The SOG Mini-Pentagon is an outstanding self-defense tool. It is highly concealable, comfortable in a variety of grips, at home either slashing or stabbing, and in a pinch can be used as a credible wilderness survival knife.

The Mini-Pentagon is 7.75 inches long overall with a blade length of 3.5 inches. Its handle is no-nonsense checkered Kraton with a lanyard hole at the butt. The first inch or so of the blade is left unsharpened and contoured to provide the user with a space to choke up on the blade for precision work. The blade surface is a very nice nonreflective powder coat – I wish more of my knives had this coat. The steel is AUS-6 hardened to 55-57 Rc if you care about that sort of thing – I don’t particularly care about blade steel in a self-defense oriented knife, and it’s hard to imagine a city-dweller like myself convincing a jury that this knife was carried for any other purpose. The blade is double edged – one side razor-sharp plain edge, the other side a nice aggressive pattern of serrations. The sheath is pretty good, holding the knife where it’s supposed to be and not coming with it when it’s drawn quickly. I wish there were more carry options than the belt/boot clip, though – I’d like to carry this knife sideways at the small of my back, and there isn’t a good way to do that. It’s made in Japan, again, if you care.

In terms of concealment, the knife and sheathing are first-rate. It doesn’t print appreciably under a light jacket or a heavy shirt, although that’s probably a given. More importantly, it’s comfortable to wear small-of-the-back for long periods. I don’t wear boots, but I let an Army friend wear it in his jump boot around town for an afternoon, and he had no problems.

As to performance: I am of the school of thought that says that banging a knife against a rock until it fails is a silly thing to do. If you’re going to be inserting knife A into thug B, repeat as needed, you aren’t going to need to torture test it extensively, because thug B is not made of granite and thus you don’t need to test your knife on a rock. However, the question of whether the knife will fail catastrophically when it dings off of a metal button or a rib seems relevant.

I went to the grocery store, bought a ham, and did the following test: I wrapped the ham in a blue jeans jacket that was going to goodwill, secured it to a stool with duct tape, and proceeded to stab, cut, and gouge the holy shit out of it. I then handed it off to my Army friend, who is considerably larger and fitter than I, and let him go at it with the now slick knife. He stabbed, cut, and gouged the holy shit out of the now-distressed ham-and-jacket. No problems with buttons or the bone in the ham other than a minor tip ding that I would say is to be expected when you jam a needle-sharp piece of metal into anything that could be remotely described as resistant.

My final verdict is that this knife is very tough, well-thought-out (note the flared hilt as opposed to the straight hilt of its big brother, the Pentagon), and made very well. I wouldn’t carry it as a primary knife, as I live in a city with city attitudes to such things, but I do recommend it as a backup knife for anyone who can legally carry it or get away with carrying it otherwise.

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