Just in time for your winter solstice adjacent giving holiday of choice, there’s a whole bunch of new crap at Walmart ready to sucker your grandma out of her cash and turn every cutlery nerd’s unboxing day into pure disappointment when it turns out you wound up with three of these damn things from various distant relations because everybody heard you’re into knives, right?

I was at my local orphan-crushing retail juggernaut the other day and noticed that the full array all of these displays must’ve finally hit the sales floor between now and the last time I darkened their doorstep in order to buy this. It seems the theme this year is sets, or maybe it is every year but I dunno because I don’t check, plus I deliberately ignore the Internet scuttlebutt over this kind of thing like I’m avoiding Silksong spoilers or some shit. Anyway, the play here is to make you think a pile of crappy knives all sold together is somehow a better value than a single crappy knife all sold on its lonesome. Although given the ultimate fate of probably most cheap Walmart knives what with getting busted, lost forever in the fishin’ hole, or confiscated by airport security, there might be something to be said about having a whole charcuterie board of the little bastards to begin with so you’ll have a ready supply of backups.

I browsed and documented a fair assortment of the available offerings which include this fuckin’ thing, and this fuckin’ thing, and these fuckin’ things, and these fuckin’ things. I have to admit that this SOG branded set was almost intriguing enough to get me to cave, and this box cutter set with a pair of Gerber EAB knockoffs in it is also interesting enough to warrant a mention if you’re into that kind of thing. Likewise, this Kershaw branded set was coquettishly beckoning in my direction. I almost bought this interchangeable blade dressing knife combo just for the whimsy of it all until I realized that I will never in a thousand years need to dress game for any purpose, and even if I found myself in that situation in the aftermath of some manner of hypothetical zombie attack scenario I of all people would probably not have any trouble laying my hands on a sharpened implement as it is.

The problem with all of this kind of crap is that, just like those Black Friday “doorbusters” these days, all of these kits are purposefully cut-down models commissioned specifically for the purposes of cramming them into bad value-for-dollar bundles like this and you’d pretty much always be better off buying a single boxed copy of some other knife actually from its purported maker. They are not, per se, necessarily actually a deal. All of these were either explicitly constructed of garbo low end steels or didn’t bother to specify, and ultimately didn’t include much of anything I actually gave a shit about. So I left them alone.

Except.

Except, except, except.

Yeah, I still bought this one. Of course I did; you all saw the headline.

Among various other options, this one in particular is the Swiss Tech “Helden” kit. These things apparently all have international-chic faux Swedish names, sort of like Ikea furniture. And it’s precisely an EDC Bro Starter Pack meme shitpost, but in real life.

If you apply a couple of brain cells to this you’ll quickly realize the inherent shortcoming in these sorts of kits, vis-a-vis the fact that any presumptive recipient you’d be gifting this to who is into the discipline in question is pretty likely to already have a selection of spiffy knives, pens, keyring doodads, and other trinkets that they’ve picked out for themselves for various reasons. Thus they’re unlikely to be excited by a perfunctory spread of Chinese knockoff stand-ins carelessly curated from the back pages of the vendor catalog where only the absolute lowest bill of materials cost items are found.

Except.

…I already said except.

A couple of things tickled my fancy, here. First is that in addition to a dinky EDC pen and wholly unexciting keyring, the Helden set also includes a little pen shaped interchangeable bit screwdriver kit, which according to the box comes with T6 and T8 Torx bits inside (as well as a 2.5mm slotted driver) which ought to be just about perfect for fiddling with knife screws in the field. It’s even got a little pocket clip.

Second is that it includes an only mildly cheapified instance of Swiss Tech’s Stämmig knife, which sports a gen-u-wine 12C27 Sandvik steel blade which is a mile or two beyond the 3cr and 420 bladed dreck in the other assortment kits, and in this instance got off mostly unscathed with the only visible downgrade being getting busted down from the full fat models’ aluminum and carbon fiber scale options to regular G-10. This is labeled as the “Stämmig M2” version to indicate its yule tide cheapness.

