Author Topic: condor tool & knife hudson bay knife  (Read 3121 times)

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Offline dodd3

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condor tool & knife hudson bay knife
« on: February 17, 2011, 01:45:04 AM »
got these pics from a friend that just got this condor tool & knife Hudson bay knife, steel is 1075 carbon that is powdercoated which could be removed it is a big knife and the sheath is well made from good leather and they are cheap to bye,my friend says it came shaving sharp and holds a very good edge.
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Offline pastorp

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Re: condor tool & knife hudson bay knife
« Reply #1 on: February 17, 2011, 02:17:47 AM »
To me, a knife like that is totally useless for any reasionable cutting chore i'd need to do.  :o  How would you gut a deer with it?

Guess it would work as a fighting knife, but then I try to avoid fighting with a knife much prefering a gun.....

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Offline Joel

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Re: condor tool & knife hudson bay knife
« Reply #2 on: February 17, 2011, 03:09:44 AM »
The title should have read Hudson Bay CAMP knife, since it was the first knife ever  given a name with the word camp included.   And that was it's purpose.  In the early colonial days, The Hudson Bay Fur Company had a complete monopoly on the trade.  Trappers wanted a big knife, which was generally carried in the canoe or pack horse, to handle what modern camp knifes do..all the odds and ends that involve light chopping mainly, and  that was a knife design rather than a small axe.  Anyway, the Hudson Bay developed this one and it was a very useful design.  It was not meant to be carried, or to do delicate tasks; it stayed at basecamp.

As far as the knife goes, Condor has done a good job of screwing up traditional designs in a number of cases.  Their knives somewhat follow the basic profiles, but are manufactured in the cheapest manner available.  The profile isn't too bad, but the blade grind is all wrong; it should be either a full flat or convex grind....They're expensive to do, so they've opted for the simple, cheap and not particularly efficient Scandi grind in this case.  Since the blade is so thick, the grind defeats the purpose of the blade by turning it into a clumsy and inefficient axe.  The wide bevels can only hold a sharp edge for a fairly short period of time.  Sharp does not last long with those wide, thick bevels.  Bark River makes an excellent Hudson Bay knife with a traditional grind; I guarantee you that if you used both knives side by side you'd see the difference in efficiency.  The 1075 steel is traditional enough, but the powder coating obviously isn't.  It is useful in hiding rough machining though.

Perhaps I'm being a bit hard on this one, but as a lover of traditional knives, it just really disgusts me when I see a great design compromised, removing the characteristics that made them great knives.  You see it a lot in the knife field. 

Offline Hit or Miss

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Re: condor tool & knife hudson bay knife
« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2011, 02:29:49 PM »
That is an incredibly large chunk of a knife!  I prefer a small blade myself but could see some rough chopping done with it.  It would probably hold up well to batoning too.
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Offline kyelkhunter3006

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Re: condor tool & knife hudson bay knife
« Reply #4 on: February 26, 2011, 01:11:49 PM »
The knife is flat ground with a convexed edge profile.  Not Scandi.  They sharpen it after they coat them.  It also has a distal taper toward the tip. 

The knife actually gets pretty good reviews from outdoors people on a knife forum I hang out on.  A person that owns the Bark River compared the two side by side at camp chores, and after thinning the the edge profile slightly, it cut nearly as well as the Bark River. 

When you compare the price to the Bark River, $40 and a few minutes thinning the edge isn't a bad thing at all. 

The 1075 carbon is hardened to 56-58 RC and people who own them report great edge holding and very easy touch ups.  For good hard user blades, it's hard to beat them for the money. 

They aren't fancy or refined, but they aren't intended to be.

I've got a couple of knives from Condor on the way and I'll report on them after I use them.

As for other uses, well, a big knife can do anything a small knife can do.  The reverse isn't necessarily true.  I once gutted a deer and processed it with a Reinhardt Jungle Machete that had a 10" blade of ATS34. 

Ever tried to chop down a tree or build shelter with a Schrade Sharpfinger?

People can argue for a small knife all they want, but if you look at native peoples around the world, regardless of environment, the one thing that they have in common is a preferance for large knives.  These are the people that use knives daily to live and survive.