Prior to coming to the Yard and to Bussekin knives in general my use of knives that I had for field work had shown a few features which generally assisted in doing bushcraft type tasks. Taking my Woodlore knife as a starting point this has some good features but the knife still needs tweaking a bit...
The blade comes with a Scandi grind which is partly hollow ground and the spine has slightly rounded sides...taking the edge to a water stone and making it a proper flat grind on the edge and flattening off the spine for a sharper edge angle to use the ferro rod with really helps...
once done this knife works very well and really is the bench mark I assess my other knives by.
Of all the Bussekin knives I have had....and that is a fair few now...the knife that came the best prepared for field work is my DFLE...
This knife had a great factory edge....really very sharp...and the spine had nice sharp edge angles...and being a satin finish instead of painted it really takes sparking a ferro rod perfectly and the satin finish makes using the knife very easy...you can see perfectly whether the blade needs cleaning and this helps a great deal on food prep work. Make no mistake...the ideal nice weight of this knife at 16 oz's and it's perfect balance make this knife very hard to beat in any company...a justified flag ship for the Yard! But it is slightly big for some tasks...
This lead me to looking for a smaller blade...of those I have had I really liked the Ratmandu...
The only problem for me was that the knife came painted and needed stripping and had a very rounded spine which did'nt help with using a ferro rod for fire lighting....now I appreciate many don't see the need for having a knife able to use a ferro rod and are happy with using a lighter or matches or even having a ferro rod with a striker. My preference is to have a knife that can use these tools though...it is a nice way to always have the ability to make a fire...and I suppose for me I like the challenge of using basic equipment like this.
To improve the RMD for this purpose I decided to give it a sharp swedge....
This along with stripping it makes the RMD for me a great small knife option.
Putting a sharpened swedge on some of my Bussekin knives has now become a preffered alteration to make them better for field work. I will post some pic's in another post as I might be at my limit of pic's for a single post...but am interested in what others do or how they like to modify their knives for field use.