The Badlands Drifter Sheath System – Description and Ordering Information

While it won’t come as much of a surprise to those who have read my blog for awhile, I want all my gear to be versatile and work together, and my belt knife and sheath are certainly no different. As part of my line 1 survival gear, it has to be fail safe as well be as useful as possible. Ounces equal pounds, and pounds equal pain, so I want to maximize every ounce I’m carrying.

After designing a knife that I felt was the best representation of what I’ve been looking for in a hard use field knife, I decided to build a sheath that was the best sheath I could think of to compliment it. I think a knives sheath should be just as useful as the knife, not just an afterthought to carry the knife with. The sheath is also just as important, protecting the user from the blade when not in use and protecting the blade from loss and the elements, ensuring it is ready to use when needed most.

I chose to use Kydex because of it’s high durability as well as great retention. I mount the sheath to a sheath mount made of heavy duty polyester webbing, the same webbing used to make industrial webbing slings, with 2000 pounds of breaking strength. The sheath mount itself is sewn using heavy nylon thread with an industrial sewing machine. No straps, buckles or snaps to break and no janky belt clips to unclip, causing you to lose one of your most important pieces of gear; everything is sewn solid.

The sheath mount is more than just a belt loop though. It’s a versatile platform for mounting the sheath that the end user can customize to fit his needs.

Side view of sheath mount. L-R: Belt loop, storage pouch, sheath loop.

The innermost part, closest to the body, is the belt loop itself, large enough to fit over any belt up to 5” in width. I made it this large so that those who want to mount their knife to a battle belt or LBE would be able to slide the sheath mount over and retain the useful functions of the rest of the sheath mount.

Belt loop easily fits over this USMC issue battle belt.

Moving to the center of the sheath mount is the storage pouch. I sized this to fit a 1/2” x 6” ferro rod and some wet weather tinder, like Vaseline cotton balls or Tinder-quik tabs. At the top of the storage pouch is a small grommet to tie a dummy cord to. This ensures a reliable, all weather fire starting method is on board no matter what.

Moving further out is the sheath loop. The sheath itself mounts to this using a kydex clamping bar, pinching the webbing of the sheath loop between the sheath and the bar. This allows a very wide range of mounting positions to suit the end user’s needs. Just by loosening the two Phillips screws on the clamping bar the user can slide the sheath up or down to their preferred height, or even cant the sheath up to about 15 degrees forwards or backwards. I’m not sure if there’s another sheath that is this customizable. This allows for comfortable and convenient carry no matter the situation.

Sheath is fully ambidextrous just by flipping the hardware around. Here it is mounted for left handed use with a full forward cant.

Hiking in 5 miles with your ruck and you don’t want your hip belt to squeeze your knife into your side? No problem, just slide the sheath down as far as you need to clear your hip belt like in the picture below.

Then after your hike you want to ditch your ruck at camp, but you’re tired of your knife hanging down and slapping you in the leg? Once again, no problem, just slide it up to where it’s convenient like in the next picture. Note the height of the knife’s handle in relation to my pants belt in both pictures. That’s nearly 5” of adjustment range.

Moving to the sheath itself, I’ve scalloped around the edges to allow the sheath to be used to store a small amount of cordage. I’ve got about 12’ (two spans) of #36 bank line stored on the sheath, in addition to the dummy cord for the ferro rod. Cordage is not easy to recreate in the wild, and having some on hand and out of the way could come in handy in a number of ways should you be left to only the equipment on you to survive.

The top three rows of eyelets on the sheath are all spaced at 3/4”. This is a standard mounting pattern for all the different varieties of MOLLE mount available such as MALICE clips or Tek-Lok’s. While I personally prefer to mount my belt knife on my pants belt, I know some people prefer to mount it on a MOLLE belt or chest rig, so I made sure to make allowances for that. This does involve removing the sheath mount since it too uses those mounting holes.

Here the sheath is mounted to my Helikon Foxtrot belt rig using MALICE clips.

This sheath comes standard with my Badlands Hunter knife in the following colors:

Kydex L-R: Black, OD green, Chocolate Brown, Coyote. Webbing is available in black or OD.

For those interested in a sheath made for a different style of knife just shoot me an email and we can discuss the details.

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