Hunting season is here, which means I’m thinking about knives again. This time it’s the Adventure Sworn Huntsman, the knife that broke my deer drought. I keep saying I have zero intention of turning this into a knife blog. I also keep writing about knives. At this point y’all should probably stop believing me.
This one has been a long time coming. I mentioned the Adventure Sworn Huntsman in passing in the deer hunting retrospective back in December of 2024 and said I might write it up if there was interest. A few of you asked. So here we are.
Full disclosure: I don’t have an affiliate relationship with Adventure Sworn. Nobody sent me anything. I paid for this knife, every option I piled on it, and the shipping with my own money. I just love Cody’s work. Which means the only thing I’m protecting here is my ego for spending what I spent on it.
How I Ended Up With an Adventure Sworn Huntsman
A guy I only know from X, formerly Twitter, turned me on to Adventure Sworn Bushcraft Co. a few years back. They’re a small family outfit in upstate New York. Cody makes the knives and started the whole thing with prototypes out of his dad’s basement woodshop. Amber does the leather. Cody’s dad, Ed, builds the bucksaws and firesteels. That’s the company. No factory, no distributor, no middleman.
They’ve made a few custom knives for me over the years. The first was their Guide, which has lived in my hunting pack since I got it and which I rambled about in What Does Uncle Zo Look For in a Survival Knife? I liked it enough to go back for the Huntsman, which is the knife in their lineup designed for the thing I actually hunt. Adventure Sworn calls it a bushcraft-hunting hybrid that “excels at processing wood and game alike.” The pitch is one knife for skinning, gutting and slicing that can also whittle a tent stake and feed a fire.
The order went in in October of 2022. The knife showed up at the end of January 2023. Call it fifteen weeks. These are made one at a time by three people, so I wasn’t surprised. But if you’re the sort who orders a hunting knife in October expecting to use it in November, this isn’t that kind of purchase.
No More Custom Orders
Worth knowing before you go looking: Cody has since stepped away from custom orders. Adventure Sworn now runs on a drop model. An email goes out announcing a batch of finished knives on the Available Knives page with a go-live date and time, and they sell out almost immediately. A few stragglers survive a couple of days before somebody snags them. So you can’t build an Adventure Sworn Huntsman like mine anymore, but you can get on the list and be quick on the draw.
What I Ordered
Back when the custom order page was a thing, it was dangerous. Every dropdown was a little upcharge, and every upcharge was prettier than the last. Here’s what I checked off, straight from the order confirmation.
| Option | Choice | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Blade | Custom Huntsman, O1 high carbon tool steel | $250 |
| Grind | Full-height convex | +$10 |
| Logo | Spine: “Adventure Sworn” and the steel type | – |
| Scales | Stabilized maple burl | +$45 |
| Liners | Thick (.125″) forest green G10 | +$14 |
| Secondary liner | Thin hunter orange G10 | +$14 |
| Hardware | Copper Loveless bolts | – |
| Sheath | Right-handed premium finish leather, dark brown | +$80 |
| Sheath add-ons | Firesteel loop, removable dangler | +$15, +$30 |
| Firesteel | Matching threaded firesteel | +$65 |
| Shipping | $10 | |
| Total | $533 |
That’s $273 in options on top of a $250 knife. More than half again. I regret none of it, which tells you something about me and nothing about whether you should do the same.
Why I Checked Those Boxes
Some of it was practical. Most of it wasn’t.
- Convex grind. The Huntsman came scandi by default, which is great for wood and less great for slicing meat. A full-height convex puts more belly behind the edge for skinning and slicing, and a strop keeps it going. Ten bucks. Easiest decision on the page.
- Stabilized maple burl. Zero practical reason. It’s gorgeous. Stabilized means the wood is impregnated with resin so it won’t soak up blood and swell, which is what I told myself the reason was. It wasn’t the reason.
- Green and orange liners. The forest green is for looks. The thin hunter orange stripe is for finding the knife when you set it down in the grass next to a gut pile, which every hunter has done at least once.
- Copper bolts. See maple burl.
- The sheath. Adventure Sworn’s leather is half the reason to buy from them. I went with the premium finish in dark brown and added the firesteel loop and the removable dangler so I can run it high on the belt or let it hang below a pack hip belt.
