I recently purchased a KJ Eriksson Model #911 knife from Ragnar’s Ragweed forge for $12, in addition to a two sided diamond stone, and some other items my parents ordered.

I’ve owned a #510, which I’ve generally been happy with. I had broken the tip off, while foolishly using it to try to pry some pitch out of a stump. Despite such foolishness and the force involved I only broke off enough of the tip to be noticeable if you really were examining it closely. After some work, its “point” is now once again sharp although if you look very closely you’ll still notice the point was snapped off, and as obvious as it ever was.

The #911 has a 4” carbon steel blade, 0.098” thick, and unlike the #510 comes with a sheath that has a clip to slide over your belt or onto a strap. The sheath can be rotated with relation to the clip due to the connector being designed to allow rotation. This allows it to either be rotated out of the way or to a more useful position.

The handle appears to be made by injection molding solid red plastic, and then injection molding a rubbery material on top of that. It's textured, but not in a particularly pronounced fashion. This knife has a minimal guard in that except for the molded receptacle area for your ring finger you can see here the handle actually narrows approaching the blade. This guard section protecting you hand from accidentally slipping on the blade is also used by the knife retention system, which has led to some barely noticeable wear on that section’s rubber material. There are ribbed sections on three corners of the handle excluding the ring finger area.

This Mora like the #510 before it had some chattering marks along the bevel, and although sharp out of the box, required some work to bring out its potential. Of course, as this is a Mora knife the sharpening process is much easier, and it’s much easier to tell what’s going on. Fine motor skills aren’t exactly required.

Me and my dad took this and several other knives (Master Hunter, Modified True Flight Thrower, SAK, Leatherman Wave, his #510, and my #510) out back to test them with batoning and carving triggers into a good sized piece of wood. My father complained about the ribs on the back of the #911 hurting his thumb, and I had some issues from pushing on the relatively thin back of the blade. In this regards only the Master Hunter didn’t hurt his bare hands, which may be due to the wide flat back of the handle and blade. While further testing is required, simply wearing a pair of leather gloves seems to go a long ways in relieving these problems.

With batoning, knives with rubberized grips seemed more comfortable then knives without. The only problem with the #911 was a tendency to want to slide towards the grip while batoning, which may be entirely due to my lack of experience. Much as learning to guillotine while cutting the triggers. The only problem with any of the other knives was when Dad’s #510 went through a knot and had its edge curled. Some time on the diamond stone should take care of that though.