VICTORINOX HUNTER PRO

When it comes to utility knives, while it's great to lust after the best Benchmade money can buy or ponder the even more expensive option of ordering a custom knife, the reality is that there's one company that's been doing it longer than damn near everyone else: Victorinox.

And they've cultivated their impressive history and even more impressive reputation by building utility knives that are just that: utilities. Their line of famous Swiss Army Knives feature a basic design that can be readily adapted to almost any purpose, and over the course of the company's 129 year history, have been. But their latest offering is something entirely different. Called the Hunter Pro, this new knife features a conventional lock-back design, rendered in stainless steel, and sandwiched between rubberized plastic scales.

Obviously enough, from its name, the new Hunter Pro is squarely aimed at the outdoors market that wants a high-quality but affordable knife. And at first glance, that's certainly what this new knife appears to be. With a nice amount of heft, and an excellent size and texture proffered by the rubberized scales, it comes to hand easily and can be used for extended periods without inducing blisters or straining the hand. And since the blade has a massive thumbhole to ease deployment, it is easily flicked out with either the weak or strong hand.

Once deployed, just why the Hunter Pro has some decent heft to it becomes immediately apparent; the blade is uncharacteristically large (and uncharacteristically matte-finished) for a Victorinox product. Measuring roughly four inches long, one inch wide, and an eighth of an inch thick, the big blade calls for an equally large lockback mechanism, and that results in a knife that balances somewhere between the pointer and middle fingers' positions. This makes it an excellent rough use knife, as you get plenty of meat on the blade with which to poke, pry, whittle, and cut things. And since the knife shipped to us with a pretty decent edge, it came out of the box ready to do all of those things, without any additional work on our part.

Now for the surprising part. As huge Vicotrinox fans, we really wanted to like the Hunter Pro, and we did... initially. But as we used it, we noticed a few things that cropped up over the course of a few month's usage that we didn't like; the first of which was an odd rattle from the knife whenever it was put down. Then, we started noticing some flex between the blade and the lockback mechanism, which was accompanied by a clicking noise of its own. So, to figure out what was going on, we pulled the scales off and took a look at how the Hunter Pro was assembled. What we found was a polished stainless steel liner retained on either side of the blade and lockback mechanism by three 4mm brass pins that have been peened over brass bushings to hold the various components together; a method of assembly that's quite similar to most other Swiss Army Knives.

But while that method may work great on the majority of Victorinox's smaller, slipjoint-style traditional Swiss Army Knives, this style of assembly isn't quite up to par when employed in a large folding knife like this. How so? Well, the first and foremost issue with the Hunter Pro's construction is the complete lack of pivot bushings. While most large folding knives employ either bronze or nylon bushings on either side of the blade to reduce the friction between the liner and the blade itself, the Hunter Pro instead relies upon a stamped-in raised potion of the polished liner to accomplish the same task. On most Victorinox tools, the use of the highly-polished stainless steel as a bearing surface is fine, but in the case of a knife as large as this, it proves a bit of a drawback as it limits the amount of pressure with which Victorinox can assemble the tool. In other words, it means they have to leave the liner looser than it should be, lest a too-tight liner bind up against the blade and make it hard to deploy. In the case of our test knife, that meant we could actually spin both the lockpack pivot pin bushing, and knife pivot pin bushing by hand; the source or our various rattles.

The next issue with this style of assembly just exacerbates the issue of the missing bushings: the pivot pin is simply too small. With a heavy, quarter-inch thick, four-inch long blade, the Hunter Pro should be capable of levering and prying with the best of them, but given it's only joined to the liner by a 4mm pin (itself holding things together somewhat more loosely than we'd like), we can't say we'd have a lot of faith in its ability to hold together long-term under such heavy usage.

For Victorinox, engineering a new knife is one thing, but engineering an entirely different kind of knife is an another matter entirely. And while we have typically struggled to communicate precisely how excellent Victorinox's products have been in the past, the Hunter Pro is Victorinox's first real crack at this particular style of knife, and really demonstrates how hard it can be to break a century-old design mold. So while we can only hope that they figure out and address the design deficiencies soon, in the meantime, with an MSRP of $75, it will remain a tough sell.