Hey, everyone. David C. Andersen here coming at you from
the woods behind the KnifeCenter, because today we’re pitting two budget bushcraft
knives against each other. It’s the Mora Garberg versus the Condor
Terrasaur. Let’s do this. So the Mora Garberg was released a couple
of years ago, and it’s the full-tang Mora knife that people have been asking for for
a long time. We’ve got a sturdy overmolded handle and
a protruding pommel. It’s definitely a solid tool, but there’s
actually a new competitor running around in the woods these days, and that knife is the
Condor Terrasaur, which is adapted from a custom design by Joe Flowers. And these days, in the Condor version, it
follows very closely the same formula as the Garberg. We’re out here today to compare these two
knives, feature by feature to see how they stack up to each other, and to see which one
is worth your money, because even though Moras have always been a great deal, the new Garberg
started about $90 in 2019, which is a little bit higher than some people may have expected
from a Mora. Meanwhile, the Condor comes in a bit over
$40, so we’re gonna find out which one’s best. Since there are a couple of bushcraft knives,
we’re gonna keep our tests today to some sort of bushcraft tasks, but before we head
down the hill to find some wood that we’re gonna use for some tent stakes, I want to
talk about the sheaths real quick. The Condor comes with a very Mora-like hard
plastic sheath. It is ambidextrous, the knife will go in either
direction. It’s not gonna fall out easily on you. You’ve got a nice thumb pad there that can
be used to push out, and if you want to orient that on the other side, this belt loop does
slide off so you can spin it around, so you can have that for you no matter which side
you’re using it on. You’ve also got a couple of drain holes
on the bottom to help moisture run out, and all in all, it’s a very solid economical
package, and very easy to carry, too. This is a fairly lightweight knife. The Mora actually comes with a couple of different
sheath options, and today, the one we have out here right now is the premium leather
sheath option. It’s a black leather affair with a snap
flap on the front to keep it completely.. Not so much completely exposed, but it keeps
the tang of the knife and the hilt of the knife covered up very nicely. Still a very easy to carry knife, it is a
little bit heavier than the Condor, however, so if ultralight is your thing, if weight
is a concern, then you’re probably gonna want to go with the Condor. As I said, there are a couple of sheath options
for the Mora, and if you’re not a fan of that leather, they actually do have a hard
plastic option as well, called their Multi-mount sheath that has a lot of great options for
attaching that sheath to all of your different gear. So we’ve got some sapling right here that
we’re gonna take down to see how these knives perform on green wood. Now, both of these knives have a Scandi grind,
as you can probably tell, which is, you can kind of think of it like a double-planed chisel. These are great for working all kinds of wood. Basically the ground portion of the knife
comes straight down to the point at the edge. There’s no secondary bevel on this Condor. The reason I mention the Condor specifically
is because the Mora actually does have a hint of a secondary bevel right at the edge, something
that’s common to Moras, actually. Fortunately, that’s going to sharpen out
very easily, so it’s not a big concern in the long run, but we’ll see how it fares
on some wood. So, in order to cut down a tree with your
knife, as opposed to some kind of chopper, you want to bend it over, and you’re actually
gonna do a rocking motion with the blade. That’s because you’re not actually chopping
it, you’re actually going to be pressing through the wood that’s under tension. That’s giving me a little bit of trouble
here, but you want to come in here at a 45 degree angle to the grain so it’s going
to pop that loose as you go. Let me go ahead and bend it the other way. It just goes to show you that it doesn’t
always work quite like they show it in the textbooks. Now I’m going to switch over to the Condor
and see if it behaves similarly on this branch right next to it. So this particular sapling was pretty gnarly,
actually, and both knives performed pretty much the same. They did the job with just a little bit of
fuss, not too bad in the grand scheme of things, so now we’re gonna take one of these up
to our block up there, and we’re going to break this down into smaller pieces and use
this to make some tent stakes. The next thing we’re going to do is use
a piece of wood to baton our knives across the grain on this branch to get the pieces
that we want to use. Now, when it’s done safely, this can be
a great way to get more utility out of your small blade, but you’ve got to have materials
that can stand up to that sort of abuse. Now, the Condor, while most of their blades
