In this episode, David Bloch, founder and owner of Outdoor Edge, talks about creating fine cutlery and what it takes to make quality knives and hand tools for the outdoors. Learn the different kinds of knives used by experienced hunters and what’s the best for you for various outdoor situations. David shares his go-to knife from his long line and gets into some tips and tricks to keep your knives performing at the highest level. As he mentions, you wouldn’t want your knife to fail after you get that kill. Learn the reasons why it is important to sharpen your knife regularly and more.
—
Watch the episode here:
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Discover A Fine Edge With Outdoor Edge David Bloch
We’re welcoming David Bloch from Outdoor Edge. David created Outdoor Edge in 1988, but he’s taken a couple of ideas that he’s had about building knives, building blades, building a company and he has a successful company. You’ve seen them on the Pursuit Channel. He’s one of the presenting sponsors on the Pursuit Channel. Having said all that, I had an enjoyable time with David talking about what it takes to make a good play. We use the sharpest broadheads we can, but sometimes we don’t put the same amount of effort in picking the right blade to field dress a deer or take care deer apart and then process a deer so it ends up in our table and tastes good. David’s going to do all that and tell us why, how and where, and give you a lot of specific information. If you ever question yourself about knives and what’s the right knife and how does it all work, David’s got some answers for you. You’re going to enjoy the show.
—
I’m joined by David Bloch up in Denver, Colorado. Wheat Ridge, to be exact. David started a company back in 1988 called Outdoor Edge. I’ve used some of their products and have some of their products. I asked David, “Let’s get you on the show and talk about knives because every time we put a deer down, an elk down, a moose down, anything down, we got to take it apart. Quality knives take it apart. That’s why I want David to share about hunting and the School of Mines and some fun things. David, welcome to the show. Let’s start off where you were in 1988.
Thanks for having me here. It’s a pleasure. We founded Outdoor Edge in 1988. It was my college project. I was going to Colorado School of Mines, graduated in ‘86 and for my senior design project, it was to develop a new hunting knife. Our first knife was the Game Skinner. It’s a T-handle grip. You cut with a straight wrist and then it has a gut hook on top where you cut forward, break the skin, pull back and you can cut forward and back in one motion. Another nice thing about the T-handle is you can use both hands without sending down your knife. This was our first knife and I didn’t know anything about the knife industry hunting industry. I designed this as a school project.
I don’t know if you know Spyderco knives. They’re located in Golden. I drove by Spyderco everyday home from school and I talk to a couple of other knife companies in the US and I found that I couldn’t have my knife made here. Spyderco referred me to competent quality manufacturers in Japan. In 1988, I went to the SHOT Show in Vegas with six prototypes of my knife and that was the launch of it. I’ll tell you one funny story. My second show after the SHOT Show was Wisconsin Deer Classic in St. Paul and I had my knife, I had a booth set up and I was showing the knife. This guy goes, “What do you do for a living?” “I have this knife and I’m selling this knife.” He goes, “Let me tell you, I can’t make a living at that.” I said, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” I ended the conversation and he was right. I couldn’t make a living off one knife. I made another one and another one. Here we are almost 30 years later and we have about 120 different products in the line and built a successful business. I have been blessed and it’s been a great run.
When you hear about knives, Japan and everything, talk a little about the steel and the difference of your steel versus somebody else’s. This is incredible because the hardness or whatever, to tune it back up, to reset the edge is critical for hunters. Talk to me about that.
Every knife has a blade and a handle. Everything in between there, it’s all small details. The thing is there are many steps and many small details that go into making a good knife. Every knife has a blade and a handle, but as far as the steel, grinding is one thing. Blade geometry, final edge geometry. Steel is one thing. Heat treatment is everything. You can take the best steel known to man. If you don’t heat it correctly, it won’t be sharp. It won’t take an edge. It will be difficult to resharpen. It’s like a baking recipe. Steel is made up of iron. You have stainless steel, you have high carbon steels. It’s a cookbook recipe where you take different elements.
