Click to view our Accessibility Statement or contact us with accessibility-related questions

Free Standard Shipping in the US on orders over $99

Drop + Degnan Emrose Folding Knife

overview

specs

story1

reviews48

photos40

q&a7

discussions305

01 / 18

ALL PRODUCTS / MORE COMMUNITY PICKS / DROP

Drop + Degnan Emrose Folding Knife

Name: Drop + Degnan Emrose Folding Knife
Brand: Drop
SKU: drop-degnan-emrose-folding-knife
Price: 170 USD
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 4.708333 (48 reviews)

Where's the price?

To negotiate the best possible price for our customers, we agree to hide prices prior to logging in.

1.4K requests

Free Returns in USA

Product Description

Like something you might find in a biker's leather jacket, the Emrose sports a slim profile, contoured handle scales, and premium blade steel.

Customer Reviews

4.7

(48 reviews)

(40)

(6)

(0)

(2)

100% would recommend to a friend

Images

Sort by: Top Reviews

reswright

3852

May 30, 2020

Verified Buyer

Stilettish

Ordered this quite a while ago and after some unavoidable delays it finally arrived.

The TL:DR: it's a good light fast flipping knife with an old school design that has to compromise between coolness and utility, and does a reasonable job of it. It's got good fit and finish and a thoughtful design. Most people will probably end up buying it because of its looks, though. They’ll take it out places, they'll like it, but I bet most people do not treat this as their everyday knife. The dagger-influenced stiletto style form factor keeps it from being an all around utility blade of the sort lots of people want for EDC, and the switchblade styling just makes it seem like an occasional carry to your humble narrator. The longer version: This is a titanium, carbon fiber, and S35VN flipping knife that is styled as an obvious homage to the old school Italian stiletto made famous by gang and Mob flicks. It represents a material improvement over those knives -- most of which weren't really all that well made, when everyone's being honest about them, and moreover the form factor of old school stilettos weren't good for much other than stabbing people. The issue is that the dagger blade shape of the stiletto is optimized for shanking, and unfortunately turns out to be absolute bollocks at other common knife tasks, especially when compared to more practical utility grinds. They're also not legal everywhere, whether automatic, manual, or even fixed. These issues are all things that the designer alluded to in the Drop prerelease sale as challenges he wanted to improve upon with the Emrose. So what we've got here is a knife with an ambitious task before it: look as cool as those old switchblades but be more practical for everyday tasks -- not to mention, be legal to carry in a lot more states. First things first: the listed specs are accurate, including the weight. This is a 63g knife. Nice and light. It's the very first thing you notice when you pick it up. Edit -- Well, I have to amend this statement a little. The main dimensions are accurate. But the ad details say the knife's got a flat grind, and it doesn't. It's got a hollow grind. This is easy to visualize if you hold the knife up to the light but not as easy to photograph that way. However, see the picture below:

If that were a flat grind those reflected grid lines wouldn't curve. They'd be flat, like this:

So there you go. It's not a particularly deep hollow, but it's definitely not a flat grind. In this case the hollow is.... IMO an improvement anyway because it thins the cross section of the knife in terms of what contacts the material you're cutting. Some might disagree. I think it's fine, though. But when they re-up the Emrose they should correct the details to note that the grind is actually hollow. It’s also quite obviously not a dagger blade, but a spear with a swedge that in some senses mimic the dagger. This makes it legal in most locales, and improves upon a dagger’s capability to slice. And while the flip is smooth and fast and light, it’s definitely still a manual blade, so there: legality established. It turms out my out of the box impressions were quite good initially -- tolerances are tight, the blade's centered, the flip's beautiful -- but I wanted to mess around with it a bit before I tried shaping my thoughts into this review, so I played about with it, compared it with some other knives, used it to do a couple things, and then finally disassembled it enough to take a breakdown shot:

Well, that's a good look. Nice and clean, purposeful. Fat flip tab with nice jimping. The carbon fiber inlay both keeps you from squeezing down on the lockbar as you flip, and prevents overtravel on the return. The clip's thick at the base to steady your fingers as you flip. The handle bulges in the middle to give it some much needed, but still minimal ergonomics. It's got a proper etched anodization so it still looks good covered with fingerprints, but still pops a little when you wipe it with acetone. The CF inlays are precision milled to the point that you have to coax the out of their slot even after you've removed the bolts in place. They fit snugly, no wobble. The D pivot? It's not actually a D milled pivot, but fear not: it's more of a C milled pivot:

The bottom line is it does key into place and stay put. New one for me. The pivot action is clean. The knife spins on ceramic bearings against nice hard steel washers. They aren't races -- races are milled in. But the bearings are wearing in a slight ribbon track which you can see.

