Mora Knives

The best bang for your buck in a survival knife is any one of the variations of the Swedish Mora. I have several floating around here, including two carbon steel Mora Clippers that I got from Amazon last week. One of them was bought specifically for use in the kitchen, while the other one is for garden and field use.

This pic shows one of the Mora Clippers along with my Cloudberry Market puukko that has become my primary field knife.

Both knives came with right handed sheaths. Since I’m a lefty, I made a new sheath for the puukko, and modded the Mora sheath. To do so, I used a Dremel cutoff wheel to remove the belt loop, then made a new loop on the other side of the sheath with a piece of nylon webbing, and secured it to the plastic sheath with Gorilla tape.

The two new Moras came shaving sharp. So far I’ve used one to cut up peppers in the kitchen, and the one shown above for cutting up a bunch of over ripe cauliflower that went into my compost bin. The cauliflower is responsible for the discoloration. Something in it immediately caused some oxidation, but the edge was unaffected.

It’s been my experience while camping and (back in the 80s) being involved in SAR missions that you can handle most of your cutting needs in temperate climes with a knife about this size. It’s no chopper, but if you need to chop things you’re much better off with an axe or hatchet, and a small folding saw is better yet.

Is a Mora the be-all, end-all survival knife? No. Something like my puukko is better made and has a slightly thicker, stronger blade. That said, the Mora Clippers currently sell for $13.92 on Amazon Prime. At that price you can afford to acquire multiples and stash them all over.

Aside from Amazon, another great source of the Mora knives, as well as some much nicer Nordic cutlery, is Ragnar’s Ragweed Forge. I’ve ordered other Moras and a nice puukko from Ragnar and always had a smooth transaction with quick delivery.

Built a Compost Bin

This afternoon my 9 year old daughter gave me a hand and we made this compost bin. Most of the wood was salvaged from a friend’s old deck that he had torn down, although I did have to buy a couple of 1x3s to finish the job.

It’s about 50” wide, 3’ high, and 2’ front-to-back. The sides are surrounded by hardware cloth (1/2” galvanized steel mesh). I plan to add a hinged door to the front right, but ran out of time today.

We added 3 bags of leaves that were mulched by going through my Toro leaf blower/vac, and some of the vegetable scraps from tonight’s dinner prep.

I’m hoping we get some good compost out of it for next year’s garden. My girls really want to do a garden next year, so that should help motivate me. The soil in my yard is hard packed clay, so I’m planning on building raised beds and filling them with good topsoil.