Kalguard finish, how does it wear?

UnixDork

UnixDork

Joined
Dec 2, 2001
Messages
453
Does the Kalguard finish on the one-piece knives wear well after hard use? Does it come off like paint or just continue to get thinner like a parkerized or blued finish? I wonder because my new CR knife will be used for food prep while backpacking, and I want to know before I end up eating a lot of "Kalguard" whatever that is. I wonder if Kalguard is safe to eat in very small quantities like what you would get from it wearing off the blade when cutting meat. Has anyone tried to remove the finish from one of the Chris Reeve one-piece knives? I've used Zip Strip before on a Cold Steel knife to take the black coating off the blade after it looked like hell from hard use.

thanks for any help,
harry

ps- I saw pretty quickly why Cold Steel likes to use the black coating, it covers up the fact that they don't do any finish work on the blades. There were deep nasty milling marks where the flats had been ground.
 
It wears very slowly unless you start using it on mediums that are very abrasive like dirt/sand/brick. As coatings go its very good indeed: tough, protective and easy to wipe clean. Don't remove it.

After heavy use over years, my blades have gained no more than character like a favourite coat or pair of boots. Every scratch tells a story. You should still do normal maintenance by wiping down the blade with an oily rag and not just leave it within the festering, steaming, mud splattered pile of honking kit :D

One day I'll get around to having mine fully overhauled back at Chris Reeve's base camp.

The coating is so good it is boring.
 
I would say it is a medium or hard coating compared to others on the market. My wife use to work part time for The DNR(Department of Natural Resources), checking deer for age during the hunting season. She used a CR Aviator. To check the deers age she would have to pry the mouth open and then cut the jaw line back the see the teeth, which in turn tells the age. After a season of scraping teeth and bone, the knife was pretty beat up. I had to send the knife back to Chris for a touch up. They recoated and sharpend it. You could never even tell it had been used. At one point before sending the knife back, I dropped it point first on the cement. It too had to be reground. Knife is like new. She still uses it, but only for dressing and cleaning game. I personally would like to maybe see another type of coating used, such as the new Boron Carbide. But for normal everyday use the Kalgard is a pretty good finish.:)

RW
 
I started this thread before my new Project 1 arrived. I went out to the woods yesterday, and hacked a few downed logs just to see what would happen. I was happily surprised to see the finish wasn't apparently affected at all. One of the logs was pretty rotten, but the other's weren't after I chopped about an inch or so off the outside.

I expect the finish to last quite a long time, as I'll use the knife mainly as a camp knife. I'm sure it would make a fine survival knife, but hopefully I'll never need it for that. I'm seriously considering the suggestion that I saw on these forums that the best use of a hollow handled knife is to store a shot of whiskey!
 
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