Survival Knives – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

Gordon knives? You may think you’ve never heard of them, but maybe you’ve seen them without realizing what you were seeing. Gordon, you see, is the house brand for Harbor Freight knives. You know Harbor Freight: It’s where the folks who badmouth Chinese motorcycles buy their tools.

I don’t shop much at Harbor Freight these days, but it’s not because I think their stuff isn’t any good. I’m an old guy and I have all the tools I’ll ever need. But I still get the Harbor Freight ads, and one of them caught my eye recently. It was for what I initially thought was a Buck 119 hunting knife, but it wasn’t a Buck: It was a Gordon. They call it the Gordon Bowie/Hunting knife. So I rolled on over to my local Harbor Freight store to check it out.

The Gordon has some heft to it. It seems to fit my hand perfectly.

You can see the Gordon Bowie before you buy it because it’s packaged in a clear plastic bubble wrap container. Getting the knife out of that package was a bit of a challenge.

The Harbor Freight website lists the blade material as 7Cr17MoV stainless steel. Even though I had a course or two in metallurgy in my formative years, I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I Googled it:

7Cr17MoV is a Chinese stainless steel, often used in budget-friendly survival and kitchen knives, known for its good balance of hardness, corrosion resistance, and toughness. It’s essentially a modified version of 440A steel, with added vanadium to enhance strength and wear resistance. While it may not offer the best edge retention compared to high-end steels, it’s relatively easy to sharpen and is known for its durability under hard use.

A Buck 119 goes for about a $75. The Gordon? It’s a whopping $29.99. I had to take a look, and when I did, I liked what I saw. So I picked one up. At $30, I can take the risk of it not being perfect.

Then I noticed another Gordon knife hanging on the Harbor Freight display next to the Gordon Bowie. It was a monster that caught my attention (it was hard to miss, actually).

Visions of Sylvester Stallone as Rambo swam through my mind when I saw this Gordon. Check out the sawing serrations on top of the blade.

Harbor Freight calls the knife you see above their Survival/Hunting knife. In addition to its size, the other thing that grabbed my attention was the price. It was either $9.99 or $6.99. I couldn’t tell which, and I’ll return to that part of the story in a minute.

The Gordon Hunting/Survival knife has an 8-inch blade. It’s an impressive knife. I don’t know what impressed me more: The knife’s size, or its low price.

The gigondo Gordon is called their Hunting/Survival knife. It’s a monster with an 8-inch blade. The knife has a hollow handle with a cap that unscrews, and inside the cap, there’s a compass. Cool beans. A compass.

The Gordon Hunting/Survival knife handle. The end cap unscrews and you can store stuff inside the handle. Because the handle is hollow and made of aluminum, the knife feels much lighter than it looks.

When I later read the online reviews, one guy said the compass didn’t work. But you know those online reviews. Some folks would complain if you hung them with a new rope. Mostly these reviews consist of what emanates from the southbound end of a northbound bull. My compass works just fine.

Gordon also gives you some thread, a few matches, and oddly enough, a button or two. It all fits in the handle and it’s focused on helping you survive in dangerous places. You know, like LA. In case you need to hack your way through some bamboo or you lose a button.

The handle’s cap is sealed with an o-ring.

There’s room inside the handle to store the survival accessories that come with the knife, and maybe some other stuff.

This little package of survival stuff came with the Grodon knife.

The Gordon survival knife is cool. It makes me feel like Rambo. Maybe that’s what it is supposed to do. The upper part of the blade has a sawtooth pattern milled into it. The blade is sharp. Is the metal any good? Hell, I don’t know, and I probably won’t find out. I’m not planning any expeditions into the Amazon basin, and even if I were, I probably couldn’t get on the airplane with this thing. Will it hold an edge? I don’t know that either. But at $9.99, if I can’t sharpen the thing I’ll just buy another.

The blade material is specified on the Harbor Freight website simply as “stainless steel.” A Reddit post by one of the many folks on the internet who post such things states that it is 8CR13MOV steel (I don’t know if that’s accurate, but it’s the only blade material reference I found). Here’s what Professor Google has to say:

8Cr13MoV steel is a popular Chinese stainless steel known for its good balance of performance and affordability, making it a common choice for budget-friendly knives. It offers decent edge retention, corrosion resistance, and ease of sharpening.

Both knives come with sheaths, not that I’ll ever use either. But it’s nice to know they’re there just in case I ever get the urge to make a Rambo movie.

The Gordon Bowie and Survival/Hunting knives both include sheaths in their incredibly low prices.

You know, it’s funny. The young lady cashier at Harbor Freight asked if I knew the price of the knives. I told her the 6-inch Bowie Buck 119 wannabe was $29.99, and the big Gordon survival knife was either $9.99 or $6.99. I explained that I wasn’t sure because there were two price tags on the larger knife. She explained that if I was a Harbor Freight member, I could buy the knife for the lower $6.99 price, but as a plain old Harbor Freight nonmember, I’d have to pay the higher $9.99 price. She went on to explain that the annual Harbor Freight membership fee is $29.95. I told her I didn’t want the membership because, like Woody Allen, I wouldn’t be a member of any organization that would have me as a member (I thought I was really on top of my game with that one, but my borscht belt shtick went right over her head). She then told me if I told her my email address, I could select one of four different prizes. As a guy who still gets excited opening a box of Cracker Jacks, her offer appealed to me. (I was really having a good day. I love going into any store that sells tools, I was getting two cool knives, and now I had a offer for another free prize.) I gave that young lady my email and she showed me a menu. I selected the convertible screwdriver. And finally, when she rang up the knives, she looked at the Buck 119 wannabe. “Why is this one so expensive?” she asked, pondering its $29.99 price against the much larger $9.99 survival knife.