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| Courtesy SMKW |
For the past six months, I’ve been looking for the perfect workplace Barlow. It’s replacing a no name Barlow I bought when I was ten. The knives were competing with nostalgia and that’s a tough benchmark.
I bought ten knives, from Rough Ryder, Case, Bear & Sons, and Rosecraft. Almost all of them were good, some great, but none of them were quite right. Then came the Bluegill, I ordered it before they even had a picture of it up, so my expectations were vague. On initial inspection, I was thrilled, this was my perfect work Barlow.
Was it the best Barlow I had purchased, objectively speaking? No, that honor would go to the Rosecraft and the Rough Ryder Reserve. Did it look the most like the one I had as a kid? No, that would be of the sawcut bone variety, which I haven’t gotten yet.
But it was a perfect Rough Ryder Barlow, great pull, nail nicks facing opposite directions (a must on Rough Ryders), and great looking green, thick, jigged bone handle slabs (I don’t know what to call that kind of jigging but I think of it as “rustic”), and two, not one, but two blades. I use the pen blade a lot at work. The construction was solid.
The theme didn’t hurt. Back in the day, we kids would sneak up to a local pond, teeming with bluegill, and see if we could catch any. We caught quite a few, before the owners found us there and kicked us out. It usually took them a week or two. The pond was overstocked and we didn’t know how to filet, so eating those little fish was more like picking crabs, but we had fun.
Practically speaking I haven’t used the knife much, it’s brand new. But I did use it to cut up a ham steak. It was a thick steak made by Frick’s. I cut it into 8 strips and made 8 cubes from each, it was smooth sailing, all slicing, no sawing. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the clip point blade cut off the rind, sticking very close with the loss of very little meat. My dogs were a little disappointed. Performance-wise, it cut better than my paring knives (Victorinox, Opinel), but not quite as good as my D2 RR Reserve Barlow, which goes through meat like a lightsaber.
The knife’s specs (RR2632) are classic Barlow, 3 3/8” long, 440 Stainless steel blades, etc. If I could only have one knife, well, it would be of the Swiss Army variety, but if I could only own two knives, my second choice would be a Barlow, a Bluegill Barlow.
