a good morning!

I love the knives with the pins in the bolster. Not something I want on every Fidddleback, but would jump on one of those if it came up for sale. Great thread, Mist!

Thank you sir, glad you liked it! Yeah, I am thinking they all have pins in the bolsters, but now days the pins in the black bolsters are also black, so they don't stand out. I really like the 3 pin spread in the Bushfinger. I also love Andy's soda pop pin out, but I haven't seen one of those in a long time.

 

[Cdmayhem]

Your posts never cease amaze me! This one was great, and it makes me wish that I did a better job of keeping pictures of all of the different Fiddlebacks that I have owned at one point or another.

 

[bonafide]

Well done Brian! Always enjoy your threads - they're well written, informative, and the photography is freaking top shelf!

 

[Gary W. Graley]

Brian, you never fail to impress, always nice to see your great photos and read your insights on various knives, well done.

And I find it interesting that while some knives have the 'Look' but in practical use they fail in their 'Walk' so it's important to have good reviews that puts a blade to the test to see not only if it looks good, but does it feel right and actually do the work you need it to do.

Thanks again!
G2