There are few things more frustrating than pulling out a dull knife when you’re out in the wild. Whether you’re hunting, fishing, or just setting things up at camp, doing your tasks get a whole lot tougher when your blade has lost its edge. While you can always bring a portable blade sharpener along, the Argali Kodiak Belt lets you keep one right on your waistband.
Billed as a “hunting field belt,” it integrates a field sharpener right on the buckle and band, allowing you to shape, sharpen, and hone your blades anywhere you go. If you’re going to wear a belt to hold your pants up during an outdoor excursion, may as well make it one that brings genuinely useful function in the field and this thing gives you the ability to keep your cutting blades sharp.
The Argali Kodiak Belt looks like a regular belt, with a bomber nylon webbing and a 7075 aluminum buckle. It wears and takes off like a regular belt, too, so just pull the strap to your desired tightness and lock the buckle in to hold it in place. Unlike every belt in your closet, though, it comes with multiple sharpening tools, allowing you to restore the edge not just on your blades, but on your broadhead arrows and fishing hooks, too, making it even more useful in the field.
At the top of the buckle sits a tungsten-carbide bar, which you can use to freshen up the edge on, pretty much, any knife blade without taking off the belt completely. For more stubborn blades that are really dulled out beyond utility, there’s a much rougher 800-grit diamond plate in the back of the back, which is what you would use when you want to completely reshape a blade edge. According to the outfit, the diamond plate is good enough to sharpen broadhead arrows, too, so you can use it to give your arrows a honing before going on the hunt.
For less demanding sharpening tasks, the Argali Kodiak Belt also gets a six-inch long vegetable-tanned leather strop on the outside of the webbing, right next to the buckle, giving you a convenient place to hone a blade after you use it or fine-tune it before you get to work. If you want to do some angling, there’s even a small grooved strip at the bottom end of the diamond plate, which you can use to quickly sharpen a dull hook even while you’re out in the water.
The belt itself has a low profile design that, the outfit claims, has been designed to fit comfortably under the hip belt of a backpack, making it ideal for wearing out in the backcountry. It comes in two sizes, medium and large, with the former fitting waist sizes from 28 to 35 inches and the latter fitting waists between 35 and 44 inches. Features include an Iron Grip locking buckle, a webbing width of 1.5 inches, and a weight of 3.8 ounces.
The Argali Kodiak Belt is available now, priced at $69.99.