The knife community has fallen in love with Montana Knife Company, and their plethora of knife designs. All of that love makes the knives impressively hard to get — with new releases selling out faster than most can checkout. (This of course leads to a lot of flipping in eBay.) I’ve been looking a lot at fixed blade knives lately, and I was able to buy a Magnacut Blackfoot 2.0 second hand for a great price.
It’s quite a knife.
Specs and Materials
The Blackfoot 2.0 is Made in the USA, and hand finished in Montana. The specs are quite good:
- Magnacut Steel
- Full tang
- 7.75” OAL
- 3.5” Blade
- 0.114” Blade Thickness
- 3.6oz Weight
- G-10 Handle Scales
This is a small knife that is still designed to feel like a big knife in your hand. It’s very overbuilt. The blade steel is polished (they have coated options) to a mirror like finish.
The edge came sharp, with what MKC calls a “sharp working edge”. I took sometime to look into what MKC means by this, and generally it means that they create a very sharp edge, but they do so using a lower grit surface. The end result is a very sharp knife, but with more (I’ll call it) nano-serrations to the blade edge. MKC claims that this means the knife stays useable (workable) much longer, even when the blade seems more traditionally dull, because there’s still that serration to the edge for cutting.
I’m skeptical of this approach. It’s certainly a sharp knife, but there’s a couple of trade offs here. Before I dive into that, I need to caveat this with the fact that: this is a sharp knife no question, and the ‘best’ way to get and hold a sharp edge is a widely debated topic.
With that caveat, I think the practical downside is it’s likely not as easy to quickly bring the edge back. When I go out into the woods, I will take a ceramic rod with me for touching up the blade edge. The finer the edge the faster and easier you can bring it back on a rod like that. The rougher the finishing on the edge, the more work it can take. That’s my issue. I agree with MKC that if you are not taking anyhting to sharpen the blade, then their working edge is a great choice. But who is taking a knife like this out and not bringing something to bring the edge back?
Add to that the blade is Magnacut, so it’s going to take a lot to dull it. It’s a good story for a working edge, but at best it doesn’t really change anything — and that’s largely because of the steel choice. Magnacut is really the best steel for this type of blade.
Use and Carry
As with most of the knives I am looking at, the intended use for the design matters a lot, here’s what MKC says about the Blackfoot 2.0:
When Master Bladesmith Josh Smith launched Montana Knife Company, he set out to create the ultimate do-it-all knife — small and light enough to pack on a goat hunt, durable enough to completely field dress a moose, and shaped to gut, cape, skin, and debone with ease. He called this flagship knife “The Blackfoot,” and it remains his go-to blade.
So this is a hunting knife that is designed to hopefully be the only knife you need on a hunt. As I have said in other reviews, I don’t do the blood and guts side of knife things, so I can only comment on this knife as a general outdoors knife.
The shape of the blade comes to a rather deadly looking point. It’s more clip-point than drop point in that regard, but certainly not over bearing. Visually it’s quite striking.
In hand the knife feels amazing. It’s well balanced and the scales are perfectly sculpted for a secure and comfortable hold. I’ve been using this knife for a ton of things, and love holding and using it.
There’s a few things that are a miss for me with this knife:
- Weight: while 3.7oz isn’t a tremendous amount, it’s 4.8oz on my scale with the sheath, there’s no getting around the fact that this knife simply feels quite heavy to carry and hold. It’s over built so the weight is understandable, but for my use it’s too heavy feeling.
- Sheath: the sheath is fine, but it’s not great. Given the price point of this knife the sheath should be much better than this. I constantly have issues here with the knife edge biting the sides of the sheath when trying to stow the knife when I don’t perfectly align it in the sheath. Thus I have low confidence of stowing the knife without paying careful attention to what I am doing, especially given the wicked point this knife has.
- Polished Blade: while beautiful, I’ve found that this very smooth surface adds more friction when slicing. Testing on food stuffs, the blade doesn’t slide against materials as well as even a coated blade does. And, it also gunks up quite fast and tape and tape gunks seems to be extremely drawn to this blade surface.
- Lack of Lanyard Hole: I was rather surprised that there’s no landyard hole at the butt of this knife, as that’s a common element of most fixed blades. It’s also something I like to have on a fixed blade to add a bit of safety when doing riskier (read: stupider) things with the knife. This is an odd miss.
I started with the negatives because despite them, they are far outweighed by the rest of the knife. The overall build is exceedingly tough feeling with a great treatment on the Magnacut steel. While the spine of the blade does show finishing marks, which at this price point is slightly annoying to see, the remainder of the knife is well done. The scales mate up to the knife perfectly and left no hotspots on my hand during a lot of use. It’s all around well done and well designed.
The overall size of this knife is also really nice. I can comfortably hold it with my entire hand, and the edge is big enough to do anything I might need to do. The edge design has never struggled to get the job done either. It’s still short enough that it can slip into my front pocket and not protrude if I need to store it out of sight.
All in all, the size is the stand out feature on this — it’s small, but it doesn’t feel small. The blade shape is very practical even for standard EDC use, and it is sharp.
Overall
This is a good knife, but it’s not the right knife for me. I’m glad to have tested this, as it makes me excited to try other offerings from MKC as the design is smart and well executed. This is simply the wrong blade for how I use a fixed blade, and what I need one for. If it were a little lighter, the story would be quite different.
If you need a good small hunting fixed blade, this should be at or near the top of your list.