I specifically bought this knife with the hope that it would be suitable to carry afield with me at work, both in backcountry applications and in developed recreation areas. I put this knife in my gear bag shortly after I received her last week.
I was able to field test her today on a dense grove of decadent cottonwood trees and suckers. I cut between 40 and 50 trees averaging 3-4 inches in diameter, about an hour's work.
Here are my initial impressions, keeping in mind that my basis for comparison is my other AK, a 16.5" Chiruwa by Sanu.
This knife is quite a bit lighter than the Chiruwa and has a much thinner spine. Also, the lines and angles are sharply squared on the Chiruwa, whereas on this knife they are smoother and give a gentler appearance.
As a chopper, this knife did not have quite the penetration of the Chiruwa, but has a much smoother swing and caused me less upper arm fatigue during prolonged cutting activity.
The handle on this knife is a bit smaller than the Chiruwa. The benefit of this is that it does not "bite" the palm as much as grips on the Chiruwa - either that or my hand is sufficiently callused and broken in from using the Chiruwa to adapt easily to a smaller, one-piece handle. The down side of the smaller handle for me is that it does not quite fill my hand and so the hand tends to cramp up after awhile and needs periodic stretching breaks.
The blade performed very well on the dry, woody trees. It did experience two triangular deformations less than one millimeter in size about a half inch below the tip. I don't recall hitting any rocks, but I did manage to bury the tip in the dirt on more than one occasion, so I was not really surprised by this. I corrected these in the field using a Gerber diamond stick followed up with the chakma and a generous rubdown of Chevron air compressor oil (we use what we have).
In conclusion, I think this will be a perfect addition to my gear bag, and based on past experience, circumstances will probably provide me the opportunity to test its ability as a pry bar before the summer is over.
