This is my "First 24 Hours" review of the 2015 BR Kephart which arrived just yesterday. Please feel free to add your own thoughts and experienes with the new Kephart to this thread, and I'll continue doing the same.
A few pics of the knife out of the box:
The new BR Kephart comes with a Sharpshooter Bushcraft sheath, but I happened to have a Kephart sheath from Great Lakes Leather Works already on hand, and it fits it like a glove:
Initial impressions - compared to a few other Kephart interpretations I've owned and/or handled, this version feels very svelte and lightweight.
The handle is very comfortable, no matter how I grip it, but for those of you familiar with the traditional Kephart handle style, this should come as no surprise - it's one of the excellent, but subtle, design features of the knife.
It also should come as no surprise that at .093" this is a very slicey blade. The Kephart has been involved in prepping and eating every meal I've had since it arrived. It slices and dices beautifully. It feels so at home on my plate that I think I'm going to have to start taking it to friend's houses when I'm invited over, instead of using the embarrasingly dull butter spreaders they refer to as "dinner knives." I hope they're not too offended...
I was able to escape into the hills for a few hours this afternoon, and prepped a little cook fire using the Kephart. For such a thin blade, I was impressed at how it handled some light battoning with no binding at all:
In fact, short of dealing with large pieces of wood (which a knife like this was never really intended for anyway), it will easily handle all other fire prep:
I think this will be a fantaastic woods knife, and don't let the thinner blade fool you - this knife can be put to work. It seems to me that as Bark River has been producing more knives in 3V over the last few years, they have gotten a better sense for what this impressive steel is really capable of, with the result being thinner blades, but every bit as tough, as their A2 counterparts. I think this is a great move in the right direction, and certainly appropriate for a true woods knife like this - however, if your idea of a 'woods knife' is something that can cut through a Chrysler and pry open manhole covers, this may not be the "woods knife" for you.
Hopefully in the next few days I'll be using the Kephart to break down some small game. I'll post more then...
