I've been browsing through Ragnar's pages with great interest since I picked up the link on this Board, and I expect that I'll be making an order from him some time before the weather begins to cool and I start to think about skinning and whatnot again.
I do have one little problem, though; the three Frosts knives listed at this link:
Three Frosts
Are all very nice, and I bought all three of them a few years ago just to try out, which led me to discover that the littlest one pictured at the top is a very good pelting knife indeed; much better for that particular purpose than the other two. As you can see, that retailer lists that knife as having a 2" blade, and the model # that they use is 02D01.01. but that may just be a stocking # for that particular outfit. Anyhow, I've been looking at the pictures of the Moras and Frosts that Ragnar carries, and it looks as though the #120 may be the same knife, but I can't be sure because the image on the page is a little bit blurry on my monitor, although when I click it and view the larger image it clears up considerably, and appears to be the same one.
Does anyone know for sure if that is in fact the same knife? I'll have to browse some more, but I'm tempted to pick up a half-dozen of those and just tuck them away somewhere for a rainy day, as it were; I have a bad habit of giving knives away to friends if I find something that I think might really benefit them, but I want to make sure that I'm ordering the right pattern, although I suppose that I could always return them if they did turn out to be the wrong model.
The SL-134 also looks to be a good candidate for skinning fur, as do the #105 and #106 and the #920, but until you can actually lay them to an animal it's hard to be sure that the blade angle and profile are "just right," particularly since we all have different geometry to begin with; my hands are very large compared to an "average" hand, with comparatively short blunt fingers and a great big broad palm, so something like the full-size Glock in 10mm or .45 ACP fits me perfectly, while many of my friends complain that the damned thing is just too big to hold comfortably, and conversely the mid-sized guns that so many of them favor are just too small for me to hold comfortably (and more importantly the same way each time), while the mini-Glocks are just for looking at where I'm concerned, because I can't find a way to hold them and make them function reliably.
And finally I like the look of that Ericksson #1329 as a small skinning knife for fox and coyote and bobcat, but I usually tend to stay well shy of stainless of any description; I just don't like that "muddy" feel it has on a stone compared to carbon, and even though it may be the fault of the operator I find it hard to bring an edge back up with a few strokes on a diamond hone or rod, and god help me if I lend a stainless knife to someone and they manage to really dull the thing, because sometimes it seems that the more I try to get the edge back the duller the knife gets. Carbon steel, on the other hand, cuts cleanly, and you can "feel" it working against the stone instead of skidding and slipping and dragging around like a piece of gum the way that stainless blades seem to feel to me.
And now that I've looked once more, I think that the #1241 and/or #1260 shown near the top of the page might work very well also; I regularly see clients and students of mine show up with WAY too big a knife for skinning purposes, particularly for skinning furbearers, where precise cuts are at a premium, but where most of the work is done by hand with a little sweat, muscle, and strong fingers, so a short controllable blade that's flat-out sharp, and even more importantly capable of taking it's original razor edge with s few simple strokes on a diamond hone or a ceramic rod, far outperforms those big ungainly knives that are apparently designed by people who haven't actually spent much time taking the hide off of anything. When I skin big game like bear or elk, or butcher a cow or a horse I like a Green River pattern, particularly if I have to skin them on the ground instead of suspended from a limb, and if I don't have a Green River I like a drop-point with LOTS of belly, like the Dozier Master Skinner, because those long sweeping cuts to separate the hide from the the flesh that are really only slicing membranes for the most part are a lot easier if you don't have to worry about a point digging a little bit too deep and slashing it's way through, but aside from that kind of work on big animals a little bitty pointy sharp blade will do just fine.
I've seen guys that used Exacto knives, particularly the "hook" blades that can be inserted just behind the attachment point of the Achilles tendon and then drawn all the way down to the **** in a single motion, and they seem to like 'em for opening the tail as well, and I've seen fellas use every kind of knife under the sun, from the expensive models like the Dunn Fur Tamers to the small Rapala fillet knife (4"?), and all sorts of pocketknives on the "Trapper" pattern with a clip blade and a speyfoot of some sort, and a pointed narrow blade with some belly on the three-bladed models, and all sorts of capers because they tend to be narrow and pointed, which is what you're looking for in a fur knife, and then I've seen some swept-bladed models in commercial furrier's operations that had almost as much belly as a Green River, although they were skinning a lot of rats and 'coons and beaver, which are fatty things, and usually when I saw someone using something new to me I'd get my hands on one and try it for myself, but at the end of the day I'm pretty sure that little Frosts "carving" knife with the two-inch almost-triangular laminated carbon blade and the simple wooden handle is as good a knife to make the two cuts down the backs of the hind legs, split the tail, and help a little bit here and there where things tend to get sticky, particularly with coyotes, although most furbearers get a little bit tough around the brisket and armpits, and some of them get VERY tough, although I've been using Roy Findley's "Two Minute Coyote" horizontal skinning method with a come-a-long for lots of years, and that sure helps, particularly if you're skinning more than one or two animals at a time. I'll normally pick up another knife to tease away the headskin, just because it makes me cringe to drag a really sharp knife around eye sockets and jawbones and whatnot, but under mechanical pressure from a come-a-long you can even use the little Frosts for that if you're careful, although with a different knife with a stouter bevel you don't have to worry about careful, and you can just grate away over bone without fretting too much.
And the price on them is astonishingly low for the quality of the knife; I see plenty of low-end Chinese and Afghan and Pakistani knives at some pretty low price points, and some of them might even be good steel with a decent heat treatment, but the only thing that I've found that competes with the little Frosts (or Moras, I suppose) is that little skeletonized Bird and Trout necker that Cold Steel used to sell for well under $20.00, and sometimes closer to $10.00. That knife didn't have a whole lot to hang on to, and it required a pinch grip with my thumb and forefinger most of the time, particularly if your hands were bloody and slippery, but the little ring at the end of the hilt was handy to let the knife dangle while you got a double handful of hide to pull down, and the edge geometry of that knife made it come back up in a hurry when it began to dull a little.
Having said that, though, I like the Frosts better just for skinning, because there's a decent chunk of wood to wrap your hand around, and the point geometry makes it even easier to slide the knife under the hide and push it away from yourself to open a clean cut, at least for me; the Cold Steel had a much better Kydex jam sheath and an included dog-tag style neck chain to boot, and even though they discontinued that model in Carbon V, which I fortunately bought before that happened, and substituted some sort of stainless, it's still a very good little fur knife, and still inexpensive, relatively speaking, but it doesn't take an edge as easily as the Frosts, and I don't think that it comes up nearly as quickly, or holds as long.
What really interests me is that the pattern(s) are so consistent; it's as though a whole region of Europe collectively decided that a short stout blade with a handle that would fill most hands and a modest belly combined with enough point to do any of the "pointy" things that you do with a knife was optimal for all of the day-to-day tasks that a personal knife might be called upon to perform, and when they reached that design point they just stopped looking, because what they had did everything that they needed. I'm sure that there must be other designs offered somewhere in Finland or Sweden or Norway, and in fact the fillet knives and the larger "camp knives" are different, but the overwhelming number of blades that are almost the same suggests that they must function as they were intended to, and that no one has seen fit to try to build a better mousetrap, so to speak.
Of course, the United States has always been a conglomeration of different nationalities and cultures and races who brought their customs and cuisines and clothing styles and housing preferences and all the other trappings of their native cultures with them , and I suppose that's why we have such a bewildering variety of patterns and designs in the cutlery that's available here, but nonetheless I find the "Moras" interesting because of the uniformity of their design.
John-Henry
