If you only can have one knife ……….
The TRC Apocalypse ticks all the boxes for a knife except being light. If you factor this in when buying one and it is not a problem - you have a brilliantly designed and made knife. They weigh between 400g and 450g depending on the grind. That is just shy of half a litre of water. YMMV but I prefer to carry mine in a drag bag or roe sack. They are fine on a webbing belt with a harness and hippo pad for military use. A bit heavy for your jeans and normal belt. Other than this, they are perfect. Mine scored 100g on a BESS test which is straight razor sharp. It is the convex version and is a tribute to the hand sharpening done by TRC. This is why I like TRC! Everything is done right. The knife comes with a fire steel loop. It takes an 80mm x 8mm fire steel. The light my fire steels are 9.4mm diameter so Google the dimensions when buying one. They are readily available. Not sure if HH stocks them. I searched and found only the LMF brand come up. The spine of the knife is deliberately at a right angle just behind the wider tip for batonning and you can see the straight line section in the photos above which is designed for fire steel use. It is a 10 on fire steel scraping for showering sparks. The knife batons wood more effectively than a hatchet. The sabre grind and length of blade enables wider logs to be split and they do “pop” apart. Fire prep with this knife is as good as it gets. The Elmax steel is 60 Hrc and battoning does not unduly dull the edge. Similarly with chopping. This level of Hrc is a good balance for edge retention and avoiding edge chipping. It enables less laborious sharpening and works well with stropping. This has certainly been the case to date as stropping the edge after use has definitely restored the bite to the edge. The knife comes with a lanyard for chopping although benefits from re-tieing as a hangman’s knot so the knife can be supported on the forearm by the lanyard being pulled in and held on the spine by the tip for delicate work. This helps use the knife for gralloching and game prep and the wide battoning tip offers good purchase. In the size required for a fire steel they seem to be supplied with an eyelet hole (mine were in a pack of 10 off Amazon) and I purchased a box of 100 multi coloured plastic pencil sharpeners and zip ties. Drill or Awl a hole through the side of the sharpener and zip tie it to the fire steel . The knife is good at feather sticking but not as quick as using the sharpener to produce perfect shavings from a thinly batoned stick which can be whittled to fit. It also prevents losing the fire steel when you put them down in the dark to build up the fire. There is still room in the eyelet for some cord to secure it to the kydex loop and this has worked well for me. Fires happen very quickly using this knife! It is a great “one knife” - definitely recommend and top marks to HH helping me get this from TRC. Above and beyond service!
