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The Remington 2015 Bullet Knife, A Mini Review By Gary Zinn  Image courtesy of knifecenter.com The 2015 Remington Bullet Knife is a double benchmark. It is the tenth annual Bullet Knife produced by Bear and Son and it is the first produced under the new exclusive licensing contract between the two firms. The knife is based on the Remington Muskrat pattern #4466, from the 1920s. I bought one of these, both because of its double benchmark nature and because I wanted one in hand to examine and comment on for this article. Here are the specs for the base knife, which is designated as pattern R11000 (there are two other variations). Specifications
My knife has excellent fit and finish. The fit between handle scales, bolsters and liners is perfect. The only misfit I found is a hairline gap between the center cut and one of the back springs. Otherwise, the springs, liners and center cut match up exactly when the blades are closed. Considering all the opportunities for misalignment in the many parts of a slip joint knife, the one small gap that I found is trivial. The blades and bolsters are highly and evenly polished, showing only very faint, even polishing marks when they catch the light just so. The dyeing, jigging and finish on the handle scales is impeccable. In a mini review, I confine function evaluation to cycling the blades and checking the blade grind and factory sharpness. Concerning blade manipulation, my Bullet Knife's blades definitely move smoothly and seat crisply when opened or closed. One thing to note: the tangs are shaped so that the blades will "half stop" during cycling. (The blades are shown in the half stop position in the image above.) This was quite common on slip joint knives a half century or more ago, but is not often seen today. This is another aspect of the traditional character of this knife. The blades are hollow ground; honest, they are. The grind starts at the blade spine and is very shallow, so that it appears to be a flat grind until one checks closely. A larger angle edge grind is used to raise the cutting edge. The factory edge is good. I am sure that a bit of honing would make it even better, but this knife is destined to be a display diva, so I am not going to mess with it. I was pleasantly surprised by two subtle features of this knife. First, the image of the 2015 Bullet Knife shows "Remington" etched on the clip blade. However, there is no such graphic on the actual knife. I am totally good with this, for I do not prefer billboard art on my knife blades. In addition, I was not expecting the strength of statement made by the handle scales. The jigging is deeper and bolder than I am used to and this makes the handle both look and feel good. Plus, the dyed color of the bone is rich, without looking gaudy. During all but five years between 1982 and 2004, the Bullet Knives had a feature that I never liked. The handle scales were duPont Delrin plastic. It was colored and molded to mimic dyed, jigged bone, but it looked and felt like what it really was. To me, this downgraded the knives. In 2004, the Delrin handles were dropped in favor of genuine bone, which has been the standard material ever since. Much better! The 2015 Bullet Knife is a traditional styled pocket knife, well executed by the folks at Bear & Son. There are two additional variations of the 2015 Bullet Knife. R11001 is identical to the R11000 model, except it sports Damascus steel blades. Damascus steel is very expensive to produce, so this knife has a much higher MSRP of $270. R11002 wears genuine stag horn handle scales, but is otherwise identical to R11000; its MSRP is $145. It is noted in the Remington knife catalog that production of R11000 is limited to 5,000 units, R11001 to 500 units and R11002 to 1200 units. |