Bark River Bravo 1, Is it A2?

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Good evening everyone and welcome back to the Suburban Pathfinder. First of all, I would like to thank all of you for your overwhelming response to my last couple of videos. Not huge by the standards of a larger channel, but much much better than any of my previous videos have performed. So, again, for that, I thank you. Tonight, we are going to be taking a look once more at the Bark River Bravo 1, and I have a very specific reason for doing that. Now, I do own many other knives. I've got several of them sitting on my desk right now, and there too many more to count. My wife would probably tell you I own too many knives.

[00:00:43]Now, hopefully, this will be the last Bark River Bravo 1 specific video for a little while, but I did have a couple of questions on my last video, and I wanted to show you that the knife is no longer in absolutely brand new condition.

[00:00:59]I did start off by wet forming the sheath. I was talking in the last video about how many people absolutely hate these pouch type sheaths that the Bark River Bravo 1 comes with. I think after wet forming, it came out very nice. Uh we've got nice retention.

[00:01:19]The knife locks back in nicely and is held in place. And after it was fully dried, I applied a nice coat of Obenauf's uh heavy-duty leather preservative. This is my favorite uh waterproofing compound. It's mostly made from beeswax and other natural oils, and it gave it this nice dark finish. And you can see in wet forming the sheath, the sheath took the the form of the knife very nicely. It looks good, and it's holding up well. The generally accepted method after soaking your sheath and softening it up a little bit is to wrap your knife's blade in Saran Wrap or some other sort of clingy material to prevent water getting to the blade and rusting it. Um sometimes I'm more diligent than others.

[00:02:13]One of the things you want to do is to tape the cutting edge of the blade with like blue painter's tape before putting the Saran Wrap on. I did not do that this time, and as a result, this very sharp edge on the knife ended up poking a hole in the end of the Saran Wrap, and I got some light rust on the tip of the knife while it was sitting in the wet sheath overnight.

[00:02:39]And so, I pulled it out in the morning, and I noticed that little bit of rust, and I thought, "Well, it's no big deal.

[00:02:44]I can clean that off. It's just patina."

[00:02:47]So, I decided to just take the Saran Wrap off, reinsert the knife into the slightly damp sheath, and it would just get a haze of rust over the entire blade, and at least I'd have a nice even patina.

[00:03:01]And I did that, and it worked fairly well.

[00:03:05]It did rust fairly evenly, although there's some water spotting here, more so on the logo side of the blade, and less so over here on the off side. Then, I applied some oil, and I buffed the whole thing off with quadruple aught steel wool, and it's got a nice smooth, shiny finish. None of the rusting was significant enough to pit in any uh meaningful way, and we've got a bit of a patina on here. And lastly, I thought the the finish on the green canvas micarta handles was just a bit too shiny. I didn't want a matte finish, but I also um didn't want it to be quite as shiny as it was. So, I did some work on this with uh some steel wool, and then a little bit of polishing compound, and gave it a little bit softer polish, but the knife is now pretty much exactly how I want it to be to start actually working with it.

[00:04:07]And again, I haven't really started cutting anything with this, but so far, I'm quite happy with the knife. If anything, I would say that the acid etch that they did to put the Bark River logo on here was a little pale even as it came out of the box. And after inducing some rust on the blade, and then cleaning it off with oil and steel wool and a little bit of Simichrome polish, it's gotten even paler. You can barely see the etching on there now, but I don't really care. It's going to be gone completely eventually, so what difference does it make? But of course, the biggest question about Bark River knives now and going forward is the confession by Mike Stewart that he substituted cheap Chinese stainless steel for a lot of what were supposed to be in some cases really premium super steels, and even in the case of something as pedestrian as A2, the question remains. Now, as far as I know, there's been no allegation that Bark River substituted anything else for A2, but I had a question from a viewer last night saying that he had purchased I bought this one from Knives Ship Free.

[00:05:33]He had purchased a Bravo 1 at the exact same time from DLT, and he expressed that he was completely satisfied with the workmanship of the knife, but he was and and his knife was supposed to be A2 as well, but he was questioning whether or not it was in fact A2 because he tried to force a patina using vinegar and was unable to do so. He seems pretty convinced that his knife is in fact not A2, but rather some sort of stainless steel.

