Milwaukee Fastback Flip Open Utility Knife - Review

As part of their steadily growing line of hand tools, Milwaukee recently released two new utility knives, the light and lean Fastback and a larger, submarine-style slider. Since, for years, we've been in a pathetic and forever-failing pursuit of the perfect utility knife, we were thrilled when Milwaukee sent us a Fastback to try out. Would it meet our apparently 'too-high-for-the-industry' standards and be the knife of our dreams? Or would it prove once again that the perfect knife is one made of unicorn horns and dragon scales?

The Milwaukee knife is certainly a nice looking item. It's on the large side for the flip-out style, but it's a good large and allows for a very comfortable handle, complete with a massive first finger notch. The contoured design goes a long way to prevent the knife from slipping out of the hand during a cut. Once it's gripped, it's gripped (unless, of course, you're a weakling).

The stand-out feature of the knife is the one-handed blade flip-out. Milwaukee went with a 'wrist flip' as opposed to the 'thumb nub' (like the Striker knife we reviewed a year and a half ago), and the decision is a good one. With this knife, when you press the release with your thumb, the blade arm goes loose and a quick flip has it open and in the locked position. It's tough to quantify what exactly this does to your workday, but it sure makes you look cool. The fast one-handed operation is also good in those situations where you're holding something in your arms, propping something with your knee, and the box on the floor needs opening.

Rounding out the tool is a nice belt clip and two body notches which expose the blade; one on the main part of the tool and one on the blade arm. These allow for easy cutting of things like felt paper and Tyvek.

But, to us, the tool does have an Achilles heel and that's blade storage. Milwaukee's other knife, with the more traditional body has blade storage (really nice blade storage, actually), but this one doesn't. And while we like the idea of companion knives, the other knife isn't going to do us much good when we have this one in our pocket. Like we said, the body of this knife is fairly large and we (and everyone we talked to) think that they could have slipped in some kind of storage slot for an extra blade (like the Striker)...just one extra is all we need.. something that means we don't have to climb down from the scaffolding once we've junked a blade up with Ice and Water shield.

But beyond that quibble (which may be isolated to us and the group of carpenters that we work with), this is a very worthy knife. We've only spent about a month with it, but in that span it's seen some hard times and it seems to shrug off any brutality that heads its way. So if blade storage isn't an issue, then this is a nice knife that we wholeheartedly recommend.

The Fastback goes for about $14, which is getting towards the high side of things, but doesn't seem in any way unreasonable for the quality of the tool.

At Amazon.com. If you're interested, Milwaukee's other knife is there as well.

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