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.
