EverydayCommentary: Qvist Knives Invert Review

Knife design can be hard, especially if your goal is to come up with something new. New designs are challenging when you are talking about humanity’s oldest tool. Heck, given the Apple Samsung legal fight, apparently new designs are hard when your dealing with a comparatively brand new tool. As a result, often times new designs or iterations on old designs kinda feel like they are dancing around the same few targets. Change this a little, modify that and then it is a new design. But I have rarely found knives with these incremental changes compelling when they are based on a design that I didn’t already like. The Qvist Knives Invert bucks that trend. It is a good iterative design on the original Qvist Knives blade, the Variant.

The Variant and its variants were all swayback designs, which are basically knives with an inverted silhouette. Instead of a belly on the edge and a straight-ish spine, a swayback has a straight-ish edge and a belly on the spine. Similarly, instead of a pistol grip handle, the handle curves up into the palm. While I have found swayback designs beautiful, especially some of the custom versions, I never found them fun to use. I don’t do a lot of cutting tasks where the straight blade matters. Either the task is bladeshape agnostic, like breaking down cardboard, or it is better with a blade with a belly like rock cutting during food prep. I have also not liked the fact that virtually all swayback pattern knives have a prominent exposed rear tang. As a result, the Variant never caught my eye. But the Invert did.

I wasn’t even familiar with Qvist Knives. I like the scales.

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