It’s worth mentioning that the carbon fiber scale version of this knife is $25 all on its lonesome. This whole kit is $30, like apparently all of the current gift combos, so you’re basically allowing Hangzhou GreatStar Industrial Co., Ltd. to save $2 on the scales and you get to spend the change on a screwdriver and a little pen. “Cut, write, maintain, and carry,” thus claims the front of the box. We’ll see about all of that in due time, I’m sure.

I don’t know where the hell “Helden” comes from in all of this. Nothing in the kit itself is named such; apparently it’s the name of the entire box set, as whole. It translates to, “the hero.” Oh, save us all from the marketing department.

Minus the gift box packaging, here’s the full spread of what you get. Concealed inside is also a small baggie with a trio of screws, presumably provided as replacements for some of those in the knife. There’s no instructions leaflet or anything, though so you get no explanation of any of it. Just a cardboard tray and some self-adhesive thingummies holding in all the various bits and bobs, and that’s your lot.

Nöt För Fïghtïng The Møøsë

Let’s start with the Stämmig M2 itself.

The box actually has quite a bit to say about it and for once manages not to miss too many of the important aspects, listing not only the 12C27 blade first and foremost, but also the ceramic ball bearings, G-10 handles, and “updated skeletonized liners for added weight reduction.”

The Stämmig is a fat chickadee masquerading as a knife. It’s broadly rectangular and not terribly short at only 3-1/2" when closed, but it’s 1-7/16" across so the ultimate result is a stubby look and feel. The blade is 1-15/16" long if you measure from the very forwardmost tip of the handle but manages to have a cutting edge that’s slightly longer at a full 2", thanks to part of the edge extending past the end of the handles when it’s open. The whole thing is 5-11/16" long by my measure. I dunno about adding less weight, however the hell that’s supposed to work, but the Stämmig is a pretty chunky (for its length) 103.4 grams in total or 3.65 ounces. The profile puts one in mind of the Gerber EAB and others of that ilk, only minus the whole box cutter thing and with a normal and real knife blade.

I don’t know what the hell you call its blade shape. It’s a drop point sheepsfoot reverse tanto with an upsweep and a big hole in the middle of it. The edge is curved upwards noticeably from root to tip which genuinely does let you get almost all of it brought to bear on a flat surface. And because the primary taper can’t start until after the hole finishes, it’s a pretty steep ski slope down to the true edge’s grind.

The Stämmig has a big fat and big flat pocket clip that’d be deep carry if it weren’t positioned so unfortunately, or if its designers could restrain themselves from taking so much of a flying leap at faux-Nordic fashionability and the tail of the thing weren’t so angled. In any event, the back of the box suggests you could use this as a money clip and that’s probably an attractive feature for anyone with fat stacks, unlike me who spends all of them on damn silly knives all the time. There’s a slot that could serve as a lanyard or keyring attachment point down on that end as well.

The current Swiss Tech logo is punched into the clip here in addition to the head on the pivot screw. It’s worth mentioning that Swiss Tech’s logo is now this tree and not the cross it used to be. I imagine that’s because they got sued, given that the entire point of the brand previously was apparently to exist in the hope that people would get it confused with Victorinox of Swiss Army Knife fame, kind of like those vaguely terrifying DVD knockoffs of Disney movies that used to lurk like so much fungus around supermarket checkout counters. Or, maybe it’s because they got told off by the Red Cross organization and it’s the same story as why all the medkits in Doom are green now. Or maybe both at once.

Oh, and the clip is also not reversible. For no particular reason, since the clip itself is completely symmetrical. There just aren’t any holes for it on the other side.

In place of a thumb stud the Stämmig instead has this disk, which ought to put any Kershaw/Emerson CQC owner right at home. Other than that you don’t get any opening gimmicks. There’s no spring assist and there’s sure as hell no pocket hook. The blurb on the box tremulously suggests that perhaps you could use it as a front flipper, but this is bullshit and it’s the kind of mindless trend chasing that really chafes my tailfeathers. Calling the Stämmig any kind of front flipper is a stretch that’d give your yoga instructor trouble. It’s basically impossible to open that way not only because the whole knife is too broad, but because anyone with eyes can see that no part of the jimped heel of the thing actually sticks out forward of the handles to begin with. It’s a big ask to try to rotate the blade all the way around starting from the top since that’s all you have to work with, and it always winds up only getting there about halfway if you try it. I’m sure some turkey simply encountered this buzzword on the Youtubes and then decided they ought to wedge it into the marketing copy on the box.