Iron is the number one thing that makes up steel. You have carbon content. The higher the carbon content, the harder and stronger the steel is. It also makes it rust more. The higher the carbon, the more performance, but also it’s easier to rust. It’s also harder so it’s harder to grind and harder to work. Steel is one thing. You take all these elements, you put it together. Let’s say you’re making bread and then you put in the oven. If you don’t cook it long enough, it’s all mushy. Your bread is no good. If you overcook it, it’s all dry and crumbly. It’s the same thing with steel. If you followed the right heat treatment process, all the grains and molecules form correctly and you get proper grain structure.
The knife will be strong. It will be flexible. It will take an edge and be razor-sharp and then it will also be easy to sharpen. There are lots of small details, so it’s not any one thing, it’s a little bit of everything. I’ll also say there’s no perfect knife. What is the knife used for? If you go to Cabela’s or Bass Pro, there are maybe 1,000 different knives and they’re all for different uses. Is it for chopping? If you have a chopping knife, it should be more blade-heavy for more impact. For a skinny knife, we do a lot with skinny knives. It’s about balance and you want the center of balance right in the middle of your hand because you do a lot of accurate motion. If it’s a chopping tool, it’s more blade heavy and every time you have you go to cut, it’s cumbersome. It’s clunky in hand. You want to move that center point back into the middle of your hand and it flows a lot nicer.
There are a lot of factors, like the ergonomics of the grip. All knives are hand tools. When you go to a store and pick out a knife, don’t be like, “That looks cool. That’s fancy. I like that. That’s what I want,” but it may not be a functional or practical knife. I always say, think of all the different grips when you field dress your deer. You’re choking up on the front of the knife or you’re getting on the back of it. Sometimes you flip it around and doing the inverted cutting. I always check the handle and grip it every which way I can. I choke up on the blade, the grip behind it. I flip it around. Is it comfortable when you turn around your hand? Is it easy to change grips on it?
The knife blade is the extension of your hand. Whatever you do with your hand should easily transfer to that blade. Share on XWith ergonomics, the knife blade is the extension of your hand. Whatever you do with your hand, nice and easily transfer it to that blade. If it does, it’s going to cut better. The handle is something that’s a little bit overlooked. When I design a knife, the handle has to be perfect. It’s a one size, fits all approach. We don’t do big handles and small handles. We focus on making one handle that’s going to fit a small hand and fit a larger hand. There are lots of small details. That’s a good tip for me to share with the audience. Analyze the knife. What are you going to use the knife for? Look for the details of that knife that will make it perform for that application.
You mentioned about the carbon and then the iron. Do you ever use molybdenum for harding?
Molybdenum is a hardening and strengthening alloy that’s added to steel. The thing is there are all different elements that are added to different steels. Steel is one of those topics. We could spend the whole show talking about steel. The thing is it’s not so much what’s in the steel. It is important what’s in the steel, but it comes down to the mechanical properties and the specs of that steel once this cookbook recipe is put together, sulfur, carbon, molybdenum, phosphorus, vanadium. Vanadium is also used in steel. Depending on what the steel is, what is used for what the application is there’s no perfect knife. There’s no perfect steel. There are steels that hold an edge longer than other knives. In most cases that will make the knife very hard to resharpen. It’s important for a hunting knife that it’s sharp, it holds an edge. It’s also flexible because a lot of times you put blunt force into your knife. You have to be able to put an edge back on it. If you can’t sharpen it, then it’s no good. It’s all about sharpness. It will be sharp out of the box, stay sharp, and then also be easy to sharpen once it does go dull.
“Field to freezer.” What does that mean?
That’s our tagline. If there’s any one line that defines Outer Edge, I call Outer Edge the field to freezer knife company. We have a variety of items and my goal as a company owner and designer is to make your job easier in the field. When you get a deer down, it’s work. Once you pulled the trigger or release that arrow, the real work begins and you need a knife that’s designed for the job. It has the right shape and geometry. It has good steel, it’s razor-sharp, it’s going to hold an edge. It’s a tool to get the job done. If you’re stuck out there with a dull knife, it’s no fun. If it’s sharp and it’s ready to go, it makes it so much faster.