[00:06:04]So, I've already gotten some rust on this blade. I generally don't even wrap stainless blades in Saran Wrap or anything like that because most stainless steels will not rust even when you're wet forming a sheath. I know it's not recommended, and I know that almost any stainless steel can rust, but it generally won't. I've had a few that did get some slight rust on them, but never to this extent. This is pretty clearly carbon steel. That doesn't prove that it's A2, but it does prove that it's not 8Cr13MoV, for instance, uh cuz 8Cr13MoV will not rust when you're wet forming a sheath. It's got way too much chromium and maybe nickel in it. It's a properly stainless steel. So, but I thought, seeing as how I've already um gotten a little rust on it, I wouldn't exactly call this a forced patina, more like a careless or lazy patina, but I accidentally and then sort of intentionally got some rust on the blade already. Maybe I should test this out.

[00:07:11]Now, I've got some really hardcore vinegar here. It's like industrial strength vinegar. Um this stuff, if you get a drop of it on your tongue, it'll curl your toenails.

[00:07:21]Um this stuff, if you get a drop of it on your tongue, it'll curl your toenails.

[00:07:26]But I thought that might be a bit extreme, and I don't know that it would really prove anything cuz it's it's quite acidic. So, instead, I went to the lunchroom, into the refrigerator, and I got out a couple of bottles of mustard. We've got pretty much standard yellow hot dog mustard here, and we've got some spicy brown mustard. As I'm sure you all know, mustard has a lot of vinegar in it. And the nice thing about using mustard to force a patina on the blade is uh mustard is essentially a paste, and it'll generally stay put where you put it. If you use vinegar, there's different tricks. You can soak a paper towel in vinegar and wrap that around the blade or something like that. But this stuff, you can just put a little patch on the blade and let it sit for a while. I generally like to give it about an hour, and then rinse it off, and you should have a bit of a patina if you don't have a stainless steel blade. So, as we've already determined, this is not a stainless steel blade, but I just thought it'd be fun. There's a couple of spots on the blade right here where it didn't rust at all. And on the off side of the blade, there's some spots where there's very little rust.

[00:08:42]So, I'm going to put a patch of yellow mustard on one side of the blade and a patch of the spicy brown on the other side, and we'll let it sit for about 45 minutes or an hour, and we'll see what happens.

[00:08:56]>> [sighs] >> So, as you can see, we've got our Bravo 1 here. There's And I I wiped down the blade with acetone to remove any residual oil from when I cleaned off the last of the rust spots, and you can see there are a few rust spots on that side.

[00:09:13]This side didn't get rusted quite as badly, although there was a bit of rust here.

[00:09:18]So, we're developing a bit of a patina.

[00:09:21]And I did shake up the mustard cuz as you we all know, you've got to shake your mustard so you don't get nasty mustard juice on your hot dog. And we're going to put a little bit of the yellow mustard right there in that shiny patch.

[00:09:40]And now, we will put a little brown mustard over here somewhere.

[00:09:47]Let's see.

[00:09:49]This area looks fairly shiny.

[00:09:53]Oh. Oh.

[00:10:01]>> Oh my, we had a bit of a mustard explosion there, but we'll put a little spicy brown mustard on like that. That should be good, and then we'll let it sit for 45 minutes or an hour and see what our results are.

[00:10:17]All right, so it's been about 35 minutes. I'm running short on time. I don't have an hour to spare, but this should have had a chance to do Oh, it looks like it's doing something under there.

[00:10:32]The brown brown mustard Oh, certainly the yellow mustard is as well. I'm going to go rinse these blobs of mustard off and we'll take a look at what the results are. I don't know what they'll tell us, but we'll see. It definitely looks like there's some patina going on here though. So, there you have it. The mustard definitely reacted with the steel. It seems like actually the yellow hot dog mustard reacted a bit more than the spicy brown mustard did.

[00:11:03]I imagine if I would have left this on longer, it is darkened slightly in the middle. It mostly darkened at the edges of the blob. I think that's where the most oxygen was able to get to it. If you wanted to get a nice even patina over the entire blade, probably spread it thin, like really thin, where you'd get a better contact with air, but I don't know if this proves anything. It doesn't prove that the knife is made from A2, although the etching does say right here that it's A2. Is it A2? I don't know, but it's not 8Cr13MoV. It's not some kind of cheap Chinese kitchen knife steel because those, for all of their other flaws, do not react when you leave some mustard on the blade for half an hour.

