Blogs & Blades 2

Black Rabbit has sent me this picture of the work in progress. I'm lovin' the Hunter blade shape and as you can see he's really got it. We toyed with keeping the rasps of the file but while they look way cool they're a bit of a rust trap, and if the blade were ever to be used for its intended use on an Elk hunt they'd me an excellent breeding ground for bacteria. So this time function will dictate form.
We been batting back and forth ideas about blade thickness; a Mora sometimes looks a little flimsy (proven not to be - but they're SO thin) and the Fallkniven F1 often seems like overkill with its 5 mm of super steel. Black Rabbit's going to work the blade so the spine will retain plenty of metal, while everything towards the cutting edge will be thinned to give the blade a little of the Mora's finesse.

Once again massive thanks Black Rabbit 

Your pal

The bushwacker

I Want One - A Not So Occasional Series Pt8

Reading Holly's blog is always thought provoking (best comments section on the web - end of), but this time she's been provoking further attacks of the avarice that's afflicting this blog for a couple of posts!

As ever I've been thinking about a time [soon to come] when finances improve and I'll be able to buy myself a rifle of my own. Up until now I've mostly been thinking Swedish. But nothing's set in stone.

This weekend I've been looking at the Blaser 93 in all its myriad incarnations, including this conversion to rimfire.

The design is a modular marvel where every stock fits every action and every barrel.

Who says AR15 owners should have all the fun. And if I were to suddenly win the lottery how about their unique take on the double rifle?

Two side-by-side barrels and receivers. With each cycle of the bolt two cartridges are loaded simultaneously, like a classic side-by-side double rifle. But better. The magazine contains six cartridges and two in the barrels. Ideal for the really big pigs.

Albert I thought of you.

Maybe I should go German?

Your pal

The Bushwacker

I Want One - A Not So Occasional Series Pt7

'You can tell gentleman by his shoes and his watch' - Unknown

The two most predictable questions to ask a returning adventurer are:
Q 'Why?' 

A 'Because it's there' [I know what you mean but couldn't you find a new way of saying it?] 

From my earliest days reading about adventure, and adventurers, the intrepid adventurer has always had certain bits of kit that are; if not actually indispensable, at least touchstones. Those pieces of craft that can take us places, especially when we've taken ourselves places. Yes I'm including myself in the adventurer category now that I've led an intrepid solo expedition to the frozen north. Well Leeds anyway.

Predictable Question 2 

Q 'What's the one thing you'd always take?'

As ever Eric Newby had the best answer. 

A'Wanda!' (his Mrs).  

Apart from his beloved the other thing Newby  always had with him was his Rolex, bought on route to the hindu kush. Lacking his wit and good fortune lots of adventurers  seem to go that most pedestrian of answers ' a swiss army knife'. 

Don't get me wrong. They're OK. I've owned a few of them myself but i can think of better options; a stack of $100 bills'll solve most problems, from lighting fires to calming traffic cops. While it cant light fires, when the Benjamins are gone a Rolex can always be swapped  for a ticket home from anywhere.

I've been a fan of Rolex since I first saw them advertised in an ancient copy of National Geographic as a teenager, and how many dreams were born between those pages?  The trouble with Rolex is that every fourth Essex wide boy's got one, and the other three are wearing 'Bangkok rolys'. In order to reestablish some of the exclusivity they once had there's a now a fashion for coating Rolex sports watches in a variety of black finishes - the same sort of coatings people use to weatherproof rifles. Way cool, and there's a certain cache to not-for-sale. 

Then there's the real deal - IWC - The International Watch Company of Schaffhausen Switzerland. Every model is a thing of great beauty in its own way. To my eyes, especially the the sports watches from the 1970s. My friend Nurse Kate has one of the coolest examples. Her stepfather saw her eyeing it up on his wrist and gave it to her in a fit of pique shouting 'Stop waiting for me to die'.  She's spent the price of a Tikka T3 on servicing it and it still doesn't tell the time. Cool paperweight though. 

You can see where this is going. A hand made watch is possibly the ultimate boys toy, completely useless - your phone keeps better time, but some how way cool. In fact the more you spend the less good a watch is at its stated function. If you don't 'get' watches you'll be queuing up to leave pithy comments at the end of this post. If you do get them you'll be too busy following the links to comment. 