- The firesteel. Matching burl handle, threads into the sheath loop. I’m a Bic lighter guy and I knew that when I ordered it. I ordered it anyway.
The Knife Itself
Numbers first, for the nerds. The Adventure Sworn Huntsman runs 8.5″ overall with a 4″ cutting edge on a drop-point blade that measures 1/8″ thick on my calipers. That’s thinner than the 5/32″ stock Adventure Sworn lists for the Huntsman today, and thinner than the Wanderer’s 3/16″. It’s a slicer, not a pry bar, and that’s the right call for a knife whose main job is meat. The blade is tall for its length with a lot of belly, which is exactly what you want working a hide off a carcass.
The handle is where Cody’s design shows. It’s the “coke bottle” shape he’s known for: full and rounded, with a swell in the middle and a flare at the butt that gives the pinky something to hang onto. It fills my hand without any hot spots. There’s no real guard, so the forward grip for detail work is unobstructed.
Fit and finish out of the box was excellent, with one exception I’ll get to. The edge was sharp. The copper bolts sat flush with the scales, and the liners were even all the way around. The blade isn’t a mirror polish, but it’s shiny. Definitely not matte. I’d call it satin, with the caveat that I don’t know my polish levels very well.
The Missing Stamps
Remember that line item for the spine logo with the steel type? On an Adventure Sworn Huntsman the maker’s mark goes on the top of the tang and the steel type on the bottom, both on the exposed steel between the liners. Mine arrived with neither. No maker’s mark, no steel stamp, nothing but clean O1 from the plunge to the butt. I’d forgotten what I ordered by the time it showed up, so it took me a minute to notice something was missing. I emailed Cody. He said it was most likely O1 high carbon tool steel, apologized, and asked me to send it in so he could fix it. I declined. Partly because I didn’t want to wait again, and mostly because a misprint on a custom knife is its own kind of story. I’ve got the email thread for the provenance. If you’re the type who wants the stamp, send it back. Cody offered without me asking, which is the part that matters.
Two Years of Looking at It
Here’s the embarrassing part. The Adventure Sworn Huntsman arrived in January of 2023 and the next time it saw a deer was December of 2024. That’s not because I’m a careful reviewer who likes to live with a knife before writing about it. It’s because this is a beautifully crafted piece of work and I didn’t want to be the guy who scratched it.
My go-to hunting knife has been the Buck 537 Open Season since the first deer I ever broke down. It works. It has a gut hook. I trust it. So on the rare occasions I did get to hunt, the Buck came along and the Huntsman stayed home looking pretty.
Then a good friend invited me to hunt his property in December of 2024, and I decided it was time to stop being precious about a tool. The Huntsman went in the pack. The Buck came too, as a backup, because I’m not an idiot.
Finally Putting the Huntsman to Work
I had one real worry going in. Blood is slick. Polished wood is slick. Polished wood covered in blood seemed like a recipe for a knife on the ground or, worse, a hand sliding down onto the edge. I’d read enough internet opinions about “pretty” handles versus “working” handles to half believe them.
The doe came on the third opportunity of the day. The retrospective has that whole story, and the wide shot of this same moment. This is the part where the Adventure Sworn Huntsman earns its keep or doesn’t. Once she was hung, the Huntsman did everything but the opening cut. For that I used the Benchmade 8 Hook as a stand-in gut hook, since the Huntsman doesn’t have one. Hook in below the knee, rip to the jaw, done. From there it was all Huntsman: skinning, shoulders, backstraps, dropping the guts, tenders and hams.
It sliced through everything with ease. The tall blade and the belly gave me plenty of edge to work with on the hide, and the drop point stayed out of trouble around the gut cavity. The size hits that Goldilocks balance for medium game. Big enough to do the laborious parts of field dressing and quartering, small enough for fine work. I wouldn’t hesitate to pick it up to carefully cape a trophy buck.
