My Hardest Knife Yet: Civivi Sendy
Preamble: I’m a believer in growth through struggle. But that doesn’t mean I have to like the struggle. This knife has been a haaard one for me. I designed it in 2019. It’s now 2024. Oof. What a ride! Also, you’ll notice the name of the knife referenced here is “Cedar.” That’s part of the story, and I couldn’t bring myself to change the name in the blog post. So, I left it. Anyway, sit back. Enjoy.
Can I paint three pictures for you? Let’s start here: I want you to imagine a forest, dense with evergreen trees, carpeted in emerald moss. There's a little Cabin sitting on a rock foundation tucked in these woods with a cedar shake roof and a tiny front porch. The only sounds are the wind and a little brook winding away into the bliss. The only smell is the draft of cedar smoke wandering lightly from the chimney. Pull up a chair. Get cozy. Take it in. Enjoy it while it lasts. This is the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest, and it’s stolen your heart. But you can’t stay. In the morning, you leave the Cabin. In a week, you leave the Pacific Northwest forever. Life is funny: sometimes it whisks you away from the best moments in a flurry of opportunity.
Now let’s go south. Past winding canyons and onto high desert plateaus. Imagine an orange landscape peppered with stubby trees and punctuated with desert cliffs. History runs deep here in Cedar Mesa. Explore the remains of homes abandoned and lives mysterious. Wander through the dry quiet as the wind whistles. Count the perfect stars. Pull your chair closer to that 500 foot cliff and watch the sunrise. Breath in the calm as your cell phone sits idly out of range. This is a place to disconnect and reconnect. It’s where you go when you’re crushing the hustle and the hustle is crushing you. It’s too far away on purpose so you’re forced to reset. It’s a good place.
Lastly, let’s struggle. Leave your family. Go away. The place is called Cedar City, and you’ve left to college there. Everything is new. And hard. Challenging. You make friends and struggle and scrimp and make life happen. Growth and discomfort have long been traveling companions, and you’ve accepted a first class ticket on their train. Life is tough there, but life is also good there. The red rocks are inspiring. The campus is beautiful. The people are genuine. The experiences, rich. When it’s over, you’re relieved and exit in a sprint to the next event, never stopping to contemplate how it shaped and chiseled you into a better human.
Three Cedars in three different places and three different moments of my life-- good moments, now shrouded in the haze of time. I don't go back to any of them very often anymore. I left the Pacific Northwest nearly a decade ago. Cedar Mesa calls to me, but I rarely visit like I used to. And Cedar City, well, it's been a long time since I was there for school. How do you capture memory? How do you bottle it up and preserve it for the future? I don't know. You can't go back. It's over. But the memories are real. The sensations are vivid.
What does this have to do with pocket knives? The Civivi Cedar is my physical manifestation of these three "Cedars." It’s my memories encapsulated in a knife design. It's the EDC knife I would have taken to class in college or the toothpick I needed for a backpacking trip to the Cabin. It's the tool I wish I had while exploring Cedar Mesa when I had to pull cactus spines from my foot. It's a knife created from memory and time gone by-- a reminder of good days.
The Design
My marketing senses tell me this is the moment for a call to action: go buy the Civivi Sendy here. Now, back to the show.
On a design level, it’s a touch of nostalgia, paired with modern features. It has a traditional barlow handle and the OG design has a spay point blade. I wanted a toothpick and tweezers, so we slapped those in the handle à la Swiss army knife. The flipper is in-line so it’s easy to open and use. My friend Trent suggested doing a color scheme like an old Coleman stove, and I wanted the grain of cedar wood milled in the handle. After years of work, the model below was it. This is what I saw in my head. It’s the places I’ve been. Memory encapsulated.
I’ve never struggled so much with a knife design. I sketched it 7-8 times. It just kept evolving and devolving. In fact, I’ve never had a design that I sketched with a pencil, then did 2D on a computer, then went back to sketching again. It was rough.