So here it is. The latest 'I Want One' its totally customizable, and its a hell of a lot cheaper that even a new strap for an IWC, it combines the time keeping qualities of an phone [almost] with the machinists craft and the cache of super low volume manufacture.  The Swiss assembled models have a few choices. But it's the assembled in the USA models that interest me. Completely custom, you make yours up from an options list that include choices of case, bezel, faces, and hour, minute, second and second time zone hands. All to your own exacting taste. Corr!

MKII call my favorite the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (pronounced "LuRP") which if you include the short walk to school and back is a pretty fair description of my lifestyle.

There's a 'seeker' born every minute - and two to sell him must have accessories.

Your Pal 

SBW (that's Sucker Boy Wants)

Blogs & Blades

'You Cant Always Get What you Want. You can't always get what you want. And if you try sometime you find You get what you need''

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my hotel room, surfing away, looking at the output of customer knife makers. As yer do.
Trying to resist exposing you dear reader to further outbursts of my avaricious 'I Want One - a not so occasional series' posts, and fighting the urge to bankrupt myself when,it was as though the the kit collecting god smiled upon me. 

 I received an email from Black Rabbit who writes the Obsidian Rabbit blog

....... I'd like to ask you to review one of my knives. In return for your time, I'll happily make you the knife to your specifications and send it to you before you write the review - this way you'll be able to play/work with it first, get a feel for it, and be able to form your own honest opinion. Now don't get me wrong - this knife would not be payment for a favourable review - you can say write whatever you want about it, as long as it's fair (but I wouldn't expect anything else) - and after you've posted, the knife remains with you, for keeps.

Well YE HARRRR!!!! I waited all of .00000001 of a second before biting his hand off - right up to the elbow!!!!

So we've been bouncing a few emails back and forth, chewing a few ideas over and the project is coming along nicely. Very nicely.

We looked at three wildly differant ideas:
The Hunter - my favorite interpretation is the fallkniven TK5 and TK6
The BIG Leuku - The Sammi design that's sort of half way point beteen a camp chopper and a machete
The Bushtool - a relatively new design pioneered by Rod Garcia which he calls the skookum bushtool

I've never been remotely interested in the 'woodlore' style bushcraft knife developed by Ray Mears, I'm sure they're great but they just don't speak to me. The bushtool on the other hand looks like something really genuinely different and i've been keen since the first review i saw.

Here's a few of the reviews I've seen over the last couple of years
Bushcraftuk with a field test in the jungle

Britishblades with a moan about the ordering process
Dirt Times review with a bit of background on how Rod Garcia developed the design

karamat (the bushcraft school that hosts Mors Kochanski's training's which inspired the design)
Old Jimbo now hosting the outdoors magazine review

I've only ever seen one traded 'pre loved' and even that was out of my price range. A maker called Mick Spain does his interpretation of the design and it too is both a stunner and unaffordable at this time.

So I was delighted to seize the chance to get my chubby little hands round one. The best thing about having a knife made for you is that all those little details that no one ever seems to get quite right are suddenly solve-able.

Some thoughts:

Not too thick - a thinner blade offers you a little more finesse 

Not wood - handsome rare woods are certainly amazing to gaze at, but a real 'user' will be subjected to the blood and guts of field butchery and may need to be sterilized many times during it's life. Micarta or G10 are the best options for the small scale maker. Micarta is layers of cloth or paper set in resin, G10 is the same idea with fiberglass.

ORANGE - BoB (Brother of Bushwacker) is more of an outdoorsman than any of the armchair warriors posting on the internet even wish they were and he reckons outdoor kit comes in two colors 'where did i put that green? and So that's where it is ORANGE!' 

Deep Choi - the Scandinavian esthetic (popularized by Mors Kochanski) has it that a finger guard only gets in the way. While i agree that it does limit the options for sheath design it also serves the valuable purpose of limiting the potential for a cut finger. Call me a wuss if you like, but I've seen some nasty accidents and had a few not so nasty ones myself. Limiting the potential for disaster is part of the design brief. So a deep 'cut out' that secures the users grip is essential - this one's coming on an Elk hunt and will cut many sandwiches between here and there.

