This Knife Has Barely Changed in 135 Years: Opinel No.08 Folding Knife Review

Picasso is said to have sculpted with an Opinel. I must be in good company, because for the last 6 years I’ve packed the Opinel No.08 Inox ($19) as my go-to knife for short hikes, long solo backpacking trips, and mountaineering epics. I’ve got a few knives for different purposes, but most of the time, I don’t need to split wood apart by batoning it for kindling or dress freshly caught game.

What I want is a folding knife so light I can stash it away anywhere and forget about it until I need it. Give me a locking blade not much longer than 3 inches, too. And if it just happens to be gorgeous, well, I won’t kick it out of the pack for that.

Made in France since 1890, the Opinel hasn’t changed much since. The company added a mechanism for locking the blade open in 1955, an option for a stainless steel blade in 1986, and a tweak to the locking mechanism to also lock the blade closed in 2000. Other than that, the profile of the knife, blade and handle, has remained remarkably the same.

Some might put that down to mere tradition. I say it’s because 135 years ago, Joseph Opinel hit upon near perfection, and why mess with a winning formula?

In short: The Opinel No.08 Inox ($19) is the best choice in budget folding knives for tasks that require a sharp blade, barely-there weight, and a price so low that it belongs on a drive-through menu. There are knives out there made of more exotic metals and fancier handles, but none of them can touch the value packed into this little French-made folding knife. Even with 135 years of knifemaking since it was designed, sometimes simplicity still wins the day.

Read the Best Knives for Hiking & Backpacking guide to see how the Opinel No.08 Inox compares.

Opinel No.08 Inox Review

Design & Features

Knives almost always arrive in the buyer’s grasp duller than they ought to be. What can I say? Few knives arrive at the height of their potential. All the Opinels I’ve seen over the years have come out of the box wicked sharp. Opinel, as far as budget knives go, punches above its price point at every step of its construction, starting with the blade.

Opinel calls the knife’s blade profile Yatagan. Yeah, I didn’t know what the hell that was, either. Opinel says the Yatagan is a shape “inspired by a traditional Turkish saber, the toe up.”

It’s something like a clip point, but the distinction is fuzzy enough to split knife folks into two vigorously opposed camps: those who think it’s like a clip point with drop point characteristics, and those who think it’s like a drop point with clip point characteristics.

I’m less concerned with what to call it and more concerned with how it performs, and it performs beautifully. It’s nimble to use for delicate tasks, from preparing a fancy trail dinner to whittling wood during boring stretches spent watching others lag in their camp chores.

Chalk that up to the clip point … er, drop point-esque … Chalk it up to the upward-sweeping blade shape whose 2mm-thick spine (measured at the handle base) tapers to a thinly pointed tip. Look closely enough at the knife in the side profile, and you’ll see it also very gently sweeps downward from the midway point of the blade. You can be very precise with the Opinel.

Sharpening a convex grind is trickier than a flat grind. Any blade you own, you’re going to need to periodically sharpen. It’s a fact of life that’s come attached to every blade ever known to humankind. At least these days, you pay a company to do it for you if you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty.

Pick a Size, Any Size

Picasso’s Opie of choice was an Opinel No.05, which possesses a 2.36-inch blade. I’m partial to the No.08, with its 3.28-inch blade, as I think a blade length of 3-3.5 inches is the Goldilocks size for an outdoors knife.

Opinel has an entire range of folding knives that share an identical design, only varied by size, from the diminutive No.02, with its 1.36-inch blade, to the gargantuan No.13, with its 8.75-inch blade. Of the No.13, I got a chuckle when I read that Opinel created it “as more of a gimmick than anything else. The popularity of the No.13 kept it in production …” The brand gets points for honesty and humor.

The company ditched the No.01 in 1932 because it was, in its own telling, too small to be useful, and it ditched the No.11 in 1935 because “its size was too similar to the other large knives.” Nobody asked me, but I think an Opinel sized between the No.10 (3.92-inch blade) and No.12 (4.82-inch blade) would fill out the range nicely.

The Simplest Locking Mechanism

The No.05 is the largest that doesn’t have a locking blade. From the No.06 up (blade size increases with number), Opinel knives get an exceedingly simplistic locking ring called the Virobloc that keeps the blade from snapping closed on your hand during use.

Once the blade is open, you lock it by grasping and turning a steel ring at the base of the blade. That physically blocks it from folding shut. There’s no complicated mechanism to fuss with or to break far from home.

My only complaint about it is that it’s prone to collecting dirt, grit, and sand between the metal ring and wooden handle. Rarely does it prevent me from turning the ring to open or close the knife, although I can feel the increased effort required. It’s easy enough to blow the dirt loose or use a nail clipper, shoelace end, or twig to clear out the larger grains of sand, but it’s mildly annoying.

As I’ve written this, I’ve kept my trusted, old Opinel No.08 on the desk beside me so that I could pick it up and turn it around in my hand whenever the inclination hit me, and it hit me often. It feels good to hold. Better than most knives. The writing on the beechwood handle is a little worn away. Desert grit did that. So did glacier ice. But it’s held up fine over the years.

The handle shape is among the most ergonomic I’ve ever felt. And despite lacking a grippy rubber coating, the beechwood’s satin finish isn’t particularly slippery. It’s not as grippy as the rubber-coated handle of my Morakniv Companion, but I’ve never felt like it was especially prone to flying out of my hand in the rain or among the ice.

Stainless or Carbon Steel, Take Your Pick

Short for “inoxydable,” the French word for stainless, Inox is simply the French knifemaker’s way of saying the blade is made of stainless steel. In the Opinel’s case, the specific type of steel is Sandvik 12C27, a common Swedish steel popular for low-cost knives such as the $19 No.08.