Not optimal but good. Milled races would smooth the flip and increase bearing longevity over simple metal washers, but at least they’ve got something there. Surprisingly many brands skip both washer and race altogether. How's the edge?

The edge is good and professional on the S35VN, but a little wide, maybe to ensure edge strength with the hollow grind, I don't know. It will push cut post-its but it also catches on them sometimes, especially if cutting at an angle. As a consumer I’m tired of S35VN; as a knife owner, I know that S35VN is a legitimate super steel that a lot of people like. It won’t get as sharp as some other super steels, or for that matter, 154CM. (That is to say, those steels are comparatively much easier to get ‘scary’ sharp. You can eventually get S35VN that sharp... in the same sense that you can eventually walk the entire Appalachian Trail.) But it holds its edge very well and can take a real beating without cracking or chipping in tasks that keener steels would have either chipped or folded the edge over. How's the lockup?

Fine, solid. Surprising how little drag the decent has, considering the substantial lockup. And speaking of that, how's the flip action? I know I said it was smooth, but how's it flip? https://youtu.be/nqAp2Dw7f38 That’s one of the better parts of the knife design, honestly. You can flip it a bunch of ways. It push-buttons just like the Dogtooth, you can flick it along the spin axis, you can put pressure on the flip tab just about anywhere you like and it gets you a flip. Hidden truth about these rounded flip tabs -- they're super accommodating to whatever style of flip you are used to. You can even front flip it using the opposite tab although it's a bit cumbersome, and it's not flippable over the top like some front flippers are - but that's not bad considering it wasn't at all designed as a front flipping knife. It's a regular flipper, and a good one - it fires fast without loading much first, and hence without digging up your fingertip. Nice little knife. I think the thing I like about it the most is still the thing that I liked the most when I was looking at the pics of the prototype: I love how the quillons, usually flimsy and mostly pointless on a stiletto, were taken off the handle altogether, and turned into a functional part of the blade - the flip tab and its echo on the opposite side. ...so is there anything I don't like about it? Well, yeah. It's a five star knife, fair and square, but there are two main things worth noting. Nothing I didn’t see coming but still. Like I alluded to earlier, this knife harks back to the stiletto dagger design, and as I also alluded, stilettos aren't terribly practical for anything other than shanking people. They are an old school, long, thin, straight handled, and non-ergonomic design, optimized for piercing at the cost of cutting and slicing. These are certainly flaws the designer knew about, and in fact @degs made a point of doing things in this build to ameliorate those traditional weaknesses and offer noticeable improvement over a similarly proportioned dagger. To be fair to him, they worked. And yet there's only so much to be done in that regard, and the Emrose does hold a couple visible compromises that bump up hard against the limits of such compromise. For example, the spear blade functionally gives a thinner cutting cross section than the dagger would, which goes some way to addressing the practicality of the edge. And you can definitely push cut a Post It with this knife better than you can with any dagger I’ve ever had. But that’s not really saying a ton. You cannot use this knife to reliably trim the edge cleanly, you will tear the Post It trying to do so, and that’s somewhat inevitable due to geometry. When you take a full flat ground blade -- Spyderco PM2 being a classic example -- you have a knife blade that starts out thin at the cutting edge and slowly widens out until it reaches the spine. This cross section makes for easy slicing. Dagger geometry is different: the thickest part of the blade that bears the load of work is in the middle, not at the end. Presents a thicker wedge angled cross section as it cuts. So instead of forcing a thin piece of steel through some substrate, you’re trying to force a wedge thru, comparatively speaking. That’s harder and slower, takes more sawing and leaves a messy edge; that in turn is why I say daggers and dagger like blades present a disadvantage for slicing and cutting. The swedged spear hollow ground blade improves upon the dagger... but, again, only so much can be done. So what’s that mean? Even with the thinning of the grind, a knife like this will never be the sliciest knife you own. The thickness of the edge will push the edges of what you're cutting into apart with enough force to make the cutting ragged. That, taken with the fact that S35VN isn't the keenest steel, constitutes the primary weakness of the design -- it will cut fine, but will leave a bit of a sloppy edge on things you try to slice evenly. That’s the first issue with this knife. Which brings us to the second thing: the Emrose is also never going to be the most ergonomic knife you own. That is to say, it's fine to flip, and cut open envelopes and boxes and what not, but the handle geometry is limited. The Emrose is not really built for fine detail cutting or stuff like that. The flip tab is jimped but the other tab isn't and there's no place for your thumb in an improvised grip unless you really choke up like this:

