This is the Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel, it’s a collaborative effort between two Scandinavian companies that specialize in hand-building some of the finest gear you’ll find anywhere – Kasperi and Roselli.
Kasperi is best known for their lifetime guaranteed backpacks, and Roselli have been hand-forging high carbon-steel knives and other blades in Finland since the 1970s.
This is the Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel, it’s a collaborative effort between two Scandinavian companies that specialize in hand-building some of the finest gear you’ll find anywhere Kasperi and Roselli.
History Speedrun: Kasperi
Kasperi is a Finnish leather goods house founded in 2009 by photographer and cinematographer Janne Kasperi Suhonen. Suhonen spent his working days hauling heavy camera equipment around Helsinki by bicycle, and no bag he bought could survive the abuse for long.
He’d returned one premium “five-year warranty” waterproof bag three times in as many years, each one failing inside of 18 months, and the maker ignored his feedback. So he decided to design his own. After roughly two years of prototyping and trial and error, the first Kasperi shoulder bag was born, and once friends and acquaintances saw it, the requests to buy them started rolling in.
What began as a one-off backpack became a entire brand built on a single, simple idea – that things should last for life. Kasperi works exclusively in European full-grain, vegetable-tanned leather, notably from Germany’s SOHRE tannery and Italy’s Virgilio tannery, paired with custom hardware forged in Finland.
Everything is handmade in small batches at the company’s workshop in Hämeenlinna, about an hour north of Helsinki, housed in a 19th-century horse stable. The pieces are designed to be repairable rather than replaceable, and the company sells direct, often on a pre-order basis.
History Speedrun: Roselli
Roselli is the work of Heimo Roselli, a Finnish bladesmith who grew up on a farm where fishing, hunting, and carpentry were daily necessities and bad knives were a constant frustration. He made his first knife at around ten years old, and as a young man set about building blades he’d actually want to use.
The knife itself is forged by Roselli from the company’s UHC steel at 66 HRC. The blade runs 110 mm with a burly 4 mm spine and full-tang construction that makes it capable of rougher work, including batoning.
By the village of Harmoinen in Kuhmoinen, southern Finland, he’d earned a reputation as a skilled smith, and in 1976 he committed to making knives of his own design for a living, the date now treated as the company’s founding.
Roselli’s claim to fame is his proprietary UHC, or Ultra High Carbon, steel. Frustrated by the limits of conventional steel, Heimo spent decades studying ancient bladesmithing, chasing the legendary qualities of crucible “wootz” steel.
The result is a non-alloy, ultra-high-carbon steel with a carbon content of 1.5% to 2.0%, hardened to an extraordinary 66 to 68 HRC – figures that would normally make a blade brittle. Heimo’s secret is a closely guarded combination of hardening and tempering still known only to him and his Harmoinen workshop, which keeps the steel hard and sharp while retaining enough flexibility to work.
Knives are forged to shape, finished by hand, and fitted with Karelian birch handles. Today Roselli is one of Scandinavia’s most respected knife makers.
The Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel
This is the Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel, it’s Kasperi’s interpretation of the iconic puukko, the quintessential Finnish utility knife that, in local tradition, served as the original multitool – a single blade for fire-making, carving, building shelter, preparing food, and eating.
The knife itself is forged by Roselli from the company’s UHC steel at 66 HRC. The blade runs 110 mm with a burly 4 mm spine and full-tang construction that makes it capable of rougher work, including batoning.
Total length is 240 mm, and it weighs 220 grams bare or 340 grams with the sheath and firesteel. The handle is stained curly birch finished in linseed oil for grip in the wet. The tailored sheath is vegetable-tanned SOHRE leather, handmade in Finland, and it houses a Roselli firesteel that you strike with the back of the blade to throw sparks onto tinder.
This is the Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel, it’s Kasperi’s interpretation of the iconic puukko, the quintessential Finnish utility knife that, in local tradition, served as the original multitool – a single blade for fire-making, carving, building shelter, preparing food, and eating.
The package also includes Roselli’s lifetime sharpening service, whereby you simply cover the cost of shipping both ways, and Roselli’s craftsmen will expertly sharpen the blade for you, ensuring a perfect edge.
The Kasperi Puukko + Firesteel is now available to buy direct from Kasperi here from their official online store. These are produced in limited numbers, but they are in stock at the time of writing.
Images courtesy of Kasperi
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