Talking about the game that we put down, the game we harvest, let’s talk about your hunting experience with your knives. What is your go-to knife when you’re out in the field yourself?
I’ve got to say that we don’t make a bad knife. As we progress and come out with new knives, we always move to the newest knife and the old one goes by the wayside. My favorite knife right now is the Razor-Pro. The Razor-Pro is the hottest thing that we have going, not from a sales standpoint but from function. It’s a replacement razor blade knife. I did a lot of talking about good steel that holds an edge in resharpening. Another thing I mentioned is geometry. What makes a razor blade cut well? Thinness. The fact that it’s thin as you cut has much less friction as you’re cutting, so it cuts much easier. Everyone’s used utility razor blades. They cut good because they’re thin. Another thing I mentioned was blade geometry. With a razor blade, because it’s thin, you can get a very acute angle on the final edge.
That final edge, if you put a very acute angle on a standard knife, it tends not to hold an edge well. With a razor blade, since it’s thinner, you’re able to grind it thinner. That’s what makes it sharper out of the box. If it does go dull, what you do is you push the button and you pop in a new blade. The thing is you can replace the blade, but here’s something that I encourage people to do. This is a draw through sharpener that we make. It’s tungsten carbide and ceramics. It has a leg that folds out. How is this? It’s called the SharpX. It gives you more stability. Here’s a tip. Whether you’re using a replacement plate knife or any knife, keep the knife sharp. When the knife is razor-sharp, when you’re cutting, the skin comes apart. Once it starts going dull, you start using more force.
As you put more and more force on your edge, the blade goes duller and duller. A lot of guys don’t know how to sharpen. They don’t sharpen. Maybe they have a good knife. It’s sharp and then they get one deer, two deer, three deer, four deer and they use it to the point where the edge is completely dull. If you do that, you have a tough sharpening job. You have to take off metal and redefine the blade. My suggestion is to keep the knife sharp. It’s like a professional butcher. A butcher takes a knife and he’ll use it all day. At the end of the day, he’ll put it on a grinder and sharpen it. During the day, he’s got butcher steel and he’s steeling the knife every five minutes.
Steel is a flexible, pliable, material. That final edge is thin and that’s what makes it sharp. The edge is bending around. It’s moving. By putting it on the steel, you’re straightening the edge, you’re keeping it straight. Even if you’re using a razor blade or a non-replaceable blade knife, every five minutes stop and draw through the fine stones. You’re not taking off any metal here. What you’re doing, keeping the edge in line. It will hold an edge twice, three times as long and you won’t replace any blades. Even though we sell replaceable blade knives, if you sharpen them, you won’t replace them. It’s easy to sharpen again because it’s bent. There’s a little tip there. Keep them sharp and tune-up your knives. The angle is important. A sharp knife like this has a preset angle so anybody can use it. You don’t have to be skilled at sharpening, draw through and it gives you the exact angle.
Another cool thing about this knife that I like is you have a replacement razor blade knife. I don’t know if any of the viewers out there are familiar with the SwingBlade, but this is the coolest cutting blade out there. It’s a banana-shaped blade where it curves up. It cuts underneath the skin. By cutting underneath the skin, it doesn’t cut any hair. You push it and it zips the animal right open. It’s a cool knife. You’ve got the knife on this side, close it and take out your gutting blade. Open up the leg, open up the belly, go back to your skinning blades. It’s a convenient system in one knife.
We were talking about the Havalon blade.
Havalon, I have a lot of respect for the company. They make a great product and they came on the market with their replaceable scalpel blades. The background of Havalon is they’re a medical supply company and they make some of the sharpest surgical scalpel blades available. They put it into a folding knife, it came on the market and had a big success. I looked at it and I heard a lot of criticism where the blades are about 0.4-millimeter thin, but they’re not all that sturdy. They do flex easy. This is a really sharp knife. You have to use it very delicately. If you put any force to it, I’ve heard a lot of stories of blade snapping. Once they do snap it’s a bit challenging to change the blade. You have to flex the blade out of the way and it’s also very sharp there. You’re close to the edge. It’s a dangerous system to change the blade.
