A couple of months ago, while on a Texas exotic hunt, Charles Allen, the owner of DiamondBlade Knives, showed me one of his new knives named the Pro Series Alpha. After holding it for a couple of minutes, I immediately thought that he ought to have named it the WHITETAIL SKINNER. It is the perfect-sized knife to field dress antelope and deer-sized animals.
I’ve cleaned a lot of deer, but my brother, on his lease down by El Dorado, has dressed hundreds and hundreds of deer. He can shoot seven deer per year, and he has a million nephews come down and hunt on his lease and of course, he gets stuck with gutting and skinning a big majority of them for the kids. He favors a knife of this size and uses one made by another manufacturer of this size and of a similar shape. Despite what a lot of people think, you don’t need a Rambo-sized knife to skin a deer.
There are a lot of reasons why I think this is a sweet little knife. Let’s cover those reasons.
DiamondBlade Knives Pro Series Alpha I Features
This is not only a well-designed, high-quality knife, but it also has some great features. Here are a few features that enhance this knife.
- It has a finger choil so that you can choke down on the blade. The choil stabilizes your grip.
- The top of the spine has thumb grooves, further enhancing your grip.
- So even though it is a smaller handle, with the above two features, you have a firm grip.
- It has finger grooves near the tip of the spine, so you can really choke down on the blade for intricate cutting.
The DiamondBlade Pro Series Alpha comes with a plastic sheath into which the knife snaps, which locks it in place so it won’t fall out. And, of course, it has a belt loop so you can attach it to your belt or to the strap on your backpack. It is a compact unit, lightweight, and easy to carry. It is so light that you will forget that you are carrying it.
As I initially stated, this is a sweet little knife to field dress your deer and antelope-sized animals. You could use it to gut your larger animals like elk, moose, and bears, and in a pinch, use it to skin the same, but of course, a larger knife with a 3 ½-4” blade would work better on the skinning portion.
But last week I flew to Texas to conduct some seminars at the Dallas Safari Club Convention & Expo. I flew down a couple of days early to meet Charles on his ranch in East Texas, and we were going to duck hunt for a couple of days.
Charles is a duck-hunting fanatic with an elite duck-hunting management area on his ranch. I always learn a lot about duck hunting every time I hunt with him. My big game hunting is over for the season, but I needed to test out the DiamondBlade Pro Series Alpha knife, so I’d thrown it in my suitcase to use to breast out our ducks.
After the first day of duck hunting, I whipped it out to process our ducks. Normally, Charles will age his ducks for about 10 days, but I’d been telling Ron & Betsy Spomer how great Charles was at cooking duck. He just had a few aged ducks, so I cleaned the ones we’d shot that day to test out my new DiamondBlade Pro Series Alpha knife. It worked great.
About 4-5 years ago, Charles persuaded me to switch over to using a caping knife to process my birds, but the Alpha worked great, too, and I’ll use it more to process my birds in the future. So it is not only a good knife for its intended purpose of dressing big game, but it also works great for cleaning ducks.
The MSRP on the DiamondBlade Alpha is $199.00, and as is usual we will close with the specs.
- WT. 2.5 ozs.
- BLADE LENGTH 2.75”
- KNIFE LENGTH 7”
- BLADE RC HARDNESS 65-68
- SPINE RC HARDNESS 42-44
- BLADE BEVEL 16-18
- WARRANTY LIFETIME
- BLADE STYLE DROP POINT
- SHEATH KYDEX
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About Tom Claycomb
Tom Claycomb has been an avid hunter/fisherman throughout his life as well as an outdoor writer with outdoor columns in the magazine Hunt Alaska, Bass Pro Shops, Bowhunter.net, and freelances for numerous magazines and newspapers. “To properly skin your animal, you will need a sharp knife. I have an e-article on Amazon Kindle titled Knife Sharpening #ad for $.99 if you’re having trouble.”