I’ll also point out that the blemish in the screw head there is exactly as mine came out of the box. Maybe they’re saving a nickel by allocating their factory seconds to these, or maybe I’m just lucky.

It’s an ordinary liner locker. There absolutely was room in here to make this an Axis locker which’d make it pretty much the only non-Benchmade entry in the 2" long blade class if it were. But it ain’t, and it’ll do you no good at all wishing for things that ain’t. If you’re a good little bird, maybe Santa Claus will bring you a Full Immunity this year.

Superficially a least, the Stämmig’s build quality appears not to be bullshit. There are no telltale hallmarks of phoning in; the lockup is solid and positive, the blade doesn’t rattle, and it even stays shut properly when it’s not in use.

Instead, the Stämmig’s bullshit isn’t so much physical as it is conceptual. There’s no escaping that it’s just a bit too tryhard, with pseudominimalistic design language that only wishes it were hip and Nordic, and packaging doing its best to sell you on a pine scented zeitgeist of something that doesn’t quite actually exist. If the Helden Kit’s box were a person it’d be somebody who just found out about Eurovision yesterday and now they’re going around calling themselves a “citizen of the world.”

For instance the Stämmig, through its blurb on the box, makes a lot of noise about lightweight EDC minimalism without — you realize after inspecting it more carefully — actually managing to achieve it. For all its swish skeletonizing both within and without, and the end of the day it’s still all steel with no fancy wondermaterials in it anywhere so it’s actually pretty heavy. The wide money clip works, sure, but it’s still not exactly discreet if you use it to clip the thing to your pants. And while we’re at it we could do without the hole in the blade which surely serves only to make the blade itself a trifle weaker and be a place to accumulate pocket lint.

But then, the hole in the blade is also what makes the Stämmig carry any visual interest at all. So without it the entire ensemble would be worse even though removing it would objectively make it better. So roll that up and stick it in your koan, and ponder it for a while.

Where the Stämmig does succeed is in being a short bladed and nonthreatening urban EDC microknife, only just handily excising the “micro” part. Many of its ostensible competitors are with the best will in the world simply too small. Despite its short stature, nothing about the Stämmig feels small at all. It may be little compared to your favorite full sized tactical whatsit but when handling and using it you still feel as if you’re holding a real knife rather than some ephemeral fingernail-picker that’ll quail at the sight of anything more challenging than opening your next Amazon package. No, you’re not going to use this to split kindling or cut down a tree, and you’re probably not fighting anybody with it, either. But it’s well above the minimum threshold where it graduates from being a keychain bauble to a usable cutting implement. And it’s even made out of a decent steel. All this in a 2" folder that’s got a short enough blade it ought to be pretty universally legal, at least within the US.

So there’s a lot to recommend about the Stämmig.

Except.

Except for one thing. (I’m saying “except” a lot in this column.) We’ll get to that. First, let’s look at the rest of the package.

Skruvmejsel

The little screwdriver in this kit probably excited me at first more than the knife. Oh, sure, the knife is a fine thing in and of itself. But I have tons of knives, and ever since my CRKT Pocket Driver inexplicably went MIA I haven’t had anything to carry around to twiddle and tune knives in the field other than my entire Wiha bit kit.

Like apparently almost everything they offer, Swiss Tech have gone and given this a gratuitous Swedish name and called it the “Basteln.” You could translate this from Swedish (and German, for that matter) as “craft.”

And is it not written, if I were rolling my eyes any harder I’d flip upside down.

Anyway, the Basteln is fairly self explanatory. The various EDC whatsits included in this package purport to be made of titanium but this doesn’t, and as far as I can tell it’s made of aluminum. It’s quite small, only 3-1/4" long with its little endplug installed, and hexagonal in cross section with almost exactly the same thickness as a typical #2 pencil. It does have a pocket clip although that’s mounted very low, which leaves about one third of the thing sticking up above the hem and makes you look like an enormous nerd. If that’s not your jam you could dangle it from a keyring instead via the hole in its endplug.

