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A U.S. Made Fixed Blade That Proves a Big Bowie can Still be a Practical Outdoor Tool.
This knife was more of a visual decision for us than anything. Forget that this kind of knife personifies an entire age of exploring the American frontier, or that it’s part of a long tradition of trying to interpret writings and diagrams from explorers and legendary craftsmen like James Black. We picked up the Bear & Son 502 Bowie because we thought the big blade, stag bone handle scales, and wide brass guard would look cool in the mountain creeks we regularly hike and camp in.
So, as embarrassing as it is to admit, we were surprised when it cut and chopped like a beast and was actually comfortable to hold and work with. The 502 Bowie’s performance made it an easy add to our favorite US made Bowie knives article.
The 502 American Bowie is an excellent camping knife. We chopped up branches with it, we processed kindling with it, we sat around poking things with it. The only task we missed was throwing spark, and that was mostly because the size of the blade and the guard just make that a pain.It comes with a single-stitched leather sheath with a retention strap. It’s nothing too fancy but it gets the job done.It rides on the belt like you’d expect a 14-inch knife to: It’s a little floppy and heavy, but the wide loop helps to make it feel more stable.Drawing can be awkward until you break in the leather. The sheath likes to hug the blade, and there’s a lot of blade to hug, but once you get it in hand, this knife comes alive.The curvature in the stag bone scales don’t show up well in pictures, but this handle was much more comfortable than we expected. The shaping followed the lines of our hands in a way that made the grip feel a lot stronger.No surprises with how this knife could swipe through some things. We were cleaning up branches and pine trees in record time with it.Carving could be awkward because of the size and the aggressive bite in the edge, but it was great for cutting a quick and rough point or notch into a stick.This is the kind of knife that could replace a hatchet in a pinch. Not just because it can eat up larger pieces of wood, but because it’s incredibly fun to swing around. We wouldn’t want to tackle anything thicker than an arm-thick branch with it, though.This has a full, exposed tang, so cold weather will make it tricky with bare hands, and this is where the bone scales aren’t the most ideal, but we still had a good time working with it with gloves on.Despite the blade length, the 502 Bowie is balanced fairly close to the ricasso. It’s still blade heavy, but not so much that it feels unwieldy or that we couldn’t get it to sit on a tree knot with a little bit of patience.We’re running out of things to say about the knife, so take a moment to appreciate it in its natural element: Stuck in a hole in a tree.We especially liked the steel choice for this knife: Sandvik 12C27M is soft, tough, and highly stainless. It’s easy to fix up rolls in the edge, and it’s easy to put a razor edge on it.Maybe this is a good spot to say that after all our haphazard chopping, poking, and snow-chilled flapping around we never saw any serious wear on the knife. The scales stayed intact, and we never managed to chip the blade.The bowie design has still got it, not that anyone thought it didn’t, but we had fun reminding ourselves that a well made bowie knife can still make a dent into the frontier. Or (in our case) make fast, random shapes in flammable pieces of nature, and holy hell did Bear & Son make this thing well.
Ben started a twenty year commercial photography career after a blurry stint in the navy. He spent a lot of time losing and breaking knives and other EDC gear on location shoots before starting Nothing But Knives. He has reviewed and tested hundreds of both outdoor and kitchen knives over the course of the last six years, and he was mostly sober while testing and reviewing.