Bone and Blood
It also hit plenty of bone, which I didn’t plan on but didn’t avoid either. The edge rode the ribs while I took the backstraps. The tip dug into the hip joints and pried the sockets apart while I worked the hams. That’s the kind of thing that chips a thin edge or rolls a tip on a lesser knife. The tip is right as rain. I can’t find any edge damage, by eye or by thumbnail.
And the handle? Zero slippage. Not sliding, not even close. By the end my hands and the handle were covered in blood and I was still working with confidence. I’m convinced it’s the shape and not the material. The coke bottle swell locks into the palm and the butt flare stops the hand from sliding back. The polished burl gets all the attention, but the geometry is doing the work.
Since the Deer
I haven’t sharpened the Adventure Sworn Huntsman. Between the deer and some light kitchen duty since, the edge will still shave hair off my arm. That’s not a brag about my edge care. I haven’t done anything to it that would dull it. But a deer’s worth of hide, meat and bone with no touch-up is a fair first test, and O1 passed it.
O1 is a high carbon steel, which means it rusts if you let it, and it takes a patina whether you let it or not. I rinsed and wiped the blade down shortly after the deer went on ice. When I started writing this I was going to tell you that left some faint spotting on the finish. Then I pulled the knife out to photograph it in good light. That’s not spotting. That’s a full patina. The whole flat has gone mottled gray from the belly to the plunge, like a Case pocket knife your grandfather carried. There’s no orange and no pitting anywhere, so it isn’t rust, and the edge doesn’t care. But that shiny satin blade I described a few paragraphs ago is a memory. One deer did that.
I’m fine with it. A patina is what carbon steel looks like after it’s done some work, and it actually helps protect the steel underneath. The copper bolts have gone the same way and look better for it. If you want the blade to stay bright, that’s a reason to look at a stainless steel, not a knock on this one. Just know going in that “wipe it down after” slows the change. It doesn’t stop it.
The Sheath and the Firesteel
Amber’s leather is as good as advertised. The premium finish is dark, even and slick enough that the knife draws clean. Retention is friction only. No keeper strap. If you read the Wanderer review you know how I feel about keeper straps, so understand that “no keeper strap” is high praise from me. It’s a proper leather sheath for a working knife. The dangler lets it hang below a pack hip belt so it doesn’t fight the belt for space, and it comes off when I want the knife riding high. One nit: the screw on the dangler hardware can work itself loose. A dab of blue Loctite took care of it. Blue, not red, so the dangler still comes off with a screwdriver instead of a torch. Check yours before the season.
The firesteel loop holds the matching rod right where it should be. The firesteel itself is a healthy chunk of ferrocerium with a burl handle big enough to actually grab, which is more than I can say for some firesteels I’ve reviewed. And the Adventure Sworn Huntsman has a proper 90-degree spine. I’ve struck the rod with it and the sparks are plentiful. I’m still a Bic lighter guy. But it’s nice to know the backup works.
Verdict
The Good
- Handle stays planted even slick with blood
- Goldilocks size for medium game, from quartering to caping
- Took ribs and hip sockets with no edge or tip damage
- Still shaves hair, one deer and no sharpening later
- Friction-fit leather sheath with no keeper strap
The Bad
- No gut hook, so plan on a second tool
- Mine shipped without the spine stamps. Cody offered to fix it.
- One deer turned the satin blade gray. Carbon steel does that.
- Custom orders are gone, so now you race a drop
The Ugly
- I let it sit for two years because it was too pretty to use. That’s on me, not Cody.
Closing Thoughts
The Adventure Sworn Huntsman is the first knife I’ve owned that I had to talk myself into using, and the first one I’ve regretted not using sooner. It did the job on a deer better than I expected, and better than I had any right to expect given how little I’d asked of it. It’s going hunting again. It already has a spot in the pack next to the 8 Hook.
Is the Adventure Sworn Huntsman worth $533? Depends on what you’re buying. If you want a skinning knife that works, the Buck 537 does, and the 536 does it for a quarter of that. If you want a knife made by three people in upstate New York that you’ll hand down to somebody, with a sheath to match and a maker who answers his own email, this is that. I knew which one I was buying when I filled out that order form. You can’t fill out that form anymore, but the drops are the same knives without the dropdowns.
Your coin, your choice. Mine’s spent, and I’m not sorry.
Comments