Kizlyar "NSK Sterkh" folder
May 31, 2012 1:41:21 GMT
Post by MOK on May 31, 2012 1:41:21 GMT
Introduction
For the last ten years or so, I've carried around a cheap no-brand Chinese folder. It served me well and was surprisingly tough for what it was, but some weeks ago the lock finally broke, prompting me to look for a new pocket knife. To that end, I picked up a Böker Field Mouse... and some impulse buys while I was at it, naturally, one of which we'll talk about here: the Kizlyar NSK Sterkh.
Kizlyar Knives is a company based in the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, Russia, that began producing high-quality hunting and military knives in the early '90s; they have since branched out to fancy art knives under the trade name North Crown (or Nord Crown), but their main business remains in dead serious tools and weapons. Their products have quickly become famous for being popular with the Russian Special Forces, a notoriously no-nonsense bunch who know a damn good knife when they stab you with one.
I ordered the Sterkh along with two other knives from Lamnia.fi, a Finnish webstore, and they arrived just three days later in a somewhat oversize cardboard box packed to the brim with bubble wrap. The whole transaction was very prompt and professional, as always.
Full Disclosure
I'm no authority of any sort when it comes to knives, but like most others have used them as everyday tools for most of my life, and have some informal training in knife fighting. My only connection to Kizlyar or Lamnia.fi is buying their stuff.
Initial Impressions
My very first thought: "This is a knife."
The Sterkh is big and heavy for a folder. It's not the kind of knife you just carry in your pocket whenever, all casual; this is what you pack when you know you're going to need a serious knife. Or maybe you're simply the type who never knows when you'll have to cut down a tree or fend off a herd of ravening moose, like the Russian soldiers who use these knives.
At any rate, this is what you want when you want more knife than you'd typically get in a folding knife.
The mechanism feels very nice, smooth as silk and rock solid. There's a soft but reassuringly firm clack when the liner lock snaps into place, rather than the sharp little shnick you get from most folders, simply because the parts that make the noise are audibly bigger and sturdier. And just look at that blade! I love the profile, it's broad and has a deep belly, but the point is still menacingly acute.
Statistics
Length closed: 130mm
Length open: 235mm
Blade length: 105mm
Blade width: 29mm
Blade thickness: 3.7mm
Weight: 178g
(My new calipers don't feature crazy Moon units, so it's just metric for now. I'm sure you can do the math if needed.)
Note that there appears to be some individual variation, and possibly several unlabeled versions. Kizlyar says the blade thickness is 2.7mm, some online retailers say 3.4mm, and my calipers say 3.7mm measured at the base right before the peg. Believe who you want.
Components
The grips are made of two thick slabs of Caucasian walnut. The wood is rather attractive, in a plain no-frills way, and feels really good to the bare hand. The handle is quite large, too, large enough to give a secure and comfortable grip even if you have very big hands or are wearing gloves, no matter which way you hold it.
The blade is Russian 65x13 stainless steel, flawlessly mirror polished and separated from the frame with teflon spacers. It's flat ground all the way from the spine, but apparently there's some variation between specific versions of this knife, as I've also seen Sterkhs where the bevel only takes up half the blade. I must say, on purely aesthetic grounds, I prefer mine by far.
The secondary bevel that forms the cutting edge is clean and even on both sides of the blade, and the edge itself paper-cutting sharp. The markings on the blade, "Sterkh" and the Kizlyar logo on one side and "Kizlyar" and "(something something) Russia" on the other, all in Cyrillic script, are neat and unobtrusive.
One thing I would want to change is the thumb peg you push on to open the blade, specifically its absence on one side of the blade. You'd expect a military knife to be ambidextrous, but this seriously isn't. There's simply no way to open the Sterkh with the left hand alone. (That said, it looks like the peg might be screwed on, in which case you can just unscrew it and switch sides. I don't currently have the tools nor the nerve to try.)
The frame has a rougher finish than the blade, especially the insides of the liners. Personally I don't mind, I think it contrasts nicely with the shiny blade. The rougher surface on the liner might also give a slightly better grip when disengaging the lock, as if you needed more grip with that massive cut-out. This is how a liner lock should be done! On many folders the liner simply isn't exposed enough, which makes closing the blade needlessly finicky; no such problem here, gloves or no gloves.