are made using 1075 carbon steel, the Terrasaur actually uses 1095 carbon steel. It’s not quite as tough as 1075, but you’re
going to get plenty of edge retention, and it still ought to be plenty tough enough to
do this sort of job. We’ve got about an eighth of an inch of
thickness, so I’ve got no worries about this whatsoever. Now, with the Garberg, you have a couple of
steel options. They first launched this knife using Sandvick’s
14C28N stainless steel, but the version we have here is a carbon steel blade. Now, Mora uses European nomenclature to name
their steel, but it’s effectively the same as the 1095 on the Condor. Now, when you’re doing this, you want to
make sure you’re hitting the spine of this at a very straight angle. You don’t want there to be any flex, or
you’re going to risk doing damage to your blade. This Mora is ready to go, it’s about an
eighth of an inch thick, just like the Condor, let’s see how it does here. Now, on that first time through, I kind of
just wailed on it a little bit, and I actually created a little bit of a split, so I’m
going to do it again down here, being a little more careful to form a V that little bit better
so we don’t get that splitting action. There we go. Now I just need to do it one more time right
here at the end. All right, that’s going to form the basis
of our tent stake using the Mora. I’ve got a little bit of splitting on this
side again when I was using the Garberg, so I’m going to start under this knot here
with the Condor. Very good. Got a little bit of a split. So even though we got that split, I’m not
going to worry about it right now since we’re just demonstrating, but you definitely would
want to do something a little bit differently if you were actually going to use this. So as I’ve been doing all these cuts that
I need to do in order to execute my tent stake: my stop cuts, some chest lever grip stuff,
even the bracing on the knee to get more leverage to cut through the tip, I’m finding that
the Garberg has a comfortable handle. It’s got a very large oval cross section,
so it indexes very well in the hand, but because of the nature of it, it’s almost symmetrical,
so it works in just about any grip you can think of. Whether you’re cutting reverse, that chest
lever where you’re pointing it toward your knuckles, it just fills the hand very nicely,
and I find it very easy to use. Now I’m going to switch over to the Terrasaur
and see how it compares. Now you can see right away that the handle
is a little bit narrower and a little bit thinner as well, and it has a shape that’s
a little more biased towards a forward grip, so we’ll see how that does for us while
we’re cutting. So you can definitely see right there where
this piece of wood split while I was cross batoning it. Now that’s not really a good thing, you’re
not gonna want to actually use this, because if you pound on it, it’s just going to split
even more, but for demonstration purposes, we’re gonna keep going. Now, one thing I’m seeing right here, if
you compare the blade shapes of the Terrasaur to the Garberg, the Garberg has a bit more
belly out near the tip, whereas the Terrasaur has a bit of a narrower tip. The reason I bring that up now is I’m actually
carving in with the tip right behind this knot, and that’s where that narrower profile
comes in handier for those tighter spaces you can get it into. So even though the Condor has a slimmer handle,
I didn’t find it uncomfortable at all, it was still very easy to use, and I didn’t
find myself feeling any kind of hot spots or feeling like any blisters were being raised,
or anything like that. Now when it comes to the edge itself, out
of the box the Mora had a bit of a sharper edge than the Condor. The Condor was just a little bit behind it,
but before I brought them out here today, though, I did make sure to sharpen and freshly
strop both of these knives so they were on pretty even footing, at least in terms of
the sharpness of the edge itself. Now, in terms of the edge geometry itself,
I actually found that the Condor wanted to bite into the wood a little bit more aggressively
than the Mora did. That made it easier to hog off big chunks,
especially when I was doing the cuts where it was braced against my knee, I had no problem
ripping off bigger chunks of wood. Whereas the Mora, still did the job, but was
just a little bit behind this in terms of performance, at least in terms, as I said,
of the edge geometry itself. So the next thing we’re going to do is turn
our attention to doing a little bit of light splitting or batoning. This is going to be useful, say, if everything’s
wet out and you need to get a fire going, and you need to get to the dry wood in the
center here, or you just can’t find any good dry kindling. In that sort of situation, this is something
you can do if your knife can stand up to it. Now, given that these are smaller knives,
the blades are only a bit over four inches, we want to make sure the wood we’re splitting
is no thicker than our wrist, so that we don’t run the risk of over-exerting our blade. Now, the Mora certainly had no problem, at
