Or FinnWolf? Finnwolf? It’s rendered inconsistently. I’m going to go with “Finn Wolf.”

Anyway, I have a lot of knives that are highly collectible, or drawer queens, or otherwise very fine. This isn’t one of those. Here it is.

It’s a lockback folder with a composite body. What’s so weird about that? (It’s not that Cold Steel calls the material “Griv-Ex,” either, because they have a dumb name for everything. The handles are just glass filled nylon.)

Well, here’s what the blade profile looks like:

The Finn Hawk is one of the very few folders in the world with a Scandi grind. That is, one single angle all the way down to the edge. No secondary bevel at all, just this wedge. It’s like a tiny axe.

This knife is a collaboration with designer Andrew Demko, but despite the usual connotations this sort of thing carries, it’s about as collectible as dirt. Cold Steel tries to MSRP this at $65, but it’s still in production and thick on the ground; you can buy them all day long at the time of writing for about $35 in various colors. Mine is the OD Green model.

The Finn Wolf is a mid-large sized knife, about 8" long when open and 4-1/2" closed. It’s a reasonably svelte 98 grams (3.46 ounces) so not too tough to carry. The blade is a full 0.125" thick, 1/8" of an inch, and I do mean full. The Scandi grind to the edge has quite a lot of thickness of metal most of the way down, so the entire thing is rather stout for a folder. The “Finnish Pukko” inspired design leaves a prominent horn at the tail end when it’s open, and a lot of the difference in open vs. closed length is all in the pivot, with the lockback mechanism. Which, as is tradition, Cold Steel has gone and named, and calls the “Tri-Ad Lock.” It’s just an ordinary lockback, guys. Chill.

The blade is made of AUS-8A and as usual Cold Steel makes a lot of noise about “cryogenic tempering” to go along with its “zero grind,” and whatever the hell else. I haven’t whacked the thing with a diamond punch or anything, but I suspect just from the feel of using it that the temper is rather soft and springy, favoring toughness over hardness. Which is probably a good thing for a knife that’s bound to be bashed.

Opening is provided by a pair of ambidextrous thumb studs. One of them is slotted for removal. Getting the studs out is required for a full sharpening job, if you’re game for such a thing, because the edge angle otherwise intersects with the tops of them. To assist in this I cut another slot in the other, originally un-slotted stud.

Where the Finn Wolf really excels is in being a knockaround outdoorsy-bushcrafty work knife, but unlike most examples in that field (or perhaps woods) it’s actually a folder. So ordinary people can carry it in ordinary situations without looking like Joonatan The Lumberjack And His Fuck Off Massive Cleaver.

The clip is reversible but it’s nothing fancy, and tip up is the only option.

Due to the low price and robust blade geometry, it’s not only possible but downright appealing to use this knife for things that you might normally hesitate to inflict on an ordinary folding pocketknife. Like carving, or batoning firewood. The fat edge profile does present a bit of a downside for slicing and, say, food prep. But it still works in a broad sense, and if you had to be dropped in the middle of the woods with the stipulation that you’ll only have one knife, you could do a lot worse than bringing this one.

And again, with the rough-and-ready design and trifling price tag, you can do immensely disrespectful things to this knife like “sharpen” it on a bench grinder mounted polishing wheel, and “hone” it with a scrap of cardboard drizzled with Flitz. You could also sharpen it in the traditional Scandi way, by laying the entire flat bevel on a whetstone and having at it. That requires some dedication, a commitment to forever marring the factory finish, and really does need you to remove the thumb studs. But fortunately, it’s very rarely necessary because even when “dull” in a traditional sense the wedge profile of the blade can still be made to cut things efficaciously. Provided only you don’t care how clean the two halves of whatever it was turn out.

The Finn Wolf, then, is kind of the folder that could be a fixed blade.

But wait! There’s a bonus feature:

There is a fixed blade version, the Finn Hawk. The Hawk is very similar in aesthetics and design to the Wolf, but with a 4116 semistainless blade rather than AUS-8 which is even tougher. The Finn Hawk is my go-to recommendation for people who are about to buy a Morakniv and are looking for an alternative, because it’s definitely riffing on the same groove.

With that comparison made it’s easy to see where the Finn Wolf is coming from. It’s basically one of those, but folding, and small enough to use as an EDC.

The Inevitable Conclusion

In this feature, our focus on novelty means I tend talk about a lot of knives that are weird, whacked, impractical, or otherwise just bad. The Finn Wolf is in none of those categories. It’s definitely novel, but it’s also a knife I really do recommend.