U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- I recently received a Smith’s Edgesport Fixed Blade Gut Hook knife to test. It has a lot of features that I think that the modern hunter is going to love. Let me list these features. To begin, they put some thought into the handle. It has finger grooves for your pointer finger and for your little finger, stabilizing your grip. To further enhance your grip, it has a textured handle and thumb grooves on the top of the handle. I wish that it had thumb grooves on the top 1 ¼-inches of the spine too.
EdgeSport Fixed Blade Gut Hook Knife
The blade is a definite drop point/skinning design. Many people like a rounded curvature like this for skinning their big game trophies. With this design, you can skin fast without fear of cutting through the hide compared to using a clip-point knife. The blade is slightly concaved near the handle. I’ve never figured out why some knives are made with a concave blade. I’m not sure what the purpose is. To me, it makes them a little harder to sharpen.
It has a little bit of a point on it, but you’ll also want to carry a clip point knife to cut the pattern. Then it also comes with a gut hook. In case you’re not familiar with a gut hook, it is the indented cutting surface on the top near the tip of the knife.
Most people think a gut hook is just to cut down the belly from the crotch to the brisket or cut through the thin muscle structure down the same area. And that is what it was designed for. But you also cut the pattern. By pattern, I mean to make the cut down the midline and then cut through the hide, out to each hoof which will result in an H-shaped pattern.
So you’d cut the pattern as described above using the gut hook and then use the skinning blade on the Smith’s Edgesport Fixed Blade Gut Hook knife to skin the hide off of your animal. If possible, removing the hide with the animal hanging is easier, but that is not always possible. I like to hang it by the head and skin it, but you can hang it by the hind feet if so desired.
If you could care less about the hide and just want to rip the hide off of your deer, here’s what we used to do when I was a kid and we had a pickup load of deer to skin down by Sonora. We’d mark the pattern as described above. Then we’d skin around the legs and drop the hide on the back of the neck.
Next, we’d get a rock a little larger than a softball, wrap the neck’s skin around it, and put a lariat around it. We’d then hook the lariat to the bumper of a jeep and jerk it off. You can skin a deer in a hot second like this.
To safely carry your Smith’s Edgesport Fixed Blade Gut Hook knife, it comes with a woven polyester sheath with a buckle that snaps over the side to hold the knife firmly in place. It has a belt loop that can accommodate up to a 4-inch wide belt, so suffice it to say that you can wear it on any of your belts.
If you like using a lanyard on your fixed-bladed knives, it has a lanyard hole in the hilt of the handle. The hole is lined with a brass sleeve. I never put one on, but I think a leather lanyard dresses up a knife.
The MSRP on the Smith’s Edgesport Gut Hook is $29.99, and as is usual, we will close with the specs.
- 4″ 400 Series Stainless Skinning Blade w/Guthook.
- 8.6″ overall length.
- Custom non-slip Handle
- Cordura Sheath
- Lanyard Hole: Tether Ready
About Tom Claycomb
Tom Claycomb has been an avid hunter/fisherman throughout his life as well as an outdoors writer with outdoor columns in the magazine Hunt Alaska, Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter.net, and freelances for numerous magazines and newspapers. “To properly skin your animal, you will need a sharp knife. I have an e-article on Amazon Kindle titled Knife Sharpening for $.99 if you’re having trouble.”
