ISSUE 32052 OFFGRIDWEB.COM
i
magine yourself in a no-sh*t survival situation
and the knife in your hands is rusted, bent at the
hilt, and the edge is chipped to hell. Any expe-
rienced blade snob will tell you it’s useless and
you may injure yourself trying to use it. But is
there any truth to that assumption? Maybe it became that
way because you were lost in the woods and found it like
that. Maybe you inadvertently damaged it. Or maybe any
number of unpredictable scenarios left you with a knife
that’d seen better days. Whatever the case, let’s just say
this is the only tool you have to depend on in an outdoor
survival situation. You need a cutting implement to create
firewood, build a shelter, defend yourself, filet fish, and per-
form any number of other tasks. So the question is, how
do you survive with a damaged knife? Will it still perform?
I was curious about that myself and decided to
torture test a knife to see how well it’d perform some ofWe Torture Test One of Tops Knives’ EJ Snyder-Designed Heavy Hitters
to See If Its Performance Is as Impressive as Its Appearance
By Brady Pesola
Photos by John Schwartzethese tasks. What better test subject than a $300 Tops
Knives SXB — EJ Snyder’s Skullcrusher X-Treme Blade.
Now, here’s the problem I have with knife reviews — a
great many of them seem to be the same and don’t
involve any substantial use. The manufacturer sends
the reviewer a badass, ultra-sharp, brand-new knife,
and guess what? They all work great. Imagine that, a
brand-new knife sent by a company to a reviewer who
wouldn’t ordinarily be able to afford the knife thinks it
works great. It does everything! It slices, dices, chops,
feathers, and notches. By golly, nothing negative to say
about the knife and the reviewer almost always gets
to keep the knife, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s still in
pristine condition.
Many of the designs coming out these days are very
similar, and the Skullcrusher looks very familiar, like Tom
Brown Jr.’s squabble with Beck knives over the movie The