Condor Tool & Knife Bushlore • Bushcraft Knife Field Review

Hey what's up Turtles, it's Crick here with Black Owl Outdoors and today I'm going to be doing a review on the Condor Bushlore Full Tang Knife. MSRP on this knife is $49.98. You can find it around $30-$35 online. It comes with this nice leather sheath and honestly when you're going to get a knife at this price usually the sheath is where the quality lacks but that's not the case for this at all. This is a very nice leather sheath, a very nice thick welt. Here we've got a really generous size belt loop here and when you first put it in the sheath it's going to be a little tight but that's okay because it's leather, it's malleable so as you put it in a few times it's going to get a nice snug feel and it doesn't feel like it's too tight. That's the sheath. Now the specs of the knife are overall length 9 516ths, blade length 4 516ths, we've got a Scandi grind, blasted satin finish, 3mm thickness, hardwood handles that are definitely thick enough that if you wanted to re-profile them to a more comfortable grip you could, a lanyard hold at the end and the weight of the knife is right around a little over 10 ounces. I'm going to do some cuts with it and just give you some more of my impressions and overall opinions of the knife. My first impression of the knife after getting it out of the box, the first thing I like to do is obviously check the sharpness of the knife because a sharp knife is the only knife you want to carry. Having a dull knife is not going to do you any good. Just showing some of the tasks I would do with this knife. You can see it's not cutting too bad as it came out of the box. I'm getting some pretty thin feathers if you will but there's definitely a little bit of work to be done. Probably just putting it on a strop, wouldn't even need the touch of stone at first, would serve you really well with getting the blade a little sharper. It's a notch that you would see on a figure 4. I don't forget the name of this, particularly this type of notch, but I would use this on a figure 4. I'm going to go down to the wood here, down to the log. Now a knife this size, when I first saw it or did some research online looking at it, I thought it would be a little bit heavier but it's okay. So you can do a little bit of chopping with it, but obviously it's not a chopper, but So just to demonstrate that it does have enough weight behind it that if you wanted to you could do a little bit of chopping. And like I said, if this was sharpened to its complete capability, this would be a little bit easier for me to do. But nonetheless, out of the box, it is functional. Usually any knife review that I do, people always want to know can the knife baton, is it strong enough, all that, blah, blah, blah. Yes, it's a full tang knife and it can baton. I'm going to do some right now. But honestly, if you really wanted a knife to baton with to process firewood, a small camp knife like this would not be a good choice. Yeah, you can do it with them, but I obviously wouldn't recommend if you want to process a bunch of firewood with a 4 or 5 inch blade, you could. But like I said, ideally, if you wanted to baton, if you wanted to get some pieces of wood to a smaller piece for a feather stick or something like that, batoning with this size knife would be fine for taking a piece of stock back for the house, something like that. We'll see if it will give any feather sticks. I doubt it. Like I said, it's not that sharp. And it is a Scandi grind, which will lend itself to being able to feather wood, but because this isn't that sharp, sharp as it can be or should be for a feather stick, it probably isn't going to produce that great of a result. And ideally when I'm giving the feather stick, I want to use more of a curved part of the blade than it's supposed to down here, but because it is not that sharp, I need to use down here to give myself better leverage because when I get away from the handle, the knife doesn't want to cut. I have to put more force, but you can see it's biting a knot in the wood. Nonetheless, you can see its capability, what it's doing now. I'm not the most or the best at doing feather sticks, but it can be done with the knife as it comes out of the box. As a size comparison now to the SE4, which is a really popular knife, I'm going to lay them out on the log. Blade's a little bit shorter, handle's a little bit shorter, but it has more weight. The SE has more weight, so you can do a little bit more chopping with it, just for a size comparison. My overall impressions of this knife, when I first saw it online, people started telling me about Condor, check out their knives. I really like the utilitarian look of it. It almost looks like a steak knife that you might see at a steakhouse, which that might be kind of funny, but the point is, I really like that utilitarian look, the fact that you can get this for $30, $35, and it comes sharp enough that, like I said, on a piece of leather, it'll probably get it to right where you need it without even touching it to a stone. The 1075, I don't have that much experience with, you know, I've done my research, I've looked to see, I think it might just rust in a little bit different environments a little bit quicker than 1095, but it doesn't matter with any high carbon steel, you need to make sure you treat it every time you use it, oil it, all that good stuff, and you want to be careful about storing the knife in the leather sheath, because this can pick up moisture and retain it, and if you don't have this oiled or just over time, you can get rust because the leather will hold moisture and then having this completely inside it can quicken the rate of rust on a high carbon blade. Something else to keep in mind, get a profile shot of the nice thick hardwood handles, I'm not sure exactly what the wood is, but if you wanted to, you could put a little bit of linseed oil on this to get a little bit more sheen to it, doesn't bother me at all, or you could sand it down to get a little bit more comfortable for your particular hand size, and just as a shot in my hand, generous amount, medium sized hands, generous amount coming out the back, just for some reference, but all in all it's a great knife, for the price, I like the Scandi grinds, I like the hardwood handle, I like the utilitarian look like I said before, I'd definitely be interested in checking out more knives from Condor, I know Joe Flowers designed this knife, hope this review was helpful, if you have any experience with this knife, any of Condor's, please leave a comment, let me know, your impressions, all that good stuff, this is Crick signing out with Black Owl Outdoors, later turtles.