Tag: camping gear

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TESTED: Dometic CFX3 45

At the 2019 SEMA show, Dometic released their CFX3 line of electric coolers, which are the latest generation of the CFX series that I’ve reviewed in the past HERE.  Everything from the compressor to the control app was updated for this complete product line refresh, and after spending some time checking out the new coolers at the show, I left Dometic’s booth eager to put one to the test in the real world.  We all know that seeing something at an industry show is one thing, and spending months with that same product while traveling thousands of miles off-road in the real world is another – so rather than create just one more short term review of a product, I figured I would push this one out to over a year of use – to see just what living with the CFX3 is like well after the honeymoon phase of ownership.

At first glance, a CFX3 electric cooler may look similar to the old CFX series, but look closer and you’ll begin to see just how much has changed.  Construction wise, everything from the handles to the compressor unit to the controls have been revised.  The handles are now all aluminum, so there’s no need to worry about cracking a handle if something smashes into the cooler or if your buddy goes full hulk mode using a ratchet strap around a handle to secure the cooler in your vehicle.  We can’t see the compressor unit, but know that it’s an entirely new unit that is more efficient, consumes less power, and creates less noise than it’s predecessor.  This means that the CFX3 coolers are easier on your battery system when you’re parked, and they’re even easier to sleep near.  Dometic has also moved the compressor to the opposite end of the cooler from the lid opening, so now when you open the lid the deep end is closest to you.

On the control side of things, the CFX3 series steps into the modern age with a high resolution display that is a welcome change over the old LCD display on the older coolers.  No longer will you have to reference your manual to remember how to make a settings change, or figure out what the display is trying to tell you.  With the CFX3 display you can clearly read, adjust, and understand all of the settings with just a few button presses.  The whole process is very intuitive, and folks who have never seen the manual can make any adjustment needed without issue.  When the display isn’t in use, a little snowflake icon on the display lets you know the unit is powered up, so parasitic draw is less than the bright LEDs used by other brands of coolers.  Next to the display, you’ll also find a USB port that’s been upgraded to provide 2 Amps of power at 5V, which is a welcome upgrade over the 500 milli-amp outlet on the old CFX units.  This increase in current means that the CFX3 can actually charge modern power-hungry devices, and the port is in a great location to power a speaker or other device while you’re in camp.

Speaking of devices, Dometic has also improved the companion app for the CFX3 series. The app uses a Bluetooth connection that sips power, and now you can plot your cooler’s energy consumption in addition to fully controlling the cooler from your phone.  In use, I’ve noticed absolutely no hiccups using the app on Android devices, and being able to know how much power your cooler is currently consuming and how much power it has been consuming is powerful information when it coming to determining just how long you can go before needing to charge your battery system.  The CFX3 series coolers do come with a configurable low voltage cutoff, so you can protect your battery system from over discharging.  As they say knowledge is power, and it’s super easy to pop open the app and see where your battery system is at, rather than having to guess at your state of charge. 

Inside the CFX3 45, things will start to look like familiar Dometic territory, and it’s here where you’ll find the versatile system of baskets and dividers that allow you to organize your cooler loadout.  There is a basket for the shallow section of the cooler, and a basket for the deep section that be divided in half vertically with a removable insert.  Volume wise, the CFX3 45 measures in at 46 liters of storage, and this works out to a deep basket that can hold 16 sleeved standard size soda cans per layer with ease.  Drive off-road long enough and the simple action of cans rubbing against each other as you bounce down a trail can wear a hole in an aluminum can.  Pro tip: This is why you can never have too many foam beer koozies.  Should a can have a hole worn in it, or something else in your cooler decide to leak, there’s still a drain plug that’s easy to use at the bottom of the cooler.

Getting in and out of the CFX3 45 is where I noticed about the only issue that I’ve been able to find in my extended time with the cooler.  That issue is that the lid doesn’t always latch unless you give it a firm press to close it.  I would like the lid to work like a car door, in the respect that it’s easy to close and that it seals well, yet with the CFX3 lid, even dropping it closed isn’t enough to do the trick.  The best practice is to gently close the lid and then give it a press to engage the latch.  This is by no means a deal breaker, but I’ve seen other CFX3 coolers suffer the same ailment, and there may have been one case where a cooler in the back of a truck was closed but not latched, and spirited driving resulted in lunch being put out early – but the point is, just check that the lid is latched and you’re good to go.  Other than the lid, every CFX3 cooler I’ve encountered in the wild has worked flawlessly.

The 100 year old hotel and the 100 day old CFX3 45.

If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself that yeah, an electric cooler would be rad, but that’s a lot of money to spend on a camping gadget – remember this:  Dometic also provides an AC power adapter so that you can run your cooler when you’re at home or anywhere else you have access to AC power.  This means that your electric cooler can pull double duty and be of value at home and on the road.  Need a drink cooler in the shop?  Need a place to store additional food so that you don’t have to go to the grocery store as often?  Staying in a hotel for long term work? Don’t think of an electric cooler as a camping only tool – they are devices which can provide value every day of the year, or whenever you need them. 

In a nod to Dometic’s longevity, one of our American Adventurist staff has been running the same Dometic electric cooler for more than seven years now, and thanks to the solar panel on his roof, it’s been on 24/7.

The CFX3 45 Cooler that I’ve been testing for the last year hasn’t been phased by anything that I’ve thrown at it.  To give you a quick idea of what It’s been through, the cooler has:  Frozen in the winter in Idaho, baked in a hot car in the middle of summer in Phoenix, and logged nearly 35,000 miles of travel.  Several thousand of these miles were off-road, doing everything from Go-Fast Dirt to rock-donkey rock crawling.  The cooler may or may not have logged a little bit of flight time, and it’s spent plenty of time packed next to everything from other pelican boxes to recovery gear while bouncing around all over the Western US.  It may have a few scuffs and scrapes and dust that will never come out, but the unit works just as well as it did on day one.

The Dometic CFX3 45 has been an awesome electric cooler.  I have to give Dometic props for looking at their old CFX series of coolers (which are solid units) and figuring out how to make them better.  With the CFX3, the compressor is more efficient and quiet.  The user interface is so much easier to use.  And other little details like the revised USB port all add up to make a cooler that has been a joy to use.  The bottom line is this:  If you want an electric cooler that you just plug in and know that it’s going to work, you can’t go wrong with a CFX3.  No matter where your adventure is going to take you, know that the CFX3 will stand up to what you throw at it, and keep everything you throw in it cool.  When the road finally sees you back home, know that an electric cooler can be utilized around the house – so don’t think that an electric cooler is a travel-only toy.  Electric coolers have never been easier to use, or more useful – so if you’ve been on the fence about ditching ice, know that with a CFX3 cