Pros: Weight, None
Cons: Handle Material, Blade Sharpness, Overall Quality
You better know how to sharpen a knife...
So first off. This knife has a pointed sharp POINT, but the edge wouldn't cut butter. It would make a pretty debilitating stab wound but the real fighting knives were razor sharp edged as well. FS fighting technique wasn't all stabbing. In fact some folks would actually blunt the tip down because it had a bad tendency to stick into bone and be fairly hard to remove. After a great deal of work on my WickedEdge Pro II it's hair splitting sharp but it was a freaking J O B.... the tip is not symetrical and will give you nightmares if you are looking to put a professional quality edge on it. But from my experience 99.9999% of the world has no clue what a real professional edge is, and will never see one. But if you know how to put one down, profile, set a bevel, sharpen, hone and strop, you can get this steel surgically sharp. Down side... it won't hold the edge long. Three test cuts on paper and it needed a touch up. Sooooo. Bottom line : if you are looking for a good wwii repro commando knife, the Boker V-42 beats it hands down. All day. Same price. If you absolutely GOTTA own a fairbairn sykes and don't have 500$ for a better repro... this will do with some elbow grease. Its a 69$ knife so its prices right. You get a well balanced fighting knife with a better than original sheath. The tabs on this sheath are leather originals used 1940's elastic, so even a good qualiy original is dry rotted and useless. The leather tabs on this sheath would allow for multiple uses if you were going to sew it into your pants and cut out the pocket liner old school style. Weight is a tad on the light side and the balance is just a smidge blade heavy so if you were to be a FS fighting style practitioner, keep looking, it's a bit awkward if you hand to hand toss... a hallmark fairbairn move to keep your target guessing which hand you would stab him from, so you toss it back and forth. That was FS fighting technique 101 and this knife will end up impaling your metatarsal day one. If you are wanting something to haul out of the safe once in a blue moon and impress your fiends with some wwii history, bingo. If I hadn't spent 4 hours on the wicked edge I might have sent it back. Final note... sheffield steel... I'm skeptical. It comes in no box, wrapped in a piece of oiled wax paper with a china sheath. So if this knife came from Sheffield it came via Xiang Ping. I'm not a metalurgist but I have plenty of Sheffield lathe tools chisels and this steel pales in comparison I could tell for sure if it wasn't painted black. At 69$ its not a rip off as long as you aren't expecting a KNIFE. Its pointy yes. Its more a spear. No cutting edge at all. Zero zip none.
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