The Beck­er BK2 by Ka-Bar. I’ve had this knife for sev­er­al months, and keep for­get­ting to write a review of it. So, here it is… In hind­sight, I remem­ber pulling this knife out of the box… My first impres­sion was how heavy it was. My sec­ond impres­sion was how thick the blade was at the spine, all the way down the tang. The basics of the knife, are this: — 5.25″ blade — 10.5″ over­all length — 1/4″ thick at it’s thick­est — 1095 CRO-VAN Steel Now that that is out of the way, It was pret­ty sharp out of the box, if mem­o­ry serves. I was also suf­fi­cient­ly impressed with the weight. I imme­di­ate­ly knew this was a great knife. It also felt real­ly good in my hand.

The sheath is a heavy duty kydex sheath, that has sev­er­al mount­ing options. It does come with a nylon belt loop, how­ev­er, per­son­al­ly speak­ing, the belt loop is a lit­tle flim­sy, and if you do not have the knife han­dle snapped in, the knife sort of flops around and hits your waist and leg. No wor­ries, though, the knife will NOT come out of the sheath, as the sheath snaps around the BK 2 tight­ly. The fact that it does flop around is a lit­tle annoy­ing, though. To rem­e­dy this, I took a cou­ple pieces of card­board, wrapped them a few times in Duct Tape. I then slid it in between the belt loop, leav­ing just enough room for my belt to slide through. I then wrapped the belt loop and the card­board insert again mak­ing it a sta­tion­ary part of the belt loop. I then slid a ranger band around it to help keep it all togeth­er and not unrav­el. I put it on my belt, and it made a big dif­fer­ence. You can see it in the pic­ture. You will also note I added anoth­er ranger band that holds in a firesteel, that works real­ly well with the notch locat­ed at the end of the blade right next to the han­dle. The only thing I may do is add a larg­er firesteel. The one that I have on there is a bit short and a lit­tle awk­ward to use with such a wide blade. Now, as for chop­ping, the weight of this knife gives a clear advan­tage. I have chopped one and two inch sap­plings in very short order with this knife; and by short order, just a few good strokes.

As for baton­ning, fan­tas­tic. There were pieces I prob­a­bly should have used my camp axe on, but decid­ed to try to baton instead. With a lit­tle elbow grease on larg­er pieces of wood, kin­dling quick­ly fol­lowed. Fol­low­ing the kin­dling, I shaved down sev­er­al pieces I had just batoned for tin­der. Still did a great job.

Now, I have not done any whit­tling yet. It seems a big blade for that, but I will give that a try next time I am out camp­ing. We’ll see how accu­rate I can get try­ing to cre­ate notch­es in wood for a dead fall trap or some­thing like that. I am sure that is going to take some prac­tice.

The blade stays pret­ty sharp over­all, and this is a heavy duty piece of hard­ware.  I men­tioned to a bud­dy of mine that this was prob­a­bly going to be one of the last knives I buy for a long time.  I think that that may be the case after all…

So if you are look­ing for a SOLID knife and work tool, the Beck­er BK2 is one that I high­ly rec­om­mend.