Innovation - Sorry to say this chaps but most knives are just so [yawn] same-old-same-old, the Skookum is different, Raidops aint to everyones taste but his work is different, fallkniven has super cool laminated steel, Wild Steer knives are literally the ugliest thing I've seen since ex-Mrs SBW's sister in law, but at least WSK are trying to do something clever and innovative.  So I was delighted when BlackRabbit tentatively suggested insetting a southern cross into the handle. The Southern Cross is a constellation only visible in the southern hemisphere and a potent symbol of Australia. Different AND it nicely ties the makers work to his locale. 

More news of the project as it comes in

SBW 

PS get Black Rabbits side of the story here

Careful With That Thing

I was recently emailed this story by Tobermory. An Aussie called General Cosgrove was interviewed on the radio recently where he was talking about a program where a boy scout troop would be visiting his military base.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
So, General Cosgrove, what things are you going to teach these young boys when they visit your base?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
We're going to teach them climbing, canoeing, archery and shooting.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
Shooting! That's a bit irresponsible, isn't it?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don't see why, they'll be properly supervised on the rifle range.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children?

GENERAL COSGROVE:
I don't see how. We will be teaching them proper rifle discipline before they even touch a firearm.

FEMALE INTERVIEWER:
But you're equipping them to become violent killers.

GENERAL COSGROVE:
Well, Ma'am, you're equipped to be a prostitute, but you're not one, are you?

The radio went silent and the interview ended.

People! What are they like?

Your pal
SBW

On The Beach At Hastings

Lately i've changed the signature i use on web forums to 

Tolerable Craftsman, Terrible Fisherman and Wannabe hunter

It's a raised a smile, and a couple of chaps have 'fessed up 'I'm a terrible fisherman too'  but in all honesty however bad you think you are, I'm worse, I suck at fishing. really I do. 

On the other hand - Buying fishing equipment I excel at. Really, I'm gods gift to anyone who owns a fishing store. There's no recession if I'm in your shop. It is my heartfelt belief that under no circumstances should i ever knowingly pass a fishing shop without popping in and dropping a tenner. Minimum.

In order to convince myself that I'm more than a collector of fishing equipment and to appease the fishing gods this weekend I went back to my roots. Fishing in hastings, with crap gear. The best catch i ever had was off the boat landing beach in Hastings with a rod, reel and line set up that cost £30. Since then i've spent 100's and caught the sum total of not-a-lot. Maybe the gods don't take offerings made over the internet via fishing shops in Japan and I'd actually have to get my butt down to the water, in time for the tide, and throw some bait out there.

As usual Johna is my fishing buddy of choice, and his pal Steve was roped in for the trip.

Johna "There's a beach it's been cut off by a landslide but I know we can get down there'

SBW " Real adventure fishing! Bring it on!"

We took the unprecedented step of leaving in plenty of time, and turned that into a double whammy by going to the bait shop while the bait was fresh - I know most unlike us - but as the man said

 'doing what you've always done an expecting different results is THE definition of madness'

£11 lighter and with the most promising bag of bait i've seen in years we made our way up on to the cliffs in the country park and set about the scrabble down to the water. Expectation pays a large part in perception and of course perception is the local reality. We walked in a downward direction untill a fork in the road. 

SBW ' looks like its this way'

Johna ' no it's this way'

SBW 'well OK. errr if you say so'

To say the going was rough an muddy would be an understatement, like a recreation of the Somme on a 60 degree slope.

Man Down - Johna takes a tumble

Watching Johna struggle to his feet whilst trying to get the camera out nearly had me on my arse too. Fortunately he quickly fell again so i was able to add a photographic record. By the time we made it to the waters edge we we all covered in mud. But the sun shone, I lit a driftwood fire, and and all was right with the world. 

I set up with a Paternoster rig. Usually i think of the paternoster as a pier fishing rig, they don't cast so far but seeing as we had a decent stash of likely looking bait I was hoping two hooks would equal two chances.

Today's lesson:

I'm an advocate of circle hooks wherever possible as the research suggests that they are much less likely to be 'deep swallowed' resulting in a positive hooking through the fishes lip giving you a choice of 'catch and release' or 'catch and eat'. As i mentioned at the start it's been a while since i've landed anything at all and as a result my fishing confidence had been at an all time low. I'd started fishing with 1/O (the smallest size of sea fishing hook) having convinced myself that I was getting nibbles but not bites due to too larger hook sizes. 