Also the blades are easy to break. When you’re working inside a body cavity and you have a broken blade in there, it’s scary having a sharp scalpel blade there, trying to fish around and find it. When I came up with the RazorLite knife, I had two goals in mind. One was to make it strong and what we did is we came up with the sandwich blade holder. This is three layers of stainless steel and it has all the stability of a standard knife. You take your razor blade, put it in the holder, and you had this rigid structure. Even though it’s a razor blade, you can use it harder. You can push, twist and pry. We’ve never snapped the blade holder. It’s something where you have that razor blade sharpness but also the strength of a standard knife. You do that with your good knife and use it harder and damage your blade. You ruined your good knife. With ours, pop in the new blade and for about $2 you’re ready to go. That’s one of the things that we achieved that makes us different. You have a much stronger blade.
You also have a bit longer blade length. Ours is that a standard 3.5-inch drop point blade where it’s a delicate knife for refined work at the tip. Another major difference is to change the blade, I explained how you have to flex the blade out of the way to remove it and close to it. There’s a scalpel edge with ours basically, you have a push-button lock on the side. You push the button and out comes the blade. You put it back in. Two focuses with the RazorLite was to make it strong, make it safe and easy to change the blade.
When you go elk hunting, whitetail hunting and mule deer hunting wherever you go, do you take just one knife? For me, I’ll have three different knives for three different jobs on the same animal.
Generally, I like to go with two knives on pretty much any hunt. If I go on an elk hunt, I will bring extra knives. I’m always going elk hunting with a group of guys. When you get one down, it’s a lot of work. If you can skin out, skin out at a deer in 15, 20 minutes and drag them out of the woods by yourself, a lot of times elk live where people don’t. They’re remote, they’re heavy, and they weigh several hundred pounds. I generally like to de-bone all the meat, put it into meat bags in the field and carry out meat. It’s a big, heavy animal and it’s a lot of extra weight trying to carry out the bones. With that, I’ll bring several knives. My buddies all have knives. We’re working on the animal together.
Another knife that I take with me on every hunt is a folding fillet knife. Fillet knives are all used by fishermen to fillet fish. A butchery knife is something that weighs three ounces and you have a five-inch butchering knife in your pack. I like this fillet for cutting around the butt end of the animal, to remove the anal canal there and then ready for cutting out backstraps and doing any deboning. Those two right there are pretty much everything you need for any whitetail hunt or any Western elk remote pack and hunt. Those two knives will pretty much do it all.
When hunting, analyze the details of the knife that will make it perform for that application. Share on XIf you put a moose down, do you need a chainsaw?
The first time I heard that I was talking to some guys from Sweden and I was showing them this little hand saw that we made that goes in a nice sarcoma called the Folding Pack and they start laughing and being like, “No.” I was like, “What do you mean no? It’s fine.” They were like, “No, we use chainsaws on moose.” That’s a good idea. The chainsaw works much better than this hand saw. I was fortunate enough to go to the Yukon up in the MacMillan River Adventures and shot a moose there years ago. One of the things is walking upon this massive 1,400-pound animal. I’ve shot a number of elk over the years and the size of the backstraps from a deer to an elk. When you get to the moose, everything is uber big. They are massive animals. That is where the real work begins after the shot. When you get a moose on the ground and cut them up and pack them out, you need real gear and you need some muscles to pack out that meat. There’s a lot of weight.
I watched a video, they used a helicopter. They took it apart. They had it all apart. They reduced as much weight as they could. They flew the helicopter and went off. That’s one reason that moose hunting nowadays is extremely expensive, but it saved them days. It depends how far back they were. Forty-five minutes to an hour, he’s back at camp.
I remember carrying out the quarters in a solid, dead weight on your shoulders. I’ve never carried anything heavy as a moose quarter.
