- Founded
- 1994
- Headquarters
- Tualatin, Oregon, USA
- Specialty
- Production folding and fixed-blade knives from outside custom designers; multi-tools; youth and training products
- Category
- Knives
- Website
- crkt.com →
Our verdict
CRKT earns its place here for a reason most brand lists would miss. The company is best known for production knives built from outside custom designers' work, and that model produces a catalogue with real range and real design credibility. But the product that tells you most about them is the cheapest one they make: a seventeen-dollar wooden knife kit, designed by one of their own engineers with his son, built to teach children how a lock works before anyone hands them an edge. A company that keeps that in the catalogue for over a decade is thinking about more than this quarter.
Background
Columbia River Knife & Tool was founded in 1994 in Tualatin, Oregon, by Rod Bremer and Paul Gillespi. The company’s founding idea was not to design knives in-house but to find custom knifemakers whose work deserved a wider audience and put those designs into production — in Bremer’s own words, recognising “successful custom designs which deserved to be put into production to reach a wider audience.”
That model shaped everything that followed. CRKT’s best-known products carry other people’s names: the K.I.S.S. money-clip knife by Ed Halligan, the M16 series by Kit Carson, the Eat’N Tool by Liong Mah, the Shinbu by James Williams. Later collaborations brought in Ken Onion and Flavio Ikoma. A CRKT knife is usually a custom maker’s design executed at a production price.
How we use CRKT
Our first CRKT review is deliberately not a knife. Nathan’s Knife Kit Lockback is a $17 beech-wood folding knife that a child assembles themselves — a real working lockback with no cutting edge anywhere on it, designed by CRKT’s own Glenn Klecker together with his son Nathan, and shipped with a genuinely well-written safety booklet.
It is the product we would hand a seven-year-old years before we would hand them a Buck 284 Bantam, and it teaches exactly the mechanism the Bantam uses.
What sets CRKT apart — the lock patents
Most production knife companies buy their locking mechanisms off the shelf: liner locks, frame locks, lockbacks, all long out of patent. CRKT has invested in its own. The Klecker Lock, developed by Glenn Klecker, appears on several CRKT production models and is the kind of thing a company only does when it has engineers rather than just buyers.
Klecker himself is worth knowing about, because he explains a lot about the wooden kit. He is an engineer from Silverton, Oregon, a former Captain in the US Marine Corps who led a Marine detachment during Operation Desert Storm, and the designer behind the NIRK Tighe and the Graphite. The man who designed CRKT’s children’s teaching toy is the same man who designs their locks — which is why the toy has a real one in it.
Where CRKT falls short
We’re honest about the trade-offs.
CRKT’s steels are generally mid-range. Much of the catalogue runs 8Cr13MoV, 1.4116 or similar — perfectly serviceable, sharpenable, corrosion-resistant, but not in the same conversation as the S35VN in a Buck 663 Alpha Guide or the D2 in the Kershaw Deschutes pair. Buyers shopping primarily on edge retention should look up-market.
Most CRKT production is overseas. That is what makes the pricing possible, and the quality control is generally good, but it is a real difference from a Buck folder stamped BUCK USA and it is worth knowing before you buy.
The catalogue is also very large and moves quickly, with models discontinued and reintroduced. Finding a specific CRKT knife three years after release can be harder than it should be.
Bottom line
CRKT is on our list because the designer-collaboration model genuinely delivers — you get custom design thinking at production prices, backed by real in-house engineering on the mechanisms. And because a company that keeps a seventeen-dollar wooden knife kit in the catalogue year after year, built to teach children how to respect a tool, is telling you something about how it thinks that no marketing copy could.
If you are buying one CRKT thing this year and there is a child in the house, make it Nathan’s Knife Kit Lockback. It is the least expensive product we have ever recommended without reservation.
Why we recommend them
The designer-collaboration model is the whole business. CRKT built itself by licensing custom knifemakers' designs and putting them into production — Ed Halligan's K.I.S.S., Kit Carson's M16, work from Ken Onion, Flavio Ikoma, Liong Mah and James Williams. You are buying a custom maker's design at a production price.
Genuine engineering in the lock designs. CRKT holds several proprietary locking mechanisms, including the Klecker Lock developed by Glenn Klecker — an engineer and former US Marine Corps captain who also designed the NIRK Tighe and the Graphite.
They take youth and training products seriously. Nathan's Knife Kit is not a gift-shop afterthought; it is a working lockback in wood with a properly written safety booklet, and it has been in the catalogue for years.
Honest price positioning. CRKT's catalogue runs from a $17 wooden kit to serious mid-range production folders, and the company is straightforward about which is which. There is very little marketing-tier inflation in the lineup.
Product lines
What they make.
Folding knives
The core of the catalogue — the M16 series, the K.I.S.S. money-clip knives, and a broad range of everyday folders built from outside designers' patterns.
Fixed blades
Field, bushcraft and utility fixed blades, again largely licensed from custom makers.
Multi-tools & utility
Compact tools like the Eat'N Tool, designed by Liong Mah — small, single-purpose objects that CRKT does unusually well.
Youth & training
Nathan's Knife Kit and Nathan's Knife Kit Lockback — beech-wood folding knife kits designed to teach children knife safety and mechanism before any edge is involved. See our full review.
Reviews