Inside are the three advertised screwdriver tips in T6 and T8 Torx, plus a 2.5mm slotted driver which the package calls “# 2.5” for some reason. These aren’t the usual 1/4" hexagonal driver bits but rather the smaller 3/16" size which are typically found in your dinky cell phone repair kits and so forth.

These types of bits are a commodity item, except in this case they’ve been sawn roughly in half so that all three of them will fit inside the Basteln’s handle. You can use it with the normal longer bits as well, but if you’re thinking of carrying around a different bit in this thing note that you can only fit one of the full sized ones in it.

There’s a magnet in the socket on the business end and the bits work in it exactly as you’d expect. The Basteln’s main drawback is that its cross section is hilariously tiny and not a very comfortable shape to grip, so if you ever find yourself needing to really crank on any particular screw you’ll probably find that you actually, er, can’t.

This will become relevant very soon.

The included T6 and T8 bits appear to be bespoke items, or at least manufactured with some modicum of attention to detail. The slotted bit clearly isn’t, and has just been sawn off at the knees. Unlike the other two, its bottom is flat and nobody’s bothered to recreate the chamfer around its edges. This doesn’t affect anything, it’s just one of those little observations.

Brütålïzätïøn

Right there on the back of the box the Helden kit claims the included screwdriver is for maintaining your knife. So what happens if you try?

Boy am I glad you asked.

Getting the clip off is only mildly arduous. The screws are T6 heads which fit one of the bits that come with the driver. They’re cranked, though, and also threadlockered with what appears to be the equivalent of permanent (i.e. red) threadlocker. It’s theoretically possible that you may be able to undo these with the dinky Basteln driver but unlikely. I’m not exactly hopeless when it comes to swinging tools around but even I couldn’t do it without resorting to grabbing the Basteln with pliers or something and thus marring its finish. I didn’t, and I gave up and switched to my Wiha driver instead. After some struggle, the clip screws came out. Great! Now what?

Removing the thumb disk is also a hassle. You’d probably want to before attempting to sharpen Stämmig, because even if the blade is broad enough to hit your target angle without it getting in the way (it probably is) you still wouldn’t want to mess up that swanky red anodized finish. Its screw is T6 as well, and also glued in with permanent threadlocker. Grand.

But that’s only an appetizer. The body and pivot screws are also slathered in permanent threadlocker and some hateful bastard at the factory also apparently cranked them down with about a hundred and six ugga-duggas. Thanks a lot, asshole. So they’re not budging. At all.

Thus the notion that you can use the bit driver included with this kit to get into the knife is thoroughly dashed. You’re welcome to try, but you’ll simply ream the tips off of the drivers. Their quality isn’t awful, but they’re not exactly premium either. The Stämmig is designed with no user serviceable parts inside, and the means you’re likely to find this out involve destroying the very bits your kit came with, which it told you were intended to take apart this selfsame knife. What an absolute steaming crock of lutefisk. So just forget it.

Well, you can forget it. I have a reputation to uphold.

I’m no stranger to getting apart impossible to disassemble knives. I torqued three of my dwindling supply of T6 Torx bits so hard that their tips corkscrewed and then broke off before wising up, and then tried attacking the threadlocker directly. The typical way to go about this sort of thing is to take your soldering iron and use it to cook the heads of the offending screws until the shanks hit 300° F or thereabouts, which is the temperature at which even permanent threadlocker (excepting the specialty high temperature variants) decomposes and lets go. You’ll find that some cheapola Chinese knives are assembled with bonna fide superglue instead of Loctite, but not to worry; that also breaks down at around 300 degrees.

During this process I discovered two things:

1. The heating element in my soldering iron has apparently partially given up the ghost, so fuck me, and
2. The body screws in the Stämmig are not T6 but in fact T7, a bit which does not even come with its bit kit, so fuck you.

It seems they really don’t intend you to take this thing apart after all.

Well, bully for them. You can’t keep this bird down.

