KA-BAR Short Becker Drop Point BK16

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Saturday, February 1, 2025

Sunday, August 4, 2024

Good: The design. Possibly the best knife design of any I own. Very slicey but still seems tough. Feels strangely light in the hand, and it is lighter than say an ESEE 4 (the handle is skeletonised on the BK16). Super comfy; great overall ergonomics, can still do chest lever grip well despite the functional finger guard. I can already see it becoming my "go-to" knife. Bad: QC, build, finishing, price. The bevel grind on mine was so bad I should really have sent it back, but knivesandtools wanted me to pay to return it (despite it being faulty?!) so I decided to spend a couple of hours on the stones and fix it myself. I then removed the black coating to find very obvious grind marks all over the blade. It is unfinished to my mind; no comparison to an ESEE for example. Handle scales are just plastic with a little bit of texture. Cheap feeling and slippy, they need replacing. And the sheath is pretty much unusable. Terrible design, zero retention without using the press stud straps, which are poorly positioned and require both hands to engage, and are still fiddly even then. Sheath is too long for such a small knife too. It's just terrible Chinese rubbish basically. So that's £132 GBP for a poorly made, unfinished 1095 knife, plus £44 GBP for aftermarket micarta scales, and you still need to buy (or make if you can) a new sheath too, so add another £50 GBP maybe for that. I make that £226 GBP in total. If buying in north America or some other cheaper location it might be worth it, but at UK prices it seems very overpriced, despite the excellent design.

Thursday, April 18, 2024

Saturday, June 17, 2023