Tell me about Kansas. I tried to get myself invited, but I don’t have a tag, so thanks anyway, David. I can’t go anyway, but tell me about what’s going to happen to Kansas.
I’ve been coming to Kansas for the past several years and hands down it’s my favorite place to go whitetail hunting. It is awesome. The cool thing about Kansas is I hunt in the northwestern part of Kansas and there are lots of drainages. You have a crop around and then you have fingers of drainages where you have the tree lines. The deer do pattern down very tight and concise corridors. You see a lot of activity. I’ve hunted in Illinois and Iowa. I’ve hunted on Ohio and its massive woods. It’s big, open woods. The deer can pretty much go a little bit anywhere. The cool thing about Kansas is there are more funnels for the animals. I have a place out there where we’ve managed for trophies. We let the good-looking young bucks walk and we let them grow up and pretty much all the neighbors also have the same philosophy. There are some great deer there. The genetics are great. The nutrition and the food out there. The forest floor for them is great. Is it truly one of the great places to go hunting?
I’m going to be traveling through that country. I have a buddy and he’s hunting around the Pittsburgh area. That’s where he’s hunting. He’s taken some wonderful deer.
Pittsburgh has some awesome deer. The place that I hunt now, this guy, I shot him the first 40 minutes of being in the property on the first day.
He’s a big deer. It has a wide spread. It’s got a good mass. I’m heading east to a couple of different farms and hopefully, I’ll be blessed to see a couple of Mr. Wonderfuls. What year was that?
That was a few years ago.
It’s got a little trash. He’s got that little kicker coming off.
It’s a cool deer. I’m definitely looking forward to Kansas. We’re getting some good weather here, so it was getting cold. The rut is going to kick in a little sooner than we expect it.
My buddy Bill Winke had it on his site, Midwest Whitetail. He said the seven, and then you take three days before and three days after. You have the 3rd to the 10th is the prime time. Having said that, I have guys where they have seen bucks chasing already. One had a breeding buck go on their trail camera.
That’s interesting that you are sharing those dates with me. Unfortunately, my first day of hunting is on the 12th, so it’s a little later because of my schedule. It seems like we’re pretty much out there in Kansas every year right around the end of the first week of November. It’s been on pretty much every year at that time. I’d say Bill Winke is definitely spot on. That’s the date I’d like to be there again. I’ll be there a few days later.
Do you do crossbow hunting or compound? What kind of equipment do you use?
I shoot a PSE. It’s funny you asked that. I got a new bow. I don’t know the model, but it’s their new carbon bow. My buddy, Brad Lockwood, he hosted Love of The Hunt TV. He was sponsored by PSE and he has a bow shop out in Pennsylvania. We went elk hunting and he brought the carbon bow. I have been shooting a wonderful bow and I shot it for several years. I put one arrow through this new carbon bow by PSE and I’m like, “Wow.” It’s a game-changer.
Let’s talk about that. You’re shooting good equipment, then all of a sudden you put something new in your hand and you go, “Wow.” Was it smoothest? Did it not stack? Help me understand and share with the audience what the game-changer was.
It was the smoothness and also the let-off with this carbon bow. I’m not sure the exact specs of the let-off. I’m getting a little bit older, I’m 55 now and have issues with lower back and the work of pulling a bow for a long period of time. The let-off might be as high as 90% and when I pull it back, that value there right at the end is effortless to hold the bow back. That’s going to be a lot easier for my back and a lot more forgiving for me to shoot. The first arrow, I pretty much shot a bull’s eye with it and it was like, “Wow.” I shot an arrow and I was like, “This is a great model.” I’m excited to try it out.
A knife is all about sharpness. It will be sharp out of the box, stay sharp, and then also be easy to sharpen once it does go dull. Share on XDo you have a range at work so you can put 100 arrows in it before you leave?
I do. I’ve got three acres at home so I got all kinds of 3D targets set up. I’ll set up lunch hours at home.
