Spyderco Knives

Having gralloched and skinned your deer with a Spyderco blade, you can now complete the domestic conversion of the meat and also prepare the veggies with more cutlery from the same legendary American maker.

It was three decades ago that Spyderco first offered a quality Japanese steel kitchen knife, my wife being one of the lucky recipients. The traditional SpyderEdge blade made short work of meat, vegetables and as I recall, the odd finger. Well, they’re back and better than ever. A range of superb, dishwasher-friendly cutting, slicing, chopping and paring implements, designed to make food prep as efficient as possible. Their K09PBK is a neat Mini Paring Knife with a Plain Edge MBS 26 stainless blade and grippy polypropylene handle that makes short work of apples, avocados, beans and peppers.

At the other end of the size range is their K08PBK Santoku Kitchen Knife. Again, it features a flat-ground chunky PlainEdge Japanese MBS 26 stainless blade, this one some seven-inches long with a sculptured polypropylene handle. This mean machine is intended for use on the big sinewy cuts from your fallow, as it can easily be used to hack or chop against a board.

Choices, choices

Filling the gap are a number of kitchen knives with the choice of Plain or SpyderEdge blades. My favourite is undoubtedly the elegant and tactile 5.8-inch VG-10 PlainEdge, flat ground K11P Cooks Knife with Corian scales attached by three riveted stainless cutler’s bolts. This is complimented by a family of K04 and K05 6.5-inch and 4.5-inch Kitchen Utility models with MBS 26 stainless flat ground drop point blades and colour options for the handles. The red handle model is only available in SpyderEdge, whilst both grinds are offered with black. My blue handled prototype example already assuming collector status.

Personal needs

There are lots of pocket multitools on the market. Many have bloated into massive assemblies with up to 120 specified abilities. They may offer great bar-room bragging rights but ruin the lines of a good pair of chinos. If you’ll never need to rebuild an aero engine, why carry the tools to do it? Spyderco have applied KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) to the principle and developed the stainless ClipiTool Range!

You get what you really need and that’s it. Each of the three minimalist, UK-legal models comes with a slip joint PlainEdge blade and another tool. Either a pair of scissors, a screwdriver/ bottle opener or a SpyderEdge saw blade. All come with a pocket clip, a safety guard/ finger choil, Spyderco thumb opening and lanyard holes. Their compact construction means that when using the clip they can only be carried tip up, right-handed or of course, loose in the pocket. At under £30, they represent a truly practical everyday carry knife!