[00:11:54]So, I don't know what this experiment tells us other than the fact that this is definitely not made out of some kind of high chrome cheap Chinese stainless steel. One thing it tells you is that I'm not going to be keeping this as some pristine collection piece. I plan on using this knife. It's going to get a lot worse than some mustard stains over time.

[00:12:18]I'm definitely going to be using this this year. I'm going to place a heavy emphasis on it. I'm going to be taking it to camp.

[00:12:25]Um not sure if I'm going to take it to South Africa next month. Everything I take to South Africa has a nasty habit of not coming back to the United States. So, if I want to do a long-term test of this knife, I'm a little bit uh leery about taking it to South Africa. Not that things get stolen or lost or broken.

[00:12:48]Uh I just have a tendency not to take enough gifts with me and I end up giving stuff away, even stuff that I didn't really take with the intention of giving them away. I'm always a little bit leery about that. The last time I went to South Africa, I took as my main knife a Cold Steel SRK.

[00:13:08]Um this one belonged to my dad.

[00:13:12]You can see it's well used. He gave it to me after I came back from South Africa last time because I gave the SRK that I took with me to somebody. That one was in SK5. This one's in VG-10 San Mai. This one's a little bit more expensive, but it's still just an SRK. And I have no intention of putting all of my eggs in the Bark River basket. Uh so, I'll be taking it with me most of the places I go outdoors, but I'll always have some sort of a backup. This speculation does actually beg a question. If you've made it this far into the video, perhaps you'd like to weigh in. What knife should I take with me to South Africa?

[00:13:54]I'm going to be in a very remote place uh for 3 weeks and we'll be doing a lot of hunting and camping and trekking around in the desert, so I want to have something reliable with me. I could take my dad's SRK with me, and if it doesn't make it home, that would actually give me a good excuse to buy one of the newish Recon Scouts in 52100.

[00:14:21]I could take something like my SE4.

[00:14:24]This one I've had a couple of years and I've actually used it a bit, mostly for just camp chores. As you can see, it's still in excellent condition. I haven't been batoning firewood or anything with this. I've mostly just been slicing up vegetables, food prep, other things around camp. I haven't had the heart to start beating on it yet, but this one needs a good beating.

[00:14:51]Or I could go the super cheap route and take something that I know I can count on, but which could be very easily replaced when I come home.

[00:15:03]Something like the Mora Knife Companion Robust. This one has the 3 and 1/2 mm blade. I believe that's 3 and 1/2 mm made out of Sandvik 12C27 stainless steel.

[00:15:18]Super tough, um very good quality, but cheap and easy to replace. So, that's another possibility. Of the knives I have right now that I would trust to take into a wilderness environment, uh and barring the Bravo One, I would say it would be one of these. So, if you have an opinion, please weigh in.

[00:15:42]I'm liking the idea of having an excuse to buy the Recon Scout when I come back though. So, maybe I'll just take the SRK again. I've had over the years, I don't know, five or six different SRKs in various different configurations.

[00:16:00]I had the original in Carbon V, made in the United States. I bought it in the early '90s when I was still on active duty.

[00:16:09]That one circumnavigated the globe with me and was in uh combat environments and other sketchy places. I don't know what happened to that one. I probably gave it away.

[00:16:20]Uh then I had one in AUS-8, which was maybe made in Taiwan or maybe made in Japan. I'm not sure if they ever made them in Japan. That one was probably also given away or maybe lost. Then I had one in SK5, which was made in Taiwan, and as I just said, I left that with somebody on my last trip to South Africa, and my dad gave me his. This is made in Taiwan, but again, it's made from VG-10 San Mai.

[00:16:50]It's a little bit nicer, a little bit more expensive.

[00:16:53]I've trusted these knives for many, many years and um yeah, I'll probably just take this to South Africa and then I can [snorts] buy the Recon Scout when I come back. Uh when I do that, I will certainly talk about it on video. Then when I post it here, I hope to see each of you here then. Later, guys.