The whole point of circle hooks is that the little fella's can't bite down on them and live to grow to a better size.  This was made true for me with the only catch of the day. I landed a Huss which would have gone straight back if he hadn't swallowed the hook so deeply that it made release impossible. Point taken 3/O and 5/O from now on.

 Mr Huss received his invitation to lunch by way of a rock to the back of the head.

I wrapped him up in the fronds of a fern (any bushcrafters out there care to let me know which one it is?)

I popped him on a flat rock i'd pre heated in the fire, stuck another rock on top.....................

And scared the daylights out of my self when rock one exploded launching rock two into the air!

A quick rebuild of the fire later and Mr Huss cooked gently while we amused ourselves casting rigs costing £3.50 a time out to the rocky bottom of the english channel. Where they stayed, fishless.

Mr Huss turned out to be a most agreeable luncheon companion. 

If mother nature had not provided a bounty, she had at least laid on an appetizer. 

Despite the agreeable nature of the morning, I would hesitate to recommend the beach as a fishing venue for two reasons.

Firstly it has been described to us as a nudist beach - yet it was devoid of hot swedish naturalists and seemed instead to be a meeting point for gentlemen of certain 'interests'. Also when the tide was fully out it became apparent that the beach fails miserably to provide any reason for fish to be there. We saw one, yes ONE, limpet on the whole beach. 

No food = No fish. 

It was too nicer day to be rushing back and we stayed to the bottom of the tide. A most unusual thing happened as the tide went out - we got nearly all our broken off and snagged rigs back! 

The journey back wasn't without its moments of high comedy. Of  all the 'other users' of the beach who'd passed by during the day not one of them was covered in mud, and there was a reason for that. Expectation = perception and perception is the local reality. Where we had gone looking for a landslide that lead to the beach they had looked for a flight of steps that led to the beach.
As we struggled, puffing and wheezing, up the steps, we passed the very point where Johna had insisted that we go by the road less traveled. As we stood catching our breath with Johna lamenting his poor choice Steve's voice drifted up from the lower slope

"Is this not where the bushwacker said to go, Johna?"

So my faith, having been sincerely tested, was renewed by the days events. I did catch and eat a fish. After all this time!

Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Brought Me back In

Your pal
The Bushwacker.

This Weekends Recommended Reading

Blogs. Just like buses, ya wait for ages and then three come along at once. Two of them by the same dude.

First up I'd like to introduce Hubert Hubert an Air Rifle hunter from the bit of england between 'darn sarf' and 'oop north'. Lets call it the 'mid-lands'. The writes a blog he calls Rabbit Stew. Self described as

Surviving the credit crunch! Middle-aged bloke takes to the fields with an air rifle in search of free food.

.... because of a nagging sense that the stranglehold that the all-conquering giant alien supermarkets have on both the farmers that produce the meat and the Joe Publics that buy the meat is a fundamentally crazy, rude, unfriendly - and moreover, somehow, and this is where it gets a little less rational, I fear - yucky state of affairs: it just feels queasily, weirdly wrong to buy lamb chops from Tesco's. So, I don't really seem to do it any more. What I seem to do is go out and try to shoot rabbits instead (except I'm not very good at it, get very few, and have become, as a result, much more of a damn veggie than I'd have thought likely at the outset when I proudly purchased my manly, German, hell-bent-on-meat-eating air rifle). I seem to find myself thinking more and more of a little shack on the edge of a wood somewhere where I can dwell hermit-like with my Weihrauch, pot rabbits, pick mushrooms, grow a giant beard and, unbelievably, wash even less than I do now.

Nicely written and for such a new blog quite a few posts too. Welcome to the blog roll Hubert.

Best make your self a cup of something hot and a sandwich before you start on this one. For, dear reader, this is some blog. 

Alcoholism, Divorce, Penury, AIDS, Third world debt, Kleptocracy, Corruption, Land mines, and the fun doesn't end there. This blog contains all sorts of insights into the human condition, from the  grotesque to the inspirational. A really genuinely unique voice, and frankly the reason I've achieved so little this afternoon. 

A Hippo On The Lawn - the diary of an involuntary expatriate

Here's how it starts:

I am sitting in a 20-foot container, a reasonably well-appointed container admittedly but a container nevertheless. The kind of container in which people stuff cars, or building materials, illegal immigrants, whatever, or wash up on the southern coast of UK loaded with BMW motorcycles, that sort of container. It is one of a few that sitting on their little wooden blocks plugged into a generator together form the residential half of the industrial site that I am running........

