Recent Articles

It doesn’t really matter how expensive some of your knives are, or how well settled you are on them, there’s a certain amount of comfort and charm that comes from dropping a Swiss Army Knife in your pocket. What it is about the relatively inexpensive knives, and the overall lackluster materials, I don’t know other than to know that they are great knives.

Still, haven’t you had the thought “man, what if Victorinox actually tried to make the SAK better?” I’ve had that thought and so did MKM. Enter the Malga 6, which looks a lot like a Swiss Army knife, but uses higher-end materials. M390, and Micarta to name a few.

I’ve had this knife for a while now, and I drug my feet writing about it because of the mixed feelings I have about the knife. Actually, I don’t, because I simply don’t like it.

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I picked this watch up to meet my requirements as a watch which you can get for under $600, and wear anywhere. And my requirements for wearing anywhere is that it would be a watch I could wear swimming at a resort, traipsing through the woods, or in a Board Room. There’s not many watches which can pull that kind of duty, but of those limited few — Seiko’s Alpinist family is certainly in the mix.

This 1959 re-imagination, the SBDC149, is the revival and modernization of a 1959 mountain climbing watch. And it adds a lot of new stuff: date window, better lume, 70hr power reserve, 200m water resistance — just to name a few things.

This is a stellar watch, and in this emerald green dial, it really pops. It also comes in blue, ivory, and a slate gray color — all of them looking spectacular. I had no other green dials, so that’s the model I choose, and it might represent the best watch you can spend just under $600 on.

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Orbit Gear makes some wild designs on bags, some subdued ones, and all around well made offerings. When I saw the C102 Sharpshooter, it looked like a stellar bag and at $128 (+$30 shipping) it was worth picking up to try out.

It’s a very good bag, but not perfect.

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Maybe you noticed, but I’ve been on a slipjoint kick lately — they are very subdued feeling to those around you when you are going into places like offices. Anyways, carrying on with my quest to find great slipjoints, I snagged an Ace Farley Slipjoint with green canvas micarta second hand. I’m impressed, this is a very good slipjoint knife — it’s also a very good knife in general.

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So you want throw, but not too much throw and you still want to slip it in your pocket? That’s the KR1 and the D1 from Emisar and Noctigon. Here, I grabbed the new D1 with the SFT-40 for a balanced beam shape.

It’s… fine…

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Boldr made a wave in the ’micro brands’ pool when it launched the Venture lineup of watches. A small, titanium cased, field watch with dive watch levels of water resistance — all for a very attractive price — a hard proposition to ignore for any fan of watches. I snagged a Boldr Venture Sandstorm to give a try and see what the watch and brand are all about.

It’s a very compelling watch, but quirky at the same time.

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They call this the “DressKX”, which is admittedly a better name than Seiko gave it, which in this case we have the SRPE61 (there’s so many variants with little rhyme or reason to the labeling).

Before we get going, what you should know, is that there’s no better watch I know of for under $300. Flat out, this is the best sub-$300 being made today. It’s also possibly the best at higher price points too. But it gets so much better than that, because while the MSRP is $275, you can get many of these for right at/around the $200 mark.

I’m basically saving you money already. Just buy it, but I can write more reasons if you would like…

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Discord pal(s) have been pushing me to check out a Karas pen for a while now, and I recently snagged the Karas Kustom INK V2 Rollerball in the tumbled silver finish. This is a beast of a pen, and a really solid offering with a few quirks.

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I was on a mission to see if I could get my hands on something silly, something different — but I wasn’t set on buying. In my mind there was one, maybe two watches, I would snag if came across them: Rolex GMT-Master II ‘Sprite’ (the new left handed one); Tudor’s Pelagos LHD; yeah, ok probably a Polar Explorer II. Those who know watches might be smiling at the thought of walking into an ‘AD’ find one of these watches right now. And that’s where I was coming from: if fate let me find one to buy, buy I shall.

What I didn’t expect was a display of Grand Seiko in the store. I had only seen a few Grand Seiko in person, and after finding out they had none of the watches I assumed they wouldn’t have. I walked over to look at the Grand Seiko, after all: I was there. They had the SBGM221G front and center, a watch I had long looked at, and admired — never seen in person.

It was stunning. I put it on, and it looked even better. My wife said “yeah, get that” and so we did. It might be my favorite watch I own. Let me tell you more about it.

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Man, I love a good fixed blade knife, but a great fixed blade knife — that’s something that always makes me happy. A while back, I decided I needed to revamp my entire fixed blade knife setup. I wanted to simplify it all, and seriously upgrade it.

I don’t use my fixed blades often, but when I do, I use them more as a large pocket knife, not something I am going to beat about to make a survival shelter with. But, I still want them to be able to do that — never can be too sure. My first upgrade was the Winkler SD2, an excellent knife. And I was set to buy another Winkler to round things out, when Benchmade released the Anonimus.

And it’s a really fun knife, and truly great.

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I’ve long had my eye on the Terminus line from SOG — the design looks classic and the prices really solid. What held me back was the flipper design mechanism, as I know I am not a flipper kind of user. Recently, SOG released the ‘SJ’ variant — same knife, but with a Slip Joint design and a nail nick opening.

Stellar price too, and a really nice offering.

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There’s something about a tiny knife that always draws me in. They are very fun to own, carry, and otherwise have around. But they can be tricky to pull off in a manner where they feel worth using over a more traditionally sized pocket knife.

WESN’s Microblade, Spyderco’s Ladybug, and any others I have tried over the years, always failed to ‘stick’ because they didn’t do small tasks well enough, or they couldn’t do big tasks at all. Too much of a compromise given the pricing and such.

That’s not the case with Cold Steel’s Micro Recon — this is a gem of a knife and it’s about $30.

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