By the way, I really must commend the craftsmanship on this knife. Everything is neat and tidy and fits snugly together. Nothing moves at all but the blade, which won't move sideways, not a fraction of a millimeter, whether its open or closed or anywhere in between - that's rare, I tell you. All the parts are flush with eachother, everything's straight and the blade exactly aligned and centered on the frame. The overall finish is very nearly flawless, and I can say with no exaggeration that the construction feels more solid than some fixed blade knives I've had. That's quality.
Handling Characteristics
Put short, damn this feels good!
First of all, it's big. The handle is thick enough to comfortably fill your hand, and has ample room for any kind of grip you could possibly want to use, no matter how big your hands are. The thumb peg and the liner cut-out are both sized for easy operation even with gloves (and/or thick butterfingers).
The knife is balanced at a point just behind the liner lock cut-out when open. If you grab the butt end of the handle - there's room for that, trust me - this places the balance right at your index finger. If you move slightly forward, you can lock the same finger in that cut-out for a very secure grip. The handle is slightly barrel-shaped, narrower near the ends and wider in the middle, but the shape is subtle enough you can grasp it any way you want, unlike many knives with more aggressive ergonomics that hug your hand closely but also force you into a specific grip whether you like it or not.
All I can say about performance is that I cut and stabbed through heavy leather, wood, cardboard, a couple of plastic soda bottles and several lengths of 1" hemp rope with ease, and none of it marred the blade in any way. I would expect the user's strength to be a far more relevant limitation on most tasks than any inherent quality of the knife.
Conclusions
I love the Sterkh. Plain and simple. It has and is everything I would want in a full-size utility knife, let alone a folder. I won't be carrying it in my pocket, it's really too big for that, but it will have permanent lodging in my satchel. At around 50€ or less, it's also surprisingly inexpensive. I would honestly think it more than worth the money at twice the price. Based on this and the KO-2, I'm pretty damn confident I'll be satisfied with any further knives I might buy from Kizlyar, too. (Oh, who am I kidding - will buy, damnit. I already have my mind set on two in particular. There goes my overtime bonus...)
Pros
- Big and beefy
- Solid as a rock
- Great handling
- Rugged good looks
Cons
- Too large for an EDC pocket knife
- Opening mechanism is strictly right-handed
The Bottom Line
If you want the strength and reliability of a fixed blade knife in a package the size of a large folder, the Kizlyar NSK Sterkh is the knife for you. All around best folding knife I've ever handled, bar none - and better than many fixed blades, at that.
For the last ten years or so, I've carried around a cheap no-brand Chinese folder. It served me well and was surprisingly tough for what it was, but some weeks ago the lock finally broke, prompting me to look for a new pocket knife. To that end, I picked up a Böker Field Mouse... and some impulse buys while I was at it, naturally, one of which we'll talk about here: the Kizlyar NSK Sterkh.
Kizlyar Knives is a company based in the town of Kizlyar in Dagestan, Russia, that began producing high-quality hunting and military knives in the early '90s; they have since branched out to fancy art knives under the trade name North Crown (or Nord Crown), but their main business remains in dead serious tools and weapons. Their products have quickly become famous for being popular with the Russian Special Forces, a notoriously no-nonsense bunch who know a damn good knife when they stab you with one.
I ordered the Sterkh along with two other knives from Lamnia.fi, a Finnish webstore, and they arrived just three days later in a somewhat oversize cardboard box packed to the brim with bubble wrap. The whole transaction was very prompt and professional, as always.
Full Disclosure
I'm no authority of any sort when it comes to knives, but like most others have used them as everyday tools for most of my life, and have some informal training in knife fighting. My only connection to Kizlyar or Lamnia.fi is buying their stuff.
Initial Impressions
My very first thought: "This is a knife."
The Sterkh is big and heavy for a folder. It's not the kind of knife you just carry in your pocket whenever, all casual; this is what you pack when you know you're going to need a serious knife. Or maybe you're simply the type who never knows when you'll have to cut down a tree or fend off a herd of ravening moose, like the Russian soldiers who use these knives.
At any rate, this is what you want when you want more knife than you'd typically get in a folding knife.
The mechanism feels very nice, smooth as silk and rock solid. There's a soft but reassuringly firm clack when the liner lock snaps into place, rather than the sharp little shnick you get from most folders, simply because the parts that make the noise are audibly bigger and sturdier. And just look at that blade! I love the profile, it's broad and has a deep belly, but the point is still menacingly acute.
Statistics
Length closed: 130mm
Length open: 235mm
Blade length: 105mm
Blade width: 29mm
Blade thickness: 3.7mm
Weight: 178g
(My new calipers don't feature crazy Moon units, so it's just metric for now. I'm sure you can do the math if needed.)
Note that there appears to be some individual variation, and possibly several unlabeled versions. Kizlyar says the blade thickness is 2.7mm, some online retailers say 3.4mm, and my calipers say 3.7mm measured at the base right before the peg. Believe who you want.
Components
The grips are made of two thick slabs of Caucasian walnut. The wood is rather attractive, in a plain no-frills way, and feels really good to the bare hand. The handle is quite large, too, large enough to give a secure and comfortable grip even if you have very big hands or are wearing gloves, no matter which way you hold it.
The blade is Russian 65x13 stainless steel, flawlessly mirror polished and separated from the frame with teflon spacers. It's flat ground all the way from the spine, but apparently there's some variation between specific versions of this knife, as I've also seen Sterkhs where the bevel only takes up half the blade. I must say, on purely aesthetic grounds, I prefer mine by far.
The secondary bevel that forms the cutting edge is clean and even on both sides of the blade, and the edge itself paper-cutting sharp. The markings on the blade, "Sterkh" and the Kizlyar logo on one side and "Kizlyar" and "(something something) Russia" on the other, all in Cyrillic script, are neat and unobtrusive.
One thing I would want to change is the thumb peg you push on to open the blade, specifically its absence on one side of the blade. You'd expect a military knife to be ambidextrous, but this seriously isn't. There's simply no way to open the Sterkh with the left hand alone. (That said, it looks like the peg might be screwed on, in which case you can just unscrew it and switch sides. I don't currently have the tools nor the nerve to try.)
The frame has a rougher finish than the blade, especially the insides of the liners. Personally I don't mind, I think it contrasts nicely with the shiny blade. The rougher surface on the liner might also give a slightly better grip when disengaging the lock, as if you needed more grip with that massive cut-out. This is how a liner lock should be done! On many folders the liner simply isn't exposed enough, which makes closing the blade needlessly finicky; no such problem here, gloves or no gloves.
By the way, I really must commend the craftsmanship on this knife. Everything is neat and tidy and fits snugly together. Nothing moves at all but the blade, which won't move sideways, not a fraction of a millimeter, whether its open or closed or anywhere in between - that's rare, I tell you. All the parts are flush with eachother, everything's straight and the blade exactly aligned and centered on the frame. The overall finish is very nearly flawless, and I can say with no exaggeration that the construction feels more solid than some fixed blade knives I've had. That's quality.
Handling Characteristics
Put short, damn this feels good!
First of all, it's big. The handle is thick enough to comfortably fill your hand, and has ample room for any kind of grip you could possibly want to use, no matter how big your hands are. The thumb peg and the liner cut-out are both sized for easy operation even with gloves (and/or thick butterfingers).
The knife is balanced at a point just behind the liner lock cut-out when open. If you grab the butt end of the handle - there's room for that, trust me - this places the balance right at your index finger. If you move slightly forward, you can lock the same finger in that cut-out for a very secure grip. The handle is slightly barrel-shaped, narrower near the ends and wider in the middle, but the shape is subtle enough you can grasp it any way you want, unlike many knives with more aggressive ergonomics that hug your hand closely but also force you into a specific grip whether you like it or not.
All I can say about performance is that I cut and stabbed through heavy leather, wood, cardboard, a couple of plastic soda bottles and several lengths of 1" hemp rope with ease, and none of it marred the blade in any way. I would expect the user's strength to be a far more relevant limitation on most tasks than any inherent quality of the knife.
Conclusions
I love the Sterkh. Plain and simple. It has and is everything I would want in a full-size utility knife, let alone a folder. I won't be carrying it in my pocket, it's really too big for that, but it will have permanent lodging in my satchel. At around 50€ or less, it's also surprisingly inexpensive. I would honestly think it more than worth the money at twice the price. Based on this and the KO-2, I'm pretty damn confident I'll be satisfied with any further knives I might buy from Kizlyar, too. (Oh, who am I kidding - will buy, damnit. I already have my mind set on two in particular. There goes my overtime bonus...)
Pros
- Big and beefy
- Solid as a rock
- Great handling
- Rugged good looks
Cons
- Too large for an EDC pocket knife
- Opening mechanism is strictly right-handed
The Bottom Line
If you want the strength and reliability of a fixed blade knife in a package the size of a large folder, the Kizlyar NSK Sterkh is the knife for you. All around best folding knife I've ever handled, bar none - and better than many fixed blades, at that.