......I came here nearly 14 years ago for a six-month humanitarian demining contract. Apart from occasional interludes in places like Gabon, Nigeria and Uganda to name a few, I have been here ever since. I have been shot at and stabbed in this country, I survived a plane crash here, got married and divorced here, have been formally expelled from the country and then very grudgingly and still precariously allowed to stay, been arrested three times and detained many times, went through a week long court case facing ten years for trumped up charges before being acquitted. I am raising a son here, have had seven varied and interesting jobs here, have a farm down south on which I intend to run sheep and have just finished building a house in the southern suburbs to replace the one I lost after the divorce. As much as the immigration services want me to leave, I want to stay.

I really can't do justice to his writing in a few short exerts, READ IT yourself. I promise you won't regret the time you spend on it. 

The last of this weekends blogs is also written by Hippo. 

Cooking In The Frontline is a recipe blog of stunning (and mouth watering) simplicity. 

.........I had better teach myself to cook. Easier said than done when in a war zone. It is all very well getting the best cook books but all of them assume that the local delicatessen or well stocked supermarket is but a short drive away. So I stopped lugging the books around in my back-pack and started to look at the ingredients that were available around me. I then figured out the best way to turn, what were sometimes collectively quite an odd assortment, into a dish that would not only sustain me, but was a delight to eat. Well I wasn't always successful, my rats in Satay sauce were, quite frankly, gut churning but I was desperate at the time.

To my surprise, however, I found that cooking in the front line, so to speak, was an enjoyable experience. It took my mind off the horrors around me and the discomfort we all suffered. It brought me close to a surprising variety of people and I am sure that on more than one occasion, instead of being ambushed, the smell of cooking wafting through the bush encouraged my would be assailants to appear sheepishly out of the gloom, weapons pointing safely towards the ground, politely asking if there was any going spare.

Sure he's no Hank, (but who of us is?) the great beauty of his writing is his knack of reveling just how easy it is to knock up terrific grub even in seemingly adverse circumstances. Think of him as an older, wiser, wittier Jamie Oliver, based in Angola. 
Off for a spot of fishing. 

Don't stay up too late reading will you

SBW

If You Stand Very Very Still...

You might just get close enough to .....

Big shout to Chad who found this one

More soon
SBW

Pig Dog Slut

If I may be permitted to explain, this is not a slur on the eating habits, character or lifestyle choices of the good citizens of Leeds. It's a history lesson.

The first recorded use of a tracking animal other than a dog in the UK was 'Slut' a pig owned and trained by A baronet from hampshire called Sir Henry Mildmay. His pal Charles Darwin said "Sluts sent was exceedingly good, and she was more useful than a dog"

OK more trivia than history. The book this fact is taken from looks a lot of fun 'The Keen Shots Miscellany' by Peter Holt 

All papers sat and passed. Off back down south.

Your pal

SBW

Numpty!!

Brigid from Mausers and Muffins - home on the range found this one.

Beyond that WORDS FAIL ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Approaching Shoes

If your going to spend money, spend it on your shoes or your bed - if you're not in one you're in the other.

I've now put a few miles on a pair of what we call 'outdoors trainers' and the climbing crowd call approach shoes. I'm giving them a massive thumbs up 5.10 camp 4 are the best thing I've bought in ages, really comfy, really grippy, and even though they are shoes not ankle hugging boots they were very suppotive when we walked up Ingleborough a couple of weekends ago. I paid £72 the best I found online was $100.

All the best

SBW

Bruno the dog says Hi to Barkley and the other canine readers.

Due South

As my time here in the north draws to a close and I start to think about the next adventure I was delighted to see on this mornings news that the Scott Polar Research Institute has digitized its catalogue of photographs of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Wow are we in for a treat!

The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Here you can discover the polar regions through the eyes of those explorers and scientists who dared to go into the last great wildernesses on earth.
Detailed catalogue entries are provided for each image. All image captions are taken from original sources, where known. In digitising this resource the Scott Polar Research Institute has enabled Browsing through the collection by date, expedition or photographer, or searching the content directly.