These are without a doubt the singular most crudded up with threadlocker screws I have ever removed from a knife in all my years. The crap is everywhere: On the threads, in the boreholes, in the rebates in the scales, and all over the outsides of the aluminum handle spacers as well.

Inside is at least one interesting construction detail, which is the crescent moon track and endstop peg integrated into the blade which is nearly identical to the one we found in the Ozark Trail Valor from last week. That plus the overall construction similarity lends more credence to the theory that the latter is unmistakably yet another Hangzhou joint.

Note also that this has a functioning anti-rotating pivot screw, and a good thing, too. Because without it the blasted thing would be even more difficult to get apart than it already is.

The Stämmig has very nice ceramic ball bearing assemblies with brass carriers. These are way nicer than the ones found in the aforementioned Valor, and probably represent a significant fraction of the $5 price premium. The detent ball in the liner lock is also ceramic.

The blade is pocketed to accept these but the liners are flat.

The back of the box was telling the truth about the skeletonized liners, at least. The two halves are separated by a pair of aluminum diabolo shaped spacers which are anodized red just like the thumb disk.

Here’s the hardware lineup, sans the two body screws on the scale I didn’t bother to take apart because I’m tired, boss.

From left to right, here are the clip screws, the pivot, both body screws from one side, the thumb disk, the bearings, and the three extra screws included in the package.

Which… don’t… match any of the others. What in the nine circles of Alighierian hell now?

The instructions don’t tell you this because there aren’t any. But I eventually figured out that these are intended to fill the holes in the scale if you intend to remove the clip. I think.

The clip, you see, is located via three protrusions on its back face which index into the holes drilled in the scale on that side.

So including special screws to fill these is a whole entire layer of extra that’s just absolutely uncalled for. Neat that they bothered, I mean, sure, I guess. But it’s exasperatingly unlikely that anyone would A) bother to attempt to remove the clip, and B) actually manage to do it with the included tools, let alone C) notice or care about the difference in sizes in the screw heads, versus just putting the original clip screws back in where they came from.

What the actual fuck.

Do you know what I would have liked much better than three unnecessary clip hole filler screws? A T7 bit that actually fits half of the friggin’ screws on this knife. Oh, and rounding up whoever is responsible for applying the threadlocker on these and kicking him directly off of the end of the nearest pier.

Tråkig

Here’s the included keyring. The incorrigible punters in the marketing department have insisted on naming it “Binden,” per the back of the box. I don’t know why. This doesn’t mean “keyring,” it means “bind.”

Fair enough, I suppose. But was this trip really necessary?

It’s one of those flat profiled jobbies that are all the rage among the EDC cool kids nowadays. At least it’s genuinely titanium, just like its description says. I assume so, anyway. A magnet doesn’t stick to it and it’s clearly neither aluminum nor cast zinc.

There’s not much else to say about it, really. If, for some reason, you find yourself in desperate need of specifically a flat titanium keyring, this one can be yours for a mere $30 with a knife and pen and screwdriver thrown in for free.

I think there’s probably slightly more efficient ways to go about it in that case, if we’re honest.

Scrïbblën

Somehow, the included pen does not have a gratuitous Swedish nametag.

I’m not complaining, but given the pattern so far that’s kind of weird. It is, at least, pretty nice for what it is.

For a start, it is also genuinely titanium. Well, the body and its cap are, anyway. The preinstalled little keyring is steel, and so is the pen point and ballpoint ink tube inside. It’s only 4.6 grams (0.16 ounces!) including the ring and all. It’s also seriously tiny: 3-1/8" long with the cap installed and only 0.197" or 5.14mm in diameter. With the cap removed it’s only 2-7/8" long which for me at least is actually too dinky to comfortably write with since it’s too short to actually reach the web of my hand. If you’re old enough to have ever scribbled something on an old Palm Pilot with its included stylus, well, this’ll remind you a lot of that. Welcome back to 1999. You can use this for a quick note readily enough or singing something on the spot, but you certainly won’t clear trying to write the great American novel with it even with a long runup and a following wind.

The cap is a screw on arrangement and can’t be posted on the tail of the pen. That seems dumb, but the intended methodology here seems to be to dangle this from a zipper tab or something and leave the cap there when you unscrew the pen from it.