As we’ve been talking all about knives and gear, a little bit about hunting, the biggest thing I want to share with everybody and reiterate here with David is that you’ve got a broadhead that’s super sharp. There are a gazillion broadheads out in the market, fixed, mechanical and all this other one thing. What every single one of them has is they are deathly sharp because they’ve got to go through a lot of stuff. I’m thinking about the blades for skinning, for gutting and preparing it for the meal, all those things. That’s probably the second-most important tool you have. One is your broadhead, you’re going to launch it and put the deer down. Then you’ve got to take it home. You’ve got to cut it up. If you take it through the processor, fine, but I’ve seen too many elk and I have been too a few places that destroyed it because one, they didn’t have the right equipment. Two, maybe they should have learned how to do it a little bit better, but it was the equipment that made the difference. Let’s talk to that.
That’s hitting on a key part of why we hunt and the whole process of it. Hunting is exciting. It’s being in touch with nature, being in the outdoors, the whole outdoor experience. I went elk hunting. I can’t get enough. I never drew my bow, but I had an awesome hunt being out there in nature, being out in the woods of Colorado where the elk live, I was in their territory. It’s not easy to get an elk down but when you do get an animal, you’re fortunate enough to harvest an animal. It’s the best meat out there. It’s high protein. It’s low fat. It’s better than anything you buy in the store. I’ve heard so much criticism that, “I like elk hunting, but I give the meat away. I don’t like eating it. It’s gamey.” I don’t get the gamey part because the thing when we’re shooting an animal, once the animal expires, the quality of the meat starts right there and it starts with proper field dressing. Once you get the meat home, it’s processing the meet correctly.
Let’s definitely talk about that. Once the animal is down, once he’s expired, bacteria starts forming immediately. Heat is what rapidly grows bacteria. It’s very important to field dress quickly once the animals expire and field dress correctly. Do the field dressing process correctly where you have something like a cutting blade where you can get inside, not pierce the bladder, not pierce the stomach, don’t get any of it internal juices or viscera on the meat. Get the insights out as quickly as you can. Get them out cleanly. By doing so, you’re taking all that massive heat of the internal organs out and you’re opening the animal now for cooling. That’s another thing skinning does. By removing the hide, you’re exposing the meat for cooling. You rapidly cooled the animal.
The FDA said 41 degrees, anything over 41 degrees, bacteria grows rapidly. Get your meat to cool down. Do 41 degrees or lower. Some people are fans of aging. Aging is a topic in itself. I’ve had plenty of deer that I skin them, process them and froze them. They were tender and they aged well. Aging tends to make the meat a little bit more tender. It’s a slow process where you keep the animal at 41 degrees between freezing and you age it. There’s some bacteria process where it breaks down some of the muscle fibers and it makes the meat more tender. Whether you age or not, it’s not that critical.
Once it comes to cutting up the meat, this is another thing that intimidates a lot of people. They’d never done it. They think it’s difficult and they don’t have the right tools for it. They bring it to the butcher. What I enjoy about the hunt and processing my own game is everything comes full circle. I pursued the animal, I harvested the animal, I field dress it and then I cut up the meat. I control the quality of the animal from the field to the freezer. I know exactly what I’m eating, I cut the portions of meat in the sizes and I wrap them the way I feed my family. There’s a lot of gratification from doing that. You learn the muscle structure, what each muscle is best used for. I have my own grinders so I make my own burger and it’s the best food out there. With that, you do need good knives to do the process.
That’s one thing that Outdoor Edge does. We make a variety of butcher kits. We have our original one. We came out with it in 2001. It’s called the Game Processor and it is a complete set of knives and tools with a hard-side carry case. There are four practical knives for processing, you’ve got a caping knife for detailed work. You’ve got your gut hook skinny knife for moving the hide, opening the animal. You have your boning knife, which is the workhorse-ready butcher. It’s a flexible knife, but this is for de-boning, cutting all the meat off the bones. When it comes to carving steaks and cutting any large pieces of meat, we have an eight-inch butcher knife. It’s a great knife for cutting steaks with that.