That'll be enough to, like, cut an apple, maybe some salami. A moro like in the pictures. So it won't leave you starving. But too much of any sort of complex cutting like this in an improvised grip would hurt your thumb and wrist. Same with fine cuts and trimming - you probably won't be working in the shop or the kitchen much with your Emrose, if you follow me. Of course, people tend not to use stilettos in those places and for such tasks either, so again none of this is really a surprise. Are these two issues unforgivable sins against good knife design? Nothing so dramatic. More like the tradeoffs you have to make if you want to carry a knife that looks like this:

And let's face it: that looks cool as hell. That's the rest of the aforementioned ambitious task accounted for: Legal, more practical, still cool. If someone pockets a knife like this we know exactly why we are doing so and in the end what is winning out is style, and maybe that little frisson that one associates with toting a stiletto in their pocket. If we tell you anything else? Take it from yours truly, we're snowing you. So the design accomplishes what the designer set out to achieve, even though many owners won’t use it as their everyday pocket knife so much as they’ll pocket it on occasion, for its undeniable cool factor, and they will probably have other knives they carry more often. The only other Drop knife I'm aware of that really compares to this knife is the Dogtooth, which also happens to be, as far as I'm concerned, probably the best collab I've seen Drop do -- so that's good company. Of the two the Dogtooth is more practical and ergonomic, and it’s the one I favor of the two... but the additional lightness of the Emrose is going to count for a lot of folks, and the cool factor will too. For me, for what it is, and what it costs, it's a five star knife. Happy with mine!

(Edited)

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

View 2 More Replies

Kiefofpolice

171

Feb 15, 2021

reswrightThank you for the extremely thorough and detailed review 👌 If only there was this kind of review for a bunch of other expensive items I've purchased on here. Anyways, If you don't mind me asking. What do you use to sharpen your blades and/or keep your already sharp blades "scary sharp". I usually either carry a Chaves Ultramar s35vn drop point knife, a Chaves x Ferrum Forge "Veloz" with a CTS-XHP drop point blade , or my Kershaw Launch 3 drop point with 154cm steel. For instance one of my s35vn blades is brand new but it def won't slice a sheet of paper anymore, and I don't want to potentially ruin a new blade by dragging it down a handheld V shaped diamond bit sharpener as it seems that either makes it worse just grinds some of the edge off. As far as 154cm, CTS-XHP, and s35vn would you recommend a specific sharpener or would I be better off using something like a leather strop with the newer blades that already have a good edge on them and haven't been used but for opening a few boxes or something. Any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Vote