An addition of chrome to the metal recipe adds rust resistance, and a carbon content of at least 0.4%, according to Opinel, lends itself to improving the cutting edge and ease in resharpening the blade for periodic maintenance. Sandvik 12C27 could stand to retain its edge a bit longer, though.

Opinel makes all of its folding knives in both carbon steel and Inox. Whenever you’re buying a blade for any purpose, the choice comes down to carbon steel versus stainless steel. People get awfully wrapped up in their convictions, treating it like a holy war or a football game (same thing), acting like choosing the other side is a route to damnation and catastrophe.

When I’m picking out a kitchen knife or a straight razor for shaving, I always go for a carbon steel blade. Carbon steel holds an edge longer and is easier to sharpen, which you’ll have to do periodically for the life of a blade.

The major downside is that carbon steel is prone to rust, and so you have to keep it oiled after every use. At home, who cares? I wipe the blades in oil and store them in little drawers where they’re safe and sound.

Out on the trail, I go for stainless steel. Rust becomes one less burden to worry about, oiling one less task to add to daily camp chores.

And even though stainless steel isn’t impervious to rust, just far more resistant to it, I’ve never yet dealt with even the smallest spot of corrosion on my Opinel. I don’t tend to abuse my blades, but neither do I baby them. A large part of my Opinel’s usage comes during mountaineering trips, where I’m spending a week or more living on the ice.

Now, I know plenty of seasoned knife experts and outdoors folk who use carbon steel blades in the wilderness. Humankind’s recent few millennia, up until the early 20th century when stainless steel was made commercially viable, demonstrated that carbon steel has no trouble performing in the wet and the harsh. Still, it’s one less thing to babysit when I’m out on the trail.

Not So Burly

Folding knives aren’t often known for their strength, and so it is with the Opinel No.08. The Buck 110 ($65) is what I think of when I’m pondering a folding knife that can approach the strength of a typical fixed-blade knife. It’s a wonderful, legendary knife that also happens to weigh 7.2 ounces. I’m not lugging that with me when I hike.

Even the Buck 110 LT ($31), the lightweight version, is 3.2 ounces, twice as much as the Opinel’s featherweight 1.6 ounces. The Opie’s scant weight is a major draw for me, as I trim as much weight from my pack as I can when hiking. Even on more casual endeavors, it’s so light that I often forget it’s in my pocket.

I’ll carry a Buck 110 when I want to balance the convenience and portability of a folder with a bit of added strength, but the realities of hiking and backpacking don’t call for a particularly strong knife. You don’t need to baton wood to split logs when you’re hiking or backpacking. This isn’t bushcraft.

If you want to know which knives you can whale on like Thor’s hammer while you’re building an entire shelter out of found wood, we have a guide for that.

No, my focus is on knives for hiking and backpacking, and the cold, hard, unromantic truth of it is that the 8-inch–bladed Bowie knife is an unnecessary fiction for a person pitching a silnylon tent and cooking pre-prepared meals over a canister stove. Most trail tasks for your chosen knife will be spreading peanut butter and cutting salami, cutting open packets of food, and maybe trimming first-aid gauze.

The last “cool” thing — and I’m stretching this word far enough to make Stretch Armstrong jealous — is using my Opinel to carve a couple of empty gallon water jugs from a desert water cache into some jury-rigged trash receptacles to help me pack out some particularly smelly trash that I didn’t want baking inside my pack in the 100-degree Texas heat. The Opinel’s blade went through the plastic like butter. Plastic butter.

Find Something Else for Splitting Wood

These days, I take along my Trail Designs Sidewinder Ti-Tri stove less often than I used to, partly because more and more national and state parks have been banning wood stoves. Yes, yes, I know it runs on Esbit tablets and alcohol stoves. That’s a major reason I bought the Ti-Tri all those years ago — its versatility with fuel sources. But more often than not, I brought it along because I liked burning wood.

When I bring any wood-burning stove, I leave the Opinel at home and take a fixed-blade knife. Larger tasks, such as when I’m attempting bushcraft, entail a fixed-blade knife, often (but not always) with a full tang.

If you’re thinking “orange drink” when I say tang, turn your attention instead to the unsharpened part of a blade hidden within the handle. That’s the tang. A full-tang knife means the tang runs all the way to the rounded handle end for maximum strength.

For feeding a small wood stove like the Ti-Tri, either the Buck 110 LT or my Morakniv Companion ($17) serves fine for breaking apart small branches. That’s work that I wouldn’t subject the Opinel to for very long.

The Companion is a partial-tang fixed blade that weighs in at 3.9 ounces, and it’s stronger than the Opinel for the light task of splitting small branches. I wouldn’t call it bushcraft, but it’s my choice when I want a little more strength than the Opinel and am willing to put up a little more weight and bulk.

Opinel No.08 Folding Knife Review: Conclusion

The Opinel isn’t the knife to be admired by the types of people who only go gaga over Porsches and Ferraris. It’s for the types whose hearts melt over plucky old VW Beetles (or I should say Citroëns, as to not offend the French), all beautiful and appealing in their utilitarianism. It’s a true people’s knife.

And did I mention that it’s $19? I’ve been disappointed by fancy cheeseburgers that cost more than that, and God knows that I wasn’t getting 6 years of use out of those.

It’s easy for me to nitpick at the simplistic Virobloc locking ring’s tendency to jam up with dirt or its pedestrian (though capable) Sandvik 12C27 steel. But that you can buy such a cheap knife made in France that arrives this sharp from the factory blows my mind.

And they’re everywhere. Amazon, REI, Backcountry, Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops. Think of it as one of the most democratic knives on the planet. Anyone can afford one. Anyone can find a use for one. And if you can look past its lack of exoticism, anyone can admire one.