PDW Griffin – a survival & adventure tool
There are many schools of thought regarding what makes for the ultimate survival & adventure knife and one of them is: the best survival knife is the one you have on you. The Griffin is certainly a knife you could carry all the time… but how good is it as a balance between toughness, usefulness and EDC portability?
Patrick Ma, designer of the Griffin, is an avid outdoorsman and real expert when it comes to backpacking, diving, mountaineering and living the adventurous. With all that experience in mind he designed a knife, which could be carried almost anytime & anywhere and used hard without a fear of it being destroyed easily. I’ve had really high expectations when I decided to give it a try, especially considering $289 price tag. So let’s check it out!
The Griffin I received came in a nice cardboard box including a certificate of authenticity, limited edition Griffin velcro patch, as well as a kydex sheath with TekLok, which was made by kydex guru Tom Krein. Even just the unboxing was a really nice experience and it clearly shows how much PDW pays attention to every aspect and detail of their products. First inspection of the knife confirmed that it’s a premium cutting tool. Perfectly made, without any flaws in manufacturing. All handle edges and holes are nicely chamfered for comfort, the stonewash finish looks great and the cutting edge is 100% symmetrical and even. The sheath works well and it’s fully secure (also for handle-down carry). Plus it’s design allows you to wrap your knife with paracord as most of the handle is exposed. So my first impression is more than just positive… but I didn’t get it as a show piece- so let’s check out how well it really works!
Skeletonized handles with heavy jimpings on top & bottom always brings to mind diver’s knives. Well, the Griffin could be used as a diving knife but it’d require specific diver’s sheath I suppose. However this construction is also lightweight and ensures a very firm grip, and that’s why it was designed like that. And indeed, the Griffin stays almost glued to your hand during heavy use, both in bare hand and when using gloves.
But of course one could easily wrap such a handle with paracord for long and heavy use. Or just use outdoor gloves, which are necessary edc item in wilderness anyway!
Additionally this kind of handle makes it easy to build a hunting spear if needed – they named such blade shape a ’spear-point’ for a reason!
But a skeletal handle has even more benefits, and I learned one of them the hard way. I was trying to take some cool shots of me removing nail with the Griffin from old wooden catwalk on small local forest lake. Well, it was apparently too old and it broke under my weight… so my Griffin ended up two meters deep in the water. Consider it was early April, 5 Deg C and it was slightly snowing… diving for it was really not an option. So I found a long thin stick and used it to ‘spear hunt’ my Griffin in the crystal clear cold water. And it wouldn’t have been possible without the holes in the handle.
After that small freezing adventure, my boots required a night-long drying treatment… good that at least M390 is seriously stainless and it was fine the next day, even after I sheathed it totally wet.
The Griffin is tough as nails. Seriously. A thick slab of M390 high performance steel with saber-grind and relatively thick cutting edge – that must be tough. I tried some prying with this knife, batonning, even chopping and I tell you – it’d be really hard work to destroy it unintentionally, or rather it’d be just about impossible. That is one of the factors to consider in a wilderness survival knife – total toughness. Of course there is no free lunch, and the downside of such a construction is lower cutting performance vs. what you can find in fine edged slicers. The Griffin comes razor sharp from the factory (I was actually able to shave my forearm with the original edge) but due to tough edge geometry it requires more force delivered behind the blade to cut & whittle efficiently. But it can be done and it was not a big problem for me. As you can see in the picture the shavings are fairly thick but not smooth, which is normal in a case of this kind of edge geometry. But as a reward, the edge will stay sharp considerably longer in the field and won’t chip easily when you hit stone or metal, or if you use it to dig in the ground. It’s a super robust blade which in fact cuts considerably well for what it is! Sure, it’s not a tomato slicer for your kitchen, but it’ll outlast dozens of your fine kitchen knives in the hardcore wilderness use, when chopping, prying and digging is also required besides just cutting.
Chopping is also possible but I’d do it only with cord-wrapped handle or when wearing gloves as the jimpings are not comfortable enough for hard chopping (but very safe on the other hand).
I tested the Griffin’s tip on a piece of hardwood by hitting & digging into a thick branch – it performed flawlessly and it was still scary sharp after the work. Again, it’s not a thin needle point but it is sharp, tough and nearly indestructible. I’m sure it will survive any abuse in the field, and as I said, thanks to swedge & spear-point profile it can be transformed into a hunting weapon without fear of damage. The swedge is not sharpened so it should be no problem from a legal point of view.
One of the features I really dig is the nail puller. There is no doubt that the possibility to ‘retrieve & reuse’ some old nails in a emergency situation could be really beneficial. But… does it work? Oh yeah! I tried it on some old nails in boards which were several years old which I found around my cabin:
Stage 1 – dig some space around the nail’s head.
Stage 2 – use a piece of hardwood or metal rod to create leverage and press/step on it
Stage 3 – use hole in the handle to pull the nail from board – yeah, another use of skeletal handle.
Job well done! Not easy but possible. And I wouldn’t do it with just the blade and it’d certainly be dangerous for my fingers and would ruin the cutting edge. So it’s a great addition to the Griffin’s multitask nature – and it can be used also as a pry-bar tool to open windows, drawers, etc. and in an emergency, as a glass-breaker, bottle & metal container opener, ammo can or oil barrel opener and even as a crusher if needed. Multitool indeed!
Another well designed feature is the proprietary Strikeback™ fire striker. It’s been CNC machined to give the ultimate spark and it does! In most bushcraft style knives you must use the spine of the blade, but it’s never as effective of a firesteel striker as you need, not just a sharp edge but also some burr to give great spark. All that is implemented into Griffin’s fire striker. Add a magnesium fire starter to your kydex sheath and you’re covered as far as fire starting is concerned! Igniting an alcohol stove took me one strike. Starting a fire on kindling and wooden sticks took me 3-4 strikes.
The Griffin is my go-to knife, which I want to keep close, just in case. It’s also quite a specialized knife – a tough companion, which will neither weigh you down nor let you down. I like it so much that I built two additional kydex sheaths for it – one in OD-Green with rivets on both sides to lash to my pack or vest. And another one which fits exactly on my pack’s shoulder strap, right under a small pouch.
If you’re looking for no-nonsense multitask fixed blade, which is both lightweight and tough, look no more. Get yourself a Griffin and enjoy your next adventure!
