Bark River Little Carver 3V Review

Okay, we'll admit it -- sometimes we find ourselves in a rut. That's especially true when it comes to our everyday-carry knives.

You might remember the Bark River Knives Little Creek from our "Seven Days, Seven EDC Knives" series. It's everything we love in a small fixed blade -- pocketable, drop-point blade, great steel. And it's a Barkie.

For us, the Little Creek is also a rut -- a perfectly wonderful rut, certainly, but a habit that's kept us from considering other options. So we decided to leave our well-worn path and try something a bit different.

Our choice: the Bark River Little Carver, which is based on the same handle as the Little Creek (and the Little Caper). Its full-tang design makes it stout on the fat end, and its modified Wharncliffe blade makes it perfectly suited for fine work on the pointy end.

Ah, that blade...we've spent so much time with drop-points lately that we'd forgotten the wonders of a fixed-blade Wharnie. This one earns the "modified" moniker for its ever-so-slight upsweep, a useful variation from the pattern's standard straight edge, and the point is needle-like -- sharp, but not at all fragile.

As a package, the Little Carver is an absolute demon at tasks requiring precision. From delicate food-prep to detailed woodcarving, even removing splinters, it's a supremely controllable knife.

The Little Carver would make a great addition to a bushcraft set, a useful companion to a larger blade or a worthy ultralight hiker -- but this post is about its utility as an everyday knife, so there will be no woodsy scenes in this post, no figure-four traps and no demonstrations of batoning.

We know that EDC isn't particularly sexy. It's not even romantic. But let's face it, most of the things we do with our knives are pretty ordinary.We began our relationship with the Little Carver on a weekend morning, first employing it to slice veggies and shave cheese for an omelet. From the kitchen we moved out to the vegetable garden, where we used it to sharpen a couple of tomato stakes, harvest broccoli and cut up cucumber vines.

Back indoors we opened a stack of mail, stripped coax cable and (just for fun) made several feet of laces from a scrap of thick leather.

Come Monday we brought the Little Carver into the warehouse, where we opened packages, sliced through pallet-wrap and plastic strapping, and reduced a large pile of boxes to a neat stack of cardboard.

(Incidentally, if you ever want to demonstrate the real-world value of a convex grind, spend some time cutting corrugated cardboard. It cleaves through the material with ease, pushing it away from the edge like a speedboat through a glassy sea. Truly impressive.)

We worked the Little Carver pretty hard, and yet it refused to complain. The only attention we gave its CPM 3V steel -- amazing stuff, by the way -- was an occasional back-and-forth strop on a pant leg or a piece of cardboard.

It never lost its edge. It still shaves hair. We love 3V.

The handle, proven on thousands of Little Creeks, remained comfortable even over long stints. (We may add a fob-type lanyard to effectively lengthen the grip, but as-is it works just fine.) The Little Carver's simple sheath is unique to this particular Barkie, and it allowed the knife to ride easily in a pants pocket.

So we're feeling a little sheepish, really, for taking so long to "discover" this knife. We'll happily make up for lost time, though, because Bark River's Little Carver has become a permanent part of our EDC rotation. It's that good.

But we can't help wondering…now that we've escaped our rut, what else have we overlooked? And what, dear friend, might you be missing...hmmm?