Morakniv Companion Knife

Every camping box has one knife that came from the kitchen drawer, and the kitchen has been asking for it back since the last trip. It goes along because at camp a knife’s day is mostly other people’s requests: a marshmallow stick for one kid, apple slices for the other, a length of cord for the tarp.

Those small jobs are what owners and reviewers describe the Morakniv Companion doing, and they are why the kitchen knife can stay home. This page is about one version, the stainless Companion (S) in Hi-Vis Orange.

Which Companion the button buys

Morakniv sells several knives called Companion, and the names are easy to mix up. The one behind the button on this page is the Companion (S): 12C27 stainless steel, in Hi-Vis Orange. Morakniv also makes a carbon-steel Companion, a thicker Companion HeavyDuty and a Companion Spark. They are different knives with their own listings, and nothing on this page is about them.

Morakniv’s numbers for this one: a 104 mm (4.1-inch) blade, 2.5 mm thick, with a Scandi grind and a standard tang rather than a full one. The whole knife is 219 mm long and weighs 118.4 g, about 4.2 oz. That is a little more than a stick of butter.

At camp: kindling, cord and thin branches

GearJunkie, reviewing the stainless Companion, calls it strong enough for lightweight batoning of thin branches. Batoning means driving the blade through wood by striking its back with another piece of wood.

Thin sticks, yes. Rounds of firewood, no.

Between Lakes calls the edge “the kind that makes you immediately confident reaching for it to prep food or carve tinder.” An owner on r/knives lists kindling, food at camp and the garden among the jobs theirs has done in about a decade, without saying which steel it is.

Hands get wet at camp, and the grip is the part reviewers mention. GearJunkie’s reviewer found the rubber handle secure even with a soaked hand, and a video reviewer who has used a Companion S since 2021 also finds the grip secure and hard to slip out of.

In the camp kitchen

Food is where the thin blade earns its place in the box. Between Lakes names food prep in the same sentence as tinder, the owner on r/knives slices food at camp with theirs, and a video reviewer who used a stainless Companion for two months in the kitchen and at camp says the edge held well and still cut paper at the end.

Our sources say nothing about the dishwasher, oiling, or cleaning up after raw meat, so we won’t guess at those.

In the home emergency kit

Half of a home emergency kit is packaging, and the first job for the knife in it is opening the rest of the kit. After that it is cord, tape and whatever needs cutting while the lights are out.

For a box that sits in a closet between emergencies, three plain things count. It is stainless, the version reviewers point to for a knife that gets wet: Between Lakes, writing for paddlers, calls stainless the more practical choice when the knife will regularly be exposed to water, and survival-kompass.de warns that the carbon Companion tends to rust. The plastic sheath holds the knife by friction, covers the edge and has a belt clip, though Between Lakes calls it basic. And it is orange, which helps at the back of a dark closet.

A bag you may have to carry on foot puts weight on the list too. One commenter on r/bugout has taken hatchets and big knives on camping trips, and their bug-out bag holds a Companion and a multitool, because “it’s better to have a light pack.” Choosing the bag itself is covered in our bug-out bag guide.

A commenter on r/BuyItForLife calls it “affordable enough to get a couple and not worry about messing one up”. Take that literally: one for the camping box, one for the emergency kit.

Keeping it sharp

Sharpening is the upkeep our sources talk about. The Scandi grind is one wide, flat bevel on each side of the edge, and Morakniv gives the edge as 22 to 24 degrees in total. GearJunkie says those flat surfaces make it easier to sharpen than a hollow or convex grind, and the owner on r/knives says it “Sharpens up quick”.

The steel is where reviewers split. MM Gear has the stainless Companion and calls it the easier of the two to sharpen, but says the carbon one holds its edge better. The German site survival-kompass.de finds the stainless version difficult to sharpen and the carbon one better suited to it. So the stainless trade is plain: less worry about water, and an edge you may touch up more often than a carbon one.

On toughness, one r/Bushcraft commenter who says they make knives writes that Mora’s Sandvik stainless steels are “tough as hell, tougher than many common carbon steels.” One commenter’s word, not a measurement.

Keep a small sharpener with the knife. Our portable knife sharpener guide starts from the knife’s edge, so take the 22 to 24 degrees with you.

What it can’t do

Wood is the first complaint. GearJunkie calls it strong enough for light batoning of thin branches, and MM Gear warns that because the tang is not full, quite heavy batoning can snap the blade off the handle; it also says a long wilderness trip needs something stronger.

survival-kompass.de says the rounded back won’t strike a fire steel, and Hobbystack says the spine isn’t ground square for one; a video reviewer of the stainless Companion says you may need to file the spine first. Between Lakes calls the sheath basic, with no secondary retention. And the video reviewer who has used a Companion S since 2021 points to a little chipping at the tip after years of use.

Read that list again for what is missing. The complaints are about wood, fire, the sheath, long trips and a tip after years of use. None of them is about food.

Straight from the threads

Who should pick something else

Splitting rounds of firewood is a job for a camping hatchet, not a 2.5 mm blade. If you will be hard on a knife, the Gerber StrongArm in our camping knife guide is the one an owner there bought for their partner and children, saying their Gerbers have endured all their abuse. And if you want a spine that throws sparks straight from the box, this isn’t it.

Otherwise, put the orange one in the camping box. The kitchen knife has been waiting to come home.

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