This is just a regular old cheapo ballpoint writer and not a gel pen or anything. Inside is a normal-ish ballpoint mechanism. It looks like just a cheap ballpoint, it writes just like a cheap ballpoint. It works; it’s nothing special. You can get at it by unscrewing the tiny little endplug on the tail end of the pen.

You get two refills with the kit. By the time you actually get around to needing them these are guaranteed by ancient rite and tradition to have long since vanished. That’s no matter, since you could handily replace one of these with probably any old thing stolen from a donor pen. You only have to be willing to hack the ink tube down to be short enough and risk getting gunk all over yourself in the process. Habitual office stationery fiddlers know how this all works.

Astute readers will notice that the refills come with threaded black plastic caps on the ends whereas the original cartridge installed in the pen doesn’t.

And lo, these won’t screw into the pen body. Thus I strongly suspect that these are actually readily available commodity refills for something else, which Hangzhou GreatStar or whoever have co-opted for use here.

It doesn’t seem like this ought to work, but when the time comes you can just rip the black plastic caps off. It turns out they’re not held on by anything. It’d be helpful if the instructions mentioned this, but first it’d have to come with instructions.

Any time serious photography equipment is brought in close proximity to a ballpoint pen it is required by law that a high magnification macro shot of the pen’s point must be produced. Herewith, I present the following:

There’s a silicone O-ring at the base of the threads here which probably doesn’t do a great deal to keep water out of this but does serve as a friction aid to prevent the pen from coming unscrewed from its cap of its own accord and disappearing.

Here’s the article in question compared to a smattering of mini EDC-ish pens located by casting around those strewn about my desk at the moment: From the bottom up this is an Ohto Tasche, the obligatory Fisher Bullet space pen, a OLight O’Pen Mini, our subject, a crusty old Nite Ize Inka, and whatever the fuck this is. The Swiss Tech pen is probably now the smallest functional pen I own.

Perførmåncë

Look.

I knew I was going to get myself into trouble producing graphs in my last review, because now everyone’s going to expect the same level of rigor for every damn fool shard of metal that crosses my desk from now on.

I’m not doing that today. Maybe later for this knife, but not right now. But here’s what I can tell you.

As the Stämmig comes out of the box it is heckin’ sharp.

Its edge grind is not exceptionally refined or polished, but it’s got a wicked apex on it which is probably the keenest I’ve ever encountered on a production knife this cheap.

I don’t know if this is a fluke or what, but mine is also nearly perfectly true. That, combined with the 12C27 steel which I measured at between 55 and 60 HRC, means that the Stämmig ought to be a perfectly satisfactory cutter right from the jump for the purposes of all but the most persnickety knife nerds. And anyone in that camp will probably just resharpen the damn thing themselves anyway.

You want a graph? Here’s a graph.

With its stock edge and geometry, the Stämmig scores with an average cutting force pressure of 49.45 grams and a peak pressure of only 49.9 grams via my ISO standard Post-It slice test. It’s also suspiciously consistent across the entire length of its edge. I will remind you that in our last test, after mirror polishing the edge on my Ozark Valor it scored 39.94g and 55.5g on the same tests. That’s… not far off, all from a knife I haven’t fiddled with at all.

Suffice it to say, anybody who finds one of these stuffed in their stocking on Christmas morning probably shouldn’t handle it incautiously.

I’m not doing a long-winded cardboard cutting edge retention test on this just yet. I don’t have the time, I’ve only owned this for a day and I don’t want to fuck the finish up on it already, and practically no prospective buyer of this thing is going to care.

Thë Inevitable Cønclüsion

The Stämmig and by extension its Helden kit box thing are, amazingly, mostly not crap. I had a hunch, or more accurately a hope, that this would be the case. Which is ultimately exactly why I picked this out of lineup among all of its peers. It’s nice to be right sometimes.

Actually, something just occurred to me. If this was supposed to be an EDC starter kit, you guys forgot to include the obligatory crappy 3xAAA flashlight.

…Guys? Ah, well. I guess there’s always next year.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go find the guy in charge of the Loctite at the Hangzhou GreatStar factory and dump this load of coal down his chimney.