Unprepared Giveaway: Enter to Win a Morakniv Companion Spark

Spark up your 4th of July with a knife that makes fire.

You need a knife in your survival kit. And I want to give you one.

You know what else you need in your survival kit? A way to make fire. What if your knife and firestarter were in one package?

The good folks at Morakniv contacted me and asked if I wanted to review their Companion Spark knife. I love Morakniv’s products, so I said sure. And then I thought it would be cool to give it to an Unprepared reader, and Morakniv said sure.

To enter to win the Morakniv Companion Spark, simply subscribe to Unprepared before July 12, 2022. That can be either a free or paid subscription. On July 12, I will pick a winner at random and contact them via email. It’s that easy.

However, there is one small catch: I’m limiting the giveaway to US residents because I don’t know the legality of shipping a razor-sharp knife abroad.

Now let’s talk about Morakniv knives in general and the Companion Spark specifically.

Build Your Own Fire Kit

Why I Love Morakniv

A good knife is invaluable on the homestead or in the wild. You can use one to cut cordage, whittle wood, dress animals, split kindling, remove splinters, and so on. You can spend hundreds on a good knife, but Morakniv makes the best bang-for-your-buck knives out there.

For one, they’re inexpensive. A basic Morakniv Companion costs $20 or less. But despite being so cheap, these Swedish-made knives are high quality, and unlike most knives at this price point, they arrive from the factory razor sharp. Remember when I sliced my finger open? That was a Morakniv. So if you win this knife, please be careful.

This Morakniv Companion Spark arrived sharp enough to shave with.

Fortunately, the Morakniv Companion comes with a snug and sturdy plastic sheath. The knife clicks into place and it takes some pull to get it out. You have to be careful to make sure you don’t pull too hard and cut yourself, but it also means this knife isn’t going to just fall out while you’re hiking.

Knives don’t stay sharp forever. Every time you use the knife you’re dulling the edge, and a dull edge makes for a dangerous knife that’s more likely to slip and cut you instead of smoothing cutting through the material.

A lot of people are intimidated by knife sharpening. I know I was at first. But a Morakniv Companion is a great knife to practice sharpening with for a few reasons:

• It comes sharp, so you don’t have to profile a dull blade before using it, and sharpening is simply a matter of touching up the edge.

• It’s cheap, so you’re not going to cry if you screw it up. And when you start sharpening, you’re going to screw up some knives before you get a feel for it.

• Morakniv puts a Scandanavian or “Scandi” grind on their blades. A Scandi grind has only a single bevel — where the knife tapers down into a point — so finding the correct angle on a whetstone is easy. You just put that one big bevel down flat on your stone and draw back the knife.

A lot of knife aficionados don’t like a Scandi grind because sharpening eats away more material than a small micro bevel on the edge. But for a newbie, it makes sharpening practically idiot-proof.

I keep two Morakniv Companions: one in my go-bag and one in my shop building. The one in my go-bag I keep for emergencies and outdoor excursions, and I keep a large sail needle duct-taped to the sheath. The other Morakniv is for farm jobs like slaughtering and dressing chickens and dressing rabbits, though I now use a much-smaller paring knife for the rabbits. The 3.9-inch blade of the Morakniv Companion is just a little too big for that job.

The Morakniv Companion Spark

The Companion Spark is a regular Morakniv Companion with a literal twist: it has a small ferro rod embedded in the handle. Twist the end of the handle to pull it out. The Morakniv Companion Spark is a little more expensive than the vanilla Morakniv Companion at around $30-40, but it’s still pretty cheap for a knife of this caliber.

One big downside of the regular Morakniv Companion is that the spine (back edge) won’t spark a ferro rod because it’s slightly rounded off. You can fix that with a lot of filing, but the Companion Spark has a flat spine so it can spark the ferro rod out of the package.

Starting a fire with the Companion Spark is easy:

1. Get your tinder in place. I like vaseline-soaked cotton balls.

2. Twist out and remove the ferro rod.

3. Grip the ferro rod in one hand and the knife in the other.

4. Quickly scrape the back of the knife along the ferro rod. Aim the sparks in the direction of your tinder.

Even though the ferro rod is small, it throws out a nice shower of sparks. I tested it out myself, and if you win this knife, you’ll see a bit of the material has been scraped away already, but it has plenty of life left in it.

Since the ferro rod locks into the knife and has an optional paracord you can tie to it to hang it from your wrist, it makes your ferro rod much harder to lose, which seems trivial, but is a big deal in wilderness survival. Joe Robinet had to tap out of Alone because he dropped his ferro rod on a beach and couldn’t find it.

Joe is a seasoned bushcrafter, but looked foolish in front of millions of people because he dropped one little thing. And in a real wilderness survival situation, there is no “tapping out.” Imagine freezing to death because you dropped one little thing. Don’t let that happen to you.

What I Don’t Like About the Companion Spark

There isn’t much to complain about here, but the fact that the handle is hollow to accommodate the ferro rod bothers me somewhat because I’m afraid it might break given enough stress. It feels solid enough, but I wouldn’t want to baton wood with it.

Morakniv blades come in either carbon steel or stainless steel. The Companion Spark has a stainless steel blade. The upside is it won’t rust (easily). The downside is stainless isn’t as easy to sharpen as carbon steel. Personally, I don’t see stainless as a downside, but some people do.

And this isn’t a downside of the product itself, but don’t think a fire-starting knife replaces a complete fire kit. You want to have lots of options and spares because two is one and one is none. You want a small and light outdoor kit, but this isn’t Alone where you’re limited to just ten items. Firestarting materials are small, light, and essential. Bring plenty.

But what the Companion Spark can be is a useful tool in your kit that does double duty for both cutting and fire. And that’s a super useful combo for survival.