The Cedar opens with a flipper opener. It’s in-line with the handle, so it doesn’t take up additional pocket space or snag on the pocket. I got the idea from my friend and fellow knife designer, Joseph Vero, who kindly told me I could borrow the idea from him. He wasn’t the first to do this type of flipper, but he was the inspiration for mine, so credit where its due. The flipper works like a dream, and it’s a super solid piece of engineering from the Civivi team. They’re wizards.
The Sendy features an in-line flipper inspired by Joseph Vero’s designs.
The Cedar has a liner lock with a generous lock recession (with jimping!) for easy closing. The handle is a traditional barlow shape that’s reminiscent of your grandfather’s knife. I drew inspiration from my friend Justin Lundquist– the master of the modern barlow. Except Justin loves front flippers. It’s a forgivable offense as friends, but an unacceptable gripe for my own designs. (Admittedly, I’m horrible at opening front flippers.) I wanted a knife that I could actually open consistently. The Cedar does just that.
We ended up with 4 different handle materials: micarta, wood, and G10. The G10 models are my favorite because they’re what I had in mind when I designed this knife. You see, when you split a shake from a cedar round, it leaves the most beautiful texture within the wood grain. No knots and a beautiful lack of consistency in the grain. I asked Civivi if they could put this randomized texture in the contoured G10, and they did it brilliantly. They’re wizards. Lastly, the green and red version is my very favorite. It feels like an old Coleman stove and smells like white gas cooking camp pancakes in the dewey morning. It just feels… right.
The tweezers and toothpick harken back to your first Swiss Army knife. Buuuut, the toothpick is a sharp sucker that can double as a splinter puller. Don’t like the extreme pointy? Grind it down on a sidewalk, wash it off, and carry on.
The blade shape is a spay or a drop point, 2.75”. My original idea was the spay because it’s a chill style– whip it out in your Math 1050 class and no one is going to freak out. (Good luck passing that class, by the way. Don’t be afraid to take a B and run like I did.) Spay knife blades were originally used to neuter farm animals. The tip is less aggressive to avoid puncturing an unexpecting creature on the worst day of its young life. Some people hate spay blades, and they let us know that in the announcement post:
Who am I to deny the people their requests? So, Civivi and I pivoted and made a drop point for two of the models. The pocket clip is the same one you’ve come to know and love on the Banter, and they’re interchangeable if you don’t like the “Banter” billboarding on those models.
I sent the Cedar design off to Civivi for the first time in 2021. Then I dropped the ball when we hit design and engineering roadblocks. They were ridiculously patient. I was ridiculously inconsistent. Indeed, this Cedar knife is the physical manifestation of struggle through three of the hardest years of my life. It was my pandemic project that spanned long after the mask mandates disappeared. It was ongoing through two job changes, a move, and the chaos of taking Knafs full time.
The Sendy runs on a ceramic ball bearing pivot. It has a backspacer with an integrated lanyard loop. The toothpick and tweezers are spring tension fit into their recessions. It’s my design, but it’s a seriously cool little piece of engineering from Civivi’s team.
It’s interesting: cedar wood thrives in damp climates and it withstands many different weather conditions without shrinking, swelling, warping, or falling apart. It’s an ideal wood for roofing shingles and siding to keep out the weather. Somehow, that just feels right for the name of this knife. Like the three Cedars that inspired it, the physical design itself was wrought via struggle when the weather felt vicious. It was borne of challenge in a rainstorm. And that makes me love it even more. It’s a knife that’s ready for quiet days in quiet places. It’s a knife that’s ready for the chaos of late nights cramming in your dorm room. It’s a knife that’s designed for the times that fill your soul on the side of a mountain. Go find those moments. And then hold onto those memories as long as you can.
Epilogue. And the name.
Lastly, the name. I’ve referred to this knife as the Civivi Cedar for this entire post. Two months before launch, I learned that the name wasn’t going to work for trademark reasons. All that story. All that nostalgia. Poof. Name dead. So, just send it. Go. Get ‘er done even when you’re struggling. I was feelin’ sendy. So, I named it Civivi Sendy. And maybe that’s what Cedar was all along for me: getting comfortable with discomfort. Feeling a little scared in life but doing it anyway. Sending it.