It's all Here

Hope your as exited as I am

Your pal

The Bushwacker

A Shortish Walk In The Yorkshire Peaks

As the sky looked so majestic, and Saturday school was over for the day. TNM changed into his alter ego BONGO MAN and after: surgically removing Junior Geordie Monkey (TNM's son) from the computer, and rescuing Lennox the black lab puppy from the emasculating love of 'Grandma Yorkshire' (TNM's mum)  we finally set off for a bracing walk in the country. By the time we were actually got out of the door it was getting dark as so we changed destination and headed for Ribblehead. The night was foggy to say the least and as we drove away from Leeds and onto the moors we could only see three road markings ahead.

When we arrived we were delighted by our own powers of organization, we had allowed time for a small libation at the local hostelry - the splendid Station Inn.  

Readers with prolonged exposure to the 'corporate nightmare' public houses that have proliferated in the last twenty years may wish to either; Turn away now (bad thing jealousy) or Set off immediately ( good old-school pub t' station). Through visiting the bar a couple of times (as your representative and strictly in the interests of research) I was able to assemble a northern food parcel to send to the Bushwacker Jnr and The Littlest Bushwacker- Pork scratchings (a tooth cracking snakfood made of salt and pork rinds fried to a rock hard crunch and a bar of Romney's Kendal mint cake - a food synonymous with mountaineering, and fell walking. The packet even records its role in the first successful assent of Everest.
“'We sat on the snow and looked at the country far below us … we nibbled Kendal Mint Cake.' A member of the successful Everest expedition wrote – 'It was easily the most popular item on our high altitude ration – our only criticism was that we did not have enough of it.'"
We feasted on fine, fine pork pies that were kept stacked on the bar, made from gloucestershire old spot pork, sourced within five miles of the Station's kitchen.

As the night wore on we bedded down in the Bongo: northern monkeys and the dog on the fold down seats and your pal the bushwacker in the fold out crows nest. I went to sleep to the sound of a lad of fifteen whingeing indignantly  'but you still haven't made my bed' and TNM laughing heartlessly from the depths of his sleeping bag, a venue which I can vouch, once he has retired to, he is extremely unlikely to leave.

In the morning clouds rolled by lower than the hill tops, a burn tinkled as it disappeared into a pothole, the hills were rolling majestically, the camera spluttered an died.

Sunday morning had dawned bright and fresh, so after breakfasting on beans and eggs a la Bongo we set off up Ingleborough, second highest hill in the Yorkshire dales.

I don't know if you were reading back in the days of my long abandoned training regime, but yes 'Sofa- King-Whacked' just about summed up my journey to the summit. At least this time i wasn't mocked by the drinking pubic, it was the faux concern of JGM. 'are you going to die?' Fortunately he also kept up a running commentary on the state of Lennox's bowl movements  so at least the walk didn't pass without entertainment. 

As usual the 'great british countryside' is covered in crap (with only a small percentage laid by the dog) I fished a full size waste bag out of a stream and soon had it half filled with sweet wrappers, drink cans and other assorted food packaging. All left by people out for the day to enjoy the 'unspoiled' views. And they had the temerity to look at ME as though I'm mad. Go figure?

Your Pal

The Bushwacker

Bicentennial Bushwacker

Cor! Is it that time already?

It really does seem like only yesterday that I started this whole blogging malarky, and here we are at 200 posts.

Am i getting any closer to my moment with Mr Elk? Sort of but its taking a while isn't it.

Massive thanks to all of you who read this.

SBW

The Return Of The F1

My fallkniven F1 dropped onto the door mat a couple of days ago, back from its trip to its birth place in Sweden. Now that it's back I though I do a review after a year or more of use.

I bought the F1 as I'd seen them mentioned on numerous Bushcraft and knife forums and seen a few well thought of instructors using them. While the F1 isn't my idea of the perfect bushcraft knife - blades too thick for fine woodcarving- I do really rate the design. Alone in the woods this puppy would be a wellspring of confidence. For fire and shelter it's absolutely perfect, if you wanted to whittle a violin to play while your waiting to be rescued you may find something a little thinner more to your taste.

Regular readers will remember that I chipped the tip (1mm-1.5mm) a while back splitting a piece of Leylandii for a backyard fire. I wasnt that impressed, but in fairness to fallkniven I had already subjected the knife to some heavy use during which it had acquitted itself admirably. 