reswright

3852

Feb 15, 2021

KiefofpoliceThe truth is any kind of freehand sharpening, whether it's stones on a benchtop, or steels or ceramic rods down the edge, honestly takes years to get 'good' at. Entire books are written on how to do it, by people who already know how to do it. The thing about hand held sharpeners in particular is that people see a chef zinging his knife down the steel like it's nothing, so that's what they do. There's a hellapile of muscle memory involved though. it's incredibly hard to keep a consistent angle unless you've done it thousands of times. People try to do what they think they see and chew up their knife edge. Start with stropping. It's inexpensive (you can spend a lot but you don't need to), it's hard to screw up, but it's something you can get really good at with time. If you care about sharpness, stropping is important. Read up on it a bit first, or watch some videos because like sharpening it's more complex than you might think. Watchching videos in particular will let you visualize proper technique, before you tackle it yourself. It's a lot of forearm work, is what it boils down to. You can buy a two sided strop board -- best way to start IMO -- for $25 or so and it'll usually come with some different stropping compounds -- lightly abrasive pastes that work well with the leather of the strop to polish, burnish and smooth the cutting edge. Some knife steel responds extremely well to stropping, it ALL seems to respond to some degree no matter how hard and special the steel is, but high vanadium, high hardness steels respond less to it than traditional knife and razor steels like Sandvik, 440 and whatnot. Your S35VN will respond to stropping, but less than your 154CM. (I only recently picked up a XHP knife so can't really speak to stropping or sharpening that steel.) Will stropping ultimately leave you with an edge on your S35VN that you're happy with, at least until it's seen more wear? It may. It's even reasonably likely and if it does, great, you have a good skill that's relatively inexpensive to use, will always help you keep your knife keen. However, especially with more wear on the knife, it may not be enough to get the knife to the point that it truly feels sharp. It can also depend on how the S35VN was hardened and then ground at the factory. Both US and Chinese factories are known to screw up S35VN on occasion. If they either improperly hardened the steel, or ruined the hardening by 'cooking' it with a hot grinder edge -- or if you just managed to beat up the edge more than you realized, hitting a staple while cutting cardboard or whatever -- stropping will be of limited impact and you will need to mill away the edge a bit to get to better steel - which is what sharpening is. With a steel like S35VN, sharpening will take one of two things -- a tremendous amount of patience and time, or a diamond stone. For super steels, regular abrasives won't be enough to let you sharpen your knife without it taking literal long hours of work, hours that will tire you and lead you to poor technique that will set you back here and there. The diamond stone, on the other hand -- maybe ten minutes of light work and then do a regular sharpening job on it and because you got down to better steel, sharpening and then stropping will work a lot better overall. So that's what I'd recommend you doing -- but if you're starting out in sharpening, a regular benchtop diamond stone isn't the best choice. You want something a little more guided than that. Not sure what your budget is but if you're grabbing Ultramars you can probably swing a Spyderco Tri-Angle Sharpmaker setup, with an additional set of diamond sharpeners (I guess the cubic boron nitride ones also work on harder steels but haven't used them myself). That's the best approach that doesn't cost several hundred dollars and it's pretty doable for people who are new to sharpening. It's what I use most of the time now, though I have a Worksharp I also use on stuff. I recommend the Tri-Angle Sharpmaker setup because it's a bit of a hack -- it's like a bench stone setup but unlike most of those, it positions the stones at an angle so that if you hold the knife so the blade plane is vertical, running the blades down them vertically, you automatically get the right edge angle. The hack: visually it turns out to be much easier to tell if the blade's flat up and down than it is to guess if it's at the exact 15 or 20 or whatever degree angle to the stone. It's WAY easier to do that than it is to, say, maintain that angle with a butcher steel or a stone on the bench. You still need to learn the muscle memory to get really good with it but you aren't constantly fighting with yourself to maintain that correct angle. This bit's important, though -- don't learn how to use a Sharpmaker setup while sharpening your Ultramar. Arguably don't even start with your 154CM switch. Carefully sharpen, say, four or five knives with something like 440 or Sandvik or BD1 or 8Cr or AUS 8 or some other inexpensive steel, building up some skill and muscle memory and learning how to keep that blade vertical, before you hand sharpen a prized possession. Sharpen kitchen knives if you don't have cheaper pocket knives around. You won't need the diamond bits to do any of that, you're really only ever gonna need them to sharpen certain high hardness steels like D2 or S30V or S35VN or something harder than those. But you want to learn on inexpensive knives (which BTW you will be getting astonishingly sharp in not all that long of a time, which is kinda satisfying). And you frankly want to see these results and know they work before you tackle a super steel, because for every 1 stroke you need to give regular knife steel to perfectly sharpen the edge, you need to give 4 or 5, maybe even more, with a supersteel - and unless you really can trust in your technique, it's pretty easy to get frustrated with trying to do it right on a supersteel, and then doing it wrong because you're upset. Pressing too hard, changing the knife angle as you draw the blade down the stones, stuff like that. I speak from experience, and I even started out the right way. Once you get decent with regular steel, though, you can try sharpening something with high vanadium super steel like S35VN and have a lot more confidence that you can leave it sharper than it was when you started it, that you won't mar the edge or have picked up bad habits trying to force sharpen a high vanadium steel before you knew how to use the system on normal steel. That's where the diamond stones come in. There's a very good set of videos online that Spyderco has put together on how to use the setup and it's worth watching them. More than once -- you'll prolly refer back to them, they're fairly useful. The diamond stones (actually they're steel triangular tubes coated with industrial diamond) remove quite a bit of material even though you're just lightly running the knife edge down them and leave a very coarse edge behind, so you only use them at the beginning, to get down to the edge you want, then you sharpen the knife using the normal grit stones. It takes more strokes, but not nearly as many more as it would if you hadn't started with the diamond stones. If all this sounds like a lot more than you hoped to have to deal with -- lol, that's high vanadium steel. Great for keeping an edge for a long time through heavy work without resharpening, but once it does grow dull it takes real work to sharpen. S35VN really isn't that bad in this regard for super steel, it's easier to sharpen than S30V and M390 and a LOT easier to sharpen than S90V or S110V or Maxamet - but if you're like most people, just trying to sharpen a super steel the way you'd sharpen anything else is a recipe for serious frustration. On the other hand if you learn how to sharpen it that's immensely satisfying not to mention very useful. Best of luck!

