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The Sven Saw was born on a Boundary Waters portage in 1960, when Richard Swenson met a man heading out to the Ely hospital with his foot badly cut by an uncovered axe. Swenson, an engineer at Honeywell in Duluth, decided there had to be a better way, and by 1961 he had built and patented it: a folding bow saw whose Swedish steel blade stows completely inside its own aluminum handle. At the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, REI's Jim Whittaker asked for six and reordered a dozen more before Swenson got home. Nearly a million have sold since.
If you spend weekends wandering forest roads and two tracks, a Sven Saw earns a permanent spot behind the truck seat or in the cargo bay of the Outback. Folded, the blade is fully covered, so it rides next to your gear without chewing up seat covers or fingers. It clears a deadfall across the trail, cuts dry firewood off the ground at a dispersed site, and pairs with the bushcraft knife on your belt so the blade does the fine work while the saw handles everything thicker than your wrist. Toss in a first aid kit and the vehicle is ready for whatever is around the next bend.
The 21 inch Sven Saw is the original, folding to 24 inches at under 15 ounces and ripping through a six inch log in about a minute. The 15 inch Sven Saw came later, built by Swenson to fit his own deer hunting pack, and folds to 17 inches at under 12 ounces for backpackers and hunters counting weight. Both lock the blade, backbar, and red anodized handle into a stiff triangle with a single wingnut.
Swen Products is still family owned. The handles are machined in Minnesota, the blades are the only part sourced from Sweden, and packaging and shipping run through Opportunity Partners, a Minnesota nonprofit that provides job training and employment to people with disabilities. For camp firewood, trail clearing, and any survival kit that respects its weight limit, sixty plus years of portages are the only review that matters. The axes and saws collection carries its companions.
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