Rough Ryder – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

The knife du jour is the Rough Ryder 854, which is a gigondo folder that looked like something I couldn’t live without when I saw it on the Chicago Knife Works site. I’m hooked on the large folders, and at a price of $14, this thing seemed too good to ignore.

The Rough Ryder 854. No one has these in stock anymore. It’s a lot of knife at any price.

The problem, however, was that the design was defective, or the quality was terrible, or maybe it was both. It was a subtle defect, one that most folks wouldn’t notice until they stabbed themselves with the tip.

I first saw the knife online somewhere, and then I looked for it on Amazon. I hit paydirt and I used my Prime membership to skirt the shipping costs. Two days later it was at my front door. It looked beautiful, but the blade stopped a little bit short of the knife being fully closed. That’s not good, I realized. I tried squirting WD 40 and then adding oil to the knife’s pivot point, but the blade still stopped a bit short of being fully closed. Back it went to Amazon.

But I like the knife. It looked good and it felt good. So I called Chicago Knife Works and ordered the same knife from them. I called first, and asked if they would examine the knife before it shipped for the problem the first one had. Sure, they said. No problem. Chicago Knife Works is always slow in shipping, though, so I waited the obligatory four or five weeks before it arrived. But finally it did, and I was like a kid at Christmas time when it landed in my mailbox.

You can guess where this story is going. The new Rough Ryder had the same disease. It wasn’t as bad as the first knife, but the blade didn’t fully close. If I ran my finger along the knife handle’s edge, the blade tip still ran proud, and I still saw it could stab me if I wasn’t careful.

The red arrow on the left shows the area I relieved, thinking it would allow the blade to go further into the knife when folded. I was wrong. The red arrow on the right shows the knife’s liner lock, which prevents the blade from inadvertently closing after it has been opened.

The engineer in me took over. I examined the open blade profile and saw a bump stop. If I ground that down, I thought, the blade would more fully close. So I started grinding with my Dremel. That didn’t work. I ground some more of the blade stop off, and things didn’t improve. I examined the blade’s profile and the knife again, and I realized there was another stop of the blade (on the other side of its pivot point) that also controlled where the blade came to rest when the knife closed. But I couldn’t get to that one. Hmmm. Time for Plan B.

What’s weird (and what’s an ingrained character flaw) is that I was really stressing out over this $14 knife. I’ll do that sometimes, and this was one of those times. I’ve been a lot less annoyed at things that are a lot more expensive and aren’t perfect. I should have just returned the Rough Ryder. But I was fixated on fixing the thing. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders reference manual, it’s identified as Gresh’s Disease.

When thinking about potential fixes, I realized if I couldn’t get the blade to close any further, I could reprofile the blade to get rid of the tip, or, to be more accurate, to lower the blade’s profile so that the new tip would be below the knife’s scales when closed. So that’s what I did. The stone came out, I went to work, stroking the blade tip and checking how the blade closed every few strokes. Voilà, problem solved.

The blade tip lay above the scales when the knife was closed. I ground it down in the area indicated by the red arrow. Problem solved.

A band aid fix, to be sure, but sometimes band aids work.

In the meantime, good buddy and craftsman extraordinaire Pauly bought the same knife. The guy is lucky; his Rough Ryder 854 closed the way God intended it to, and it did not have the same problem mine had. But he didn’t stop there. What the knives needed (both his and mine) was a holster.

The Rough Ryder and the holster Paul made for me.

I’ve known Paul longer than I’ve known any living person on the planet. Literally. We were next door neighbors back in New Jersey when I was born. Paul has always been good at creating things, and it turns out that leatherworking is among his many talents. Paul created custom holsters for these knives, and they look and work as good as anything I’ve ever seen. What’s really cool is the holster takes advantage of the knife’s curves. The holster is formed to the knife’s coke bottle profile, which secures the large folder when it is in the holster. It’s a hell of a nice gift.

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By Joe Berk

You know I’m a knife nut. The collecting craze came to me late in life, and I’ve been making up for lost time. You also know that when you buy anything from any retailer, you’re deluged for life with an endless stream of emails pitching more products. Those emails work (at least they do on me), and sometimes they light a match that can’t be extinguished. That’s what happened here. An email floated in from an online knife retailer touting a sale, with a photo of a knife that that caught my attention.

So I clicked and the ad brought me to the online retailer’s website, but the knife wasn’t there. I spent a good half hour looking through hundreds of knives from that manufacturer (Rough Ryder) on the retailer’s site, and I couldn’t find the one in the ad above. I emailed the retailer asking about it, and didn’t get a response. I emailed the retailer again the next day and there still no response. On Day 3, I called the retailer. They apologized for not answering my emails and promised a response that day. They kept their word, but I didn’t like the answer: The knife was out of stock and they had no plans to order more. I also received an email from the man who owned the knife store. He apologized for the ad. That was a nice touch and it kept those guys on my “go to” list. But I still wanted the knife and they didn’t have it. Compounding the felony, the knife importer (Rough Ryder) didn’t have the knife shown above on their website, either.

I didn’t know anything about the knife, including its size or anything other than the fact that it was a folder and the scales were brown burlap Micarta. I Googled those terms and found the knife on Amazon! Woo hoo! I knew I had promised Susie I was done buying knives for a while, but you know how that goes. Add to cart, buy, etc. It arrived the next day.

Man, this is a big knife. Please, no jokes or questions about what I am compensating for. I just like these things and they are so inexpensive, I’m indulging whatever underlying cranial miswiring is fueling this collecting affliction. I sent a quick photo to Bowie-fabricating good buddy Paul, and he asked me how big it is. That led to more iPhone photos and this blog.

I learned on Amazon the knife is the Rough Ryder Deer Slayer, and the Rough Ryder series with brown burlap Micarta scales is their Tater Skin line. The Rough Ryder Deer Slayer isn’t offered any longer, but you can still find them on Amazon and one or two other retailers. The Amazon price is $39.97, and for a knife this size, that’s pretty reasonable.

The Rough Ryder Deer Slayer is nicely packaged. The box is fiberboard (cardboard, basically) and it probably won’t stand up to constant opening and closing, but it is nice. The knife doesn’t come with a sheath (or a holster, like a Buck does), which would have been even nicer. But it’s still pretty cool.

The blade is 4 inches long, and the knife (with the blade out) is almost 10 inches. This is a big knife.

The blade material is 440 stainless (it is razor sharp), and the brown burlap Micarta scales are aesthetically pleasing. The blade is a slip joint, which means it opens and closes like a regular pocketknife. The spring that holds it in either the open or closed position is strong, and I’m ultra-careful closing this one, making sure my fingers are out of the blade’s path as the knife is being closed.

The bottom line: I like the Rough Ryder Deer Slayer. I’ll probably never do anything with the Deer Slayer other than look at it (I’m certainly not going to slay Bambi with it). But I like it. If you want one, you should act fast as the knife is no longer being made. Amazon has a few in stock, and then that’s it.

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