(Edited)

dankut

May 19, 2020

Verified Buyer

Sweet!

Love this new addition to my Drop knife collection!

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

View 1 More Reply

dankut

Jul 19, 2020

Yes it is! Good eye!!

Omniseed

1972

Sep 12, 2020

yep, the Durus

Vote

slowsand_taco

Jan 27, 2021

Verified Buyer

Purchased this as a gift for my wife who wanted a smaller, sleeker knife to carry and this definitely went above and beyond in this regard.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

Bebop

May 7, 2020

Verified Buyer

Great quality knife

Review might be a little biased. My grandpa had a similar looking knife when I was a kid. It was fake gold and wood stiletto so when i saw this I had to order it. The action is very nice and smooth. Not the quickest or easiest to come out but never seems to hang and locks with minimal effort. There is almost no play in it side to side when locked. All of the bolts are snug in place and the finish is pristine. Thought it would be a little small but after handling it with the style of knife it’s just about perfect. Wish it came quicker but nothing I could do about that. I’ll update if I find any long term issues but so far I love it.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

mikemikemike

Jan 23, 2021

Verified Buyer

Great knife!

This is my first "gentleman's" knife. I'm used to heavier knives like the copper Civivi elementum(which I also recently picked up) and the Broker Albatross, so the weight difference surprised me at first, but it's a very well balanced, well made knife. Framelock is great and it opens incredibly smoothly. It's a bit pricey but I'm very happy with my purchase.

(Edited)

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

GaryZero

Jan 21, 2021

Verified Buyer

Very impressed!

Quality gents carry. Little smaller than I thought cause I failed to read the specs. But I think it’s very fine. I only wish some paperwork came with these Drop knives.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

Ello_again

Sep 5, 2020

Verified Buyer

Best Drop branded knife I've bought.

This is by far the nicest drop knife I've gotten. It's slim, well made, no sharp edges, and the inlays are well done.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

degs

122

Degs Blades

Jul 9, 2020

Verified Buyer

Love it

I am very pleased with the production of this knife. Slim, light, sharp, stylish. Great materials and tolerances.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

Dec 23, 2020

It’s a great knife. You should get one.

Vote

PNWNative

448

Dec 24, 2020

You should follow full disclosure regarding your involvement in the product when submitting a review.

DougFLA123

1404

Jun 20, 2020

Verified Buyer

It took a while to get here, but very nice knife

We Knife Co did a great job. Sharp out of the box. A little on the thin side but fit and finish, centering, detent are all perfect.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

Dzerh

Jun 4, 2020

Verified Buyer

Exceptional little knife

I'm impressed by the design and attention to details. Excellent machining and assembly too. It is smaller than I thought, so I was a little bit disappointed at first, but the knife grew on me and now I think the size is actually perfect for what it is. Highly recommended.

Recommends this product? Yes

Was this helpful?

Showing 24 of 105

Recent Activity

apenney

Placed an order

Smarty-pants-rules

Were you disapointed by the knife at all, its size or QUALITY? It seems tjis is the only knife on drop right now for sale and its far to Expensive for me to buy a fidget toy m8..😁. Im poor so cant afford an expensive fidget toy like that.. Peace out

Norwalio

Placed an order