least with this small piece of wood, but you can see, also another reason you might want
to baton, is to get a flat piece of wood like this if you’re trying to practice your primitive
fire starting methods, this is a way you can get a flat piece to start your bow drill hearth. That way you can get a friction fire going
even if you didn’t bring your materials in. So, just like the Mora, the Condor had no
real trouble doing the batoning here. Now, this particular piece of wood that the
Condor was going through was a little bit knottier, but even in spite of that, the performance
was about the same. Now, I know some people get nervous about
batoning knives like this, especially when you’re talking about cheaper bushcraft knives,
but with the full tang construction and the 1095 steel, I’m not worried at all, and
there’s plenty of reports out there in the wild of people who’ve batoned these knives
and seriously abused them, and they’ve always come out on top. Now I mentioned a friction fire hearth board
just a little bit ago, and to do one of those, one of the things you need to do first is
actually put a divot into one side of the wood. Now, you’ll notice that both of these knives
do have a protruding tang, which makes drilling a little bit more uncomfortable than with
a rounded over pommel. Now, that can be mitigated a little bit with
a nice pair of work gloves, and that’s gonna let you get the job done, but that’s something
that you’re gonna have to keep in mind if you choose this knife. Now, on the flip side of that, that protruding
tang does give us a little bit of an advantage, say if we’re using a piece of coal to burn
out a spoon or a cup that we’re making out in the wild, this makes a great tool for scraping
away that charred wood if you’re doing bushcraft tasks such as those. On the subject of getting a fire going, though,
it’s not going to start itself, so we’re going to make some feather sticks to make
some tinder. Now, my apologies to the folks on Instagram
out there who might be able to make some absolutely astoundingly beautiful feather sticks, it’s
never been quite my strongest suit, but at least out here near the tips, they are going
to be narrow enough to catch a spark. However, if you need to get even finer, both
of these knives come with a crisp spine. Not only can you use that to strike a fire
steel, you can also use that to scrape wood or bark to work up a very fine fuzz that’s
going to catch a spark very nicely. Now, I’m finding, at least for me, the Condor
is able to get a little bit finer curl and a little bit finer shavings than I was able
to do with the Mora. On the other hand, I’m also cutting a bunch
more off as I go along, because I’m kind of slicing through a little bit more easily. Take that into account, again, your mileage
may vary, but either one’s going to do feather sticks just fine. Now, as I mentioned, the Condor does have
a crisp spine, I will say, however, it’s not quite as crisp as the Mora, so if you’re
using it often to strike your fire steel or scrape other things, the Mora is probably
a little bit more effective in that regard. Now, I think that difference in the crispness
in the spine kind of tells the tale of what makes these knives different from one another,
because as I said, they are fairly far apart in price. The Mora Garberg is more expensive, but the
fit and finish is definitely better than the Condor. The Condor is a great tool at a great price,
but you are only paying a little bit over $40 for this, so it’s not going to have
world class fit and finish. The Mora, however, is simply astonishing with
the level of high quality they’re able to achieve for the price. When it comes right down to it, though, both
tools are going to perform very well, and some of it’s going to come down to personal
preference. Do you like something that’s a bit nicer
out of the box, or you prefer something with a nice fat handle, then the Garberg is definitely
the way to go. I definitely appreciate the ergonomics and
the quality of the tool you get with the Garberg. The Condor’s no slouch, though, and in terms
of the fit and finish, it’s perfectly fine, and certainly a lot better than they used
to be about ten years ago, I’ll say that for sure. The handle’s a little bit slimmer, and it’s
a little bit lighter, so if you have smaller hands or you’re conscious about weight,
that could be a consideration. Even though it’s a smaller handle, I still
feel very comfortable, and I also appreciate the taper right here at the front of the scales
that lets you pinch grip even more effectively. Now’s the part where you tell us which of
these bushcraft knives would earn a place on your belt. Do you go with the Mora Garberg, or the Condor
Terrasaur? Be sure to let us know in the comments, and
to get your hands on either of them, you can click the links in the description to head
over to KnifeCenter.com. I’m David C. Andersen from the woods behind
the KnifeCenter, signing off. See you next time.