CRKT Bona Fides
Instant Takedown
The CRKT Bona Fide has an attractive profile and finish — but the
real beauty may just lie within the first time you need to use its
Gen 2 Field Strip technology.
When CRKT introduced ace knife designer Ken Onion’s Field Strip mechanism a few years back, the cutlery world took note. Here was a mechanism that, like firearms, allowed you to take your knife apart in the wild and thoroughly clean it. Highly impressed, we covered Onion’s innovative Field Strip design on the CRKT Homefront folder in the February 2017 issue of GUNS. Now — seven years later — Onion has trumped himself with a Gen 2 version of his Field Strip technology and it is, as you’d expect, even better.
The CRKT Bona Fide series is the first to feature the Gen 2 technology. We’re featuring the OD Green handled version with a 3.50″ black Drop Point blade. A second black handled model with a satin finished saber-ground blade is also available. Overall length is 8.125″ for both. Other particulars of the Bona Fide brothers, beside different handle finishes, is their blade steel — the OD version utilizes 1.4116 stainless steel, the black version D2 semi-stainless.
The first thing I noticed about the Bona Fide is it has a noticeably slimmer handle profile than its Gen 1 forbears. This is because the Gen 1 Field Strip required two steps to disassemble the knife, a lever on the handle and a thumbscrew on the base, while the Gen 2 requires only the lever. You simply rotate it to the vertical position, push it forward and the knife comes apart. It’s this simple. The Bona Fide blade rolls out on a ball bearing pivot uniquely built into the blade tang — not the handle — to keep things simple.
The Bona Fide separates into three separate components.
ball-bearing-action resides in the blade tang.
Why you’ll like it.
If you’ve ever had mud, viscera, or the like foul up your folder, you’ll instantly see the benefits of Field Strip Gen 2. Just disassemble, rinse, reassemble and you’re back in business. Finally, these Ken Onion designs are just plain attractive — another hallmark of the knifemaker. You get all of this for the affordable MSRP of $125, worth every penny the first time you need to use the Bona Fide’s Gen 2 technology.