You’ve got a full-size cutting board underneath. You’ve got game shears, a saw, a carving fork, a sharpener. You talked about cooling, bringing that body temperature down. We have what’s called our steel stick. What you do as you saw through the chest, set it on both sides and pop that in position. It spreads the chest open and allows better airflow for cooling the animal. It’s our original and most complete processing system. You have all the tools you need all together in a hard case. The only limitation is it weighs six pounds. It’s not something that you take with you. You leave it at home. We made 4 or 5 different butcher kits, but this is our latest one.
I’ll give you a little size comparison. This is six pounds. This is at 1.6 pounds. This is something that you can carry in your day pack. It’s a complete processing kit with a caping knife, gut hook skinner knife and your boning knife. It also has that sharpener, the SharpX I told you about. There’s your sharpener with the pivoting base. You’ve got all the knives and the sharpener to keep the edge on them, so it’s a handy kit. With that, you have all the tools you need to process the animal. I know people are intimidated by it, but we used to sell a series of DVDs by Brad Lockwood. He’s a TV show host and he gives you all the expert information on how to process the animals.
The DVDs are still available, but you can go on YouTube and there are all kinds of experts out there showing you how to cut up your meat and do the process. It isn’t that bad. You have all your primary muscles and they’re all separated by that silver skin and fascia. You rip them apart. Another thing that I say too is when you bring your meat to the butcher, the way that I cut meat, I take so much time. I’m so meticulous about trimming and removing the silver skin. They’re doing it as a job to make money. They can’t make money cutting meat the way that I do because it takes a long way, the way that I do it. It’s what I eat, it’s what I feed my family, so it’s important to me that it’s done correctly.
Let’s share your one big thing about hunting. You can’t say that they let you bring, so it’s got to be something else. What’s your one big thing, your go-to thing that on every trip you either bring along or you’re going to make sure you do?
It’s got to be the bow. You don’t get anything done without that. I don’t know if that was a good answer.
It doesn’t matter. It’s yours. Everybody has one big thing and the bow is yours. Yours is the blade so we can’t go there.
The main thing is bringing a good attitude to enjoy God’s creation and enjoying the outdoors and being out there. When I was a kid, I went to the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts and we went camping a lot. Now as an adult, I don’t get to go camping much. Hunting for me is my time to be a kid again. Before even climbing the tree, walking in the dark towards the stand, the hairs stand up on the back of my head. It’s that excitement, that kid-like feeling. How do you describe that to someone that doesn’t hunt? I get so excited walking to the stand. You’re seeing the sunrise and seeing does come in and see younger bucks that I pass on come underneath the tree.
It’s seeing nature at its finest, as close and personal. What I bring to the woods is a good attitude to soak up all that good nature. It’s nothing like it. It’s the best thing on earth. David, I enjoyed getting together. This has been a joy. You’ve got a lot of technical information. You’ve got a lot of reasons how, why, when, but that blade that you put in your hand can make the difference of a great meal or what happened here type of meal. It makes your job easier. There’s no question about it. On behalf of the audience across North America, David Bloch, thank you so much for being a guest on the show.
Thank you, Bruce.
Important Links:
- Outdoor Edge
- SwingBlade
- Midwest Whitetail
- Havalon
- RazorLite knife
- Love of The Hunt TV
- Game Processor
About David Bloch
Founder, CEO, designer and marketing director of Outdoor Edge Cutlery Corp. Outdoor Edge produces a full line of knives, combo sets, home processing kits, hand tools and accessories for the hunting, outdoor, survival, hardware, DIY and sporting goods market. Outdoor Edge products are available worldwide through a network of dealers, distributors, mail order catalogs and online sellers.
His goal as Outdoor Edge’s President/CEO is to design, develop, market and distribute high-quality specialty knives, and hand tools for the hunting, outdoor, survival, hardware and sporting goods business.
Specialties: Product design and development, manufacturing, marketing (TV, print and trade shows) and international distribution.