One of the key feature of a 'survival knife's is that it needs to be a 'pry bar with an edge' and buoyed with the confidence of other peoples user reports I took them at their word and treated it without mercy. After the testing I did in the first few days I had cause to take up all the carpet in the bottom part of the house; cut it into pieces small enough to sneak into the domestic rubbish collection, take up what seemed like miles of carpet tracking (the nail studded wooden strips that holds your carpet against the wall) and then pry up a few floor boards. No problem. Scratches? Yes loads, but it kept an edge and showed no signs of bending.

Then I set out to teach myself convex sharpening, using the mouse mat method, and although it pains me to tell you this - I suck at it. The idea is that you glue a range of different abrasives papers to the undersides of old mouse mats and by pulling the blade over the abrasive service you'll sharpen the edge, while maintaining the 'apple seed' shape of the blade. Many, many people have achieved spectacular results with this method. One day I may even join their ranks.

If you fancy a go yourself here's the top tip I SHOULD have followed.

The only pressure you need is the weight of the blade, ANY pressing down on the blade will round the edge not sharpen it. Opps!

I put the F1 in the post to Peter Hjortberger, owner of fallkniven, and this is what he emailed back to me.

......Your knife has arrived. What I find is a well used knife, very blunt edge and a loss of the tip of around 1.5 mm. Regular wear and tear is NOT covered by our warranty. Our offer is to regrind your blade into a good shape for free but charge you for the return cost......

I thought this was a fair assessment of the situation and gratefully coughed up for the postage.

Team Fallkniven have refinished the blade to a wicked edge, sharper than when it came out of the box, and put a shine on the blade that would let you signal to a rescue plane. The blade seems a little thinner than I remember it, but I didn't/don't have a micrometer handy.

The person who re worked the blade took a bit of metal off the ricasso (where the handle ends and where the shaping of the edge begins) I'm sure many Britishblades or knifeforums members would be livid, but as I keep having to explain to my nearest and dearest I'm not a knife collector, I'm an enthusiast. They're tools to me.  

So, having been thoroughly tested,  I can give what I expect to be my final assessment of the F1. 

• Worth the money? YES 

(I told a well known knife vendor what I paid for mine and the look on his face made me think they aint that cheap wholesale, but even during our current exchange-rate-meltdown they're still a lot of tool for the cash - if you are after one: I keep seeing bargains on british blades in the Portobello Rd forum)

• Holds an edge? YES (It'll withstand anything. Except incompetence)
  
• Strongly made? YES  (very, beating it this deep destroyed the Oak mallet I used)

• Fit for purpose? YES (they were designed as survival knives, not scalpels, not bushcraft knives. They also make excellent carpet removal tools)
  
• Would I buy another? What do you think? ;-)

Wait 'till you see the bayonet I got for my birthday!!

your pal

The Bushwacker

A Tale of Two Rounds

I've managed to include all three still life knife/gun blog conventions in this picture. 

Camo, Steel and Brass! 

Note to self - Get A Life

SBW

Metsakaamera Or Wild Pig TV

This one may prove fruitful for any other armchair nature watchers. It's a game camera in Estonia that's becoming a bit of an internet phenomenon 75,000 people A DAY have logged on!

See what's happening NOW

The main site is linked here and they have several other cameras featured. I would tell you more about it, but to be honest I've already neglected my homework quite long enough.

Enjoy

your pal 

The Bushwacker.

Adventure Writing: An Outsider Art

It's been a while since I wrote about the books that are the inspiration for this blog. There are a few that have given me a glimpse of how I'd like to be, shaping my thinking and aspirations. 

The thing that connects them all is that they chronicle the journey of outsiders. Some have the outsider label forced upon them, others are compelled to seek out new ways of being to escape a life they feel unsuited to.

Ishi was the ultimate outsider; having literally stepped out of the stone age into the Edwardian age. But his story wouldn't have been brought to life for me in the same way if it weren't for his friend and counterpoint Saxton Pope. A man who, when the chance presented itself was ready to make the journey in the opposite direction.   If I couldn't become more like Ishi; wild, free, and indistinguishable from the landscape. I'd happily settle for being like Saxton Pope. The old school gent afield, bypassing convention, passionately curious about the world beyond his understanding, while carrying the good bits of home with him. An outsider partially by choice, partially because it's his default setting to swim against the tide.

Another inspiration who fits that frame is Eric Newby. Not a hunter or fisherman, but a total card, and some spinner of yarns....

'A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush' is one of the greatest travel books ever written and how its written. Newby conjures up the droll gentleman adventurer better than anyone, with the notion of adventure as a pursuit anyone could take up as an alternative to say, playing bridge or stamp collecting.

Newby could never have been mistaken for an ordinary man, not even at a hundred yards. His youth was full of high adventure; leave private school, work aboard a four-masted ship, win boxing matches against other crew members, serve in the special boat service (the SAS without the shoot-and-tell autobiographies) taken prisoner in WWII, escapes, betrayed, recaptured, meets Wanda, after the war returning to Italy to see the people who had sheltered him and while he's there he marries the stunning Wanda.

Surely this would be enough to convince anyone that they had a certain something. Something, which should be listened to. Followed even. But somehow he found himself working in woman's fashion, a field he latter admitted that he was totally unsuited for and had been told he was unsuited to. Daily. For ten years.

During the lunch hour of one particularly trying day at the office [told to hilarious effect in chapter two] he was to send a telegram to his pal Hugh Carless that changed his already remarkable life forever.

CAN YOU TRAVEL NURISTAN JUNE?

He returned from lunch a changed man. Sending that telegram was powerful magik. Magik that was to evoke all that was best in him. Providence of course answered, in this case by return telegram.

OF COURSE, HUGH.

Within weeks he has jacked in his job, set about filling their small flat’s living room with the giant bewildering pile of specialist kit that such an endeavor needs. Rented the flat out, arranged for Wanda and the children to live with his mum and dad. Wanda must absolutely rock because she thinks this is all good and accompanies the boys on the first leg of the journey!

In order to get the visas they need Newby and Carless decide that a compelling reason to go to Nuristan would be - mountaineering. Knowing the sum total of not-a-lot about mountaineering they decide that a weekends ‘practice’ would be in order and spend the weekend in a hilly part of Wales seeking guidance from climbing obsessed waitresses and bearded men in rough-hewn sweaters. I could spend all night writing out hilarious scenes from the book, but I’m not going to spoil it for you.

Newby is prepared to go a long way to break out of the monotony of a life that is totally untrue to him. However much he understates it, he is the real deal himself - a true explorer. Finding hither to hidden parts of himself in unmapped parts of the world. 

One scene that resonates with me shows that just like the rest of us, however far you go to escape the disappointing mediocrity of the modern world, even when he’s stepped over the ragged edge and is trekking though an alien landscape amongst people whose lives and customs havent changed much since the time of their prophet, he bumps into a living legend whose been SO much further.

We came down into a junction in the Panjshir river. We'd been travelling all day, and all night, crossing a very wild pass. "Look," said Hugh, my companion, "it must be Thesiger."
Thesiger's horses lurched to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked "British Museum", and black tin trunks.
The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, 45 years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter.
"Turn round," he said, "you'll stay the night with us. We're going to kill some chickens."
We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village.
Soon we were sitting under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger's belongings piled up behind us. "Can't speak a word of the language," he said cheerfully. "Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it's not really necessary. Here, you," he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. "Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice - three chickens." After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious. Famished, we wrestled with the bones in the darkness.
"England's going to pot," said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. "Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas - wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, 20 guineas apiece, absolute rubbish."
The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air beds. "God, you must be a couple of pansies," said Thesiger.

The last word goes to the writer Evelyn Waugh who, mistaking our Newby for another Newby, agreed to write a preface for the first edition.

'Dear reader if you have any softness left for the idiosyncrasies of our rough island race, fall to and enjoy this characteristic artifact.'

Enjoy

SBW

Weekend Reading

Have a look at this fascinating article about how a community decides which innovations are likely to help and which are likely to hinder. Very cool and well written too.

Enjoy

SBW

I Want One - A Not So Occasional Series Pt6

The season approaches and a Suburban Bushwackers thoughts turn to; Trout, buying stuff he don't need, and milled aluminum for milled aluminum's sake.

Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers. 

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher's salary. 

Patrick F. McManus

Sex on a stick (sticks in carbon, fiberglass or bamboo) from Halo Reels

Your pal

The Bushwacker