I purchased one of these about a year ago, and had an opportunity to put it through it's paces last weekend on a family camping trip.
According to Gerber's website
The ax/knife combo weighs 19.2 ounces. Overall length is 8.75". The ax blade was impressively sharp, the knife blade was disappointing. The first time I tried to quarter a deer I ended up putting it away and using a proven knife to finish the job. I took the time to rework and hone the blade afterwards and thus far it has kept a decent working edge.
As a hatchet, it performs about as I expected given the light weight and very short length. I chopped down a couple of small maple saplings, about 1.5" in diameter in about 4 swings. It was perfectly suited for digging open fallen logs to get bark and punt for starting a fire. Splitting dry wood, even with a piece of wood to hammer with, was a bit of a chore.
The knife is held magnetically in place inside the handle. Every time I swung the ax, the knife would rattle around inside and I felt like it was about to come out. Although it never did seperate from the handle, I felt the need to wrap my pinky around the bottom of the handle, in part to convince myself that the knife was NOT going to come out, in part to make the rattle stop. At the time it never occured to me to simply take the knife out of the handle and set it off to one side, when using the ax.
Overall, it's a handy, ligh-weight tool, well suitied to light duty camp work and backpacking. It fiils the nitch of being multipurpose (ax, knife, hammer). Out of the package, the knife needed a little edge work. I'll continue to use this for backpacking and as an emergency pack item.
Wheeler
According to Gerber's website
The ax/knife combo weighs 19.2 ounces. Overall length is 8.75". The ax blade was impressively sharp, the knife blade was disappointing. The first time I tried to quarter a deer I ended up putting it away and using a proven knife to finish the job. I took the time to rework and hone the blade afterwards and thus far it has kept a decent working edge.
As a hatchet, it performs about as I expected given the light weight and very short length. I chopped down a couple of small maple saplings, about 1.5" in diameter in about 4 swings. It was perfectly suited for digging open fallen logs to get bark and punt for starting a fire. Splitting dry wood, even with a piece of wood to hammer with, was a bit of a chore.
The knife is held magnetically in place inside the handle. Every time I swung the ax, the knife would rattle around inside and I felt like it was about to come out. Although it never did seperate from the handle, I felt the need to wrap my pinky around the bottom of the handle, in part to convince myself that the knife was NOT going to come out, in part to make the rattle stop. At the time it never occured to me to simply take the knife out of the handle and set it off to one side, when using the ax.
Overall, it's a handy, ligh-weight tool, well suitied to light duty camp work and backpacking. It fiils the nitch of being multipurpose (ax, knife, hammer). Out of the package, the knife needed a little edge work. I'll continue to use this for backpacking and as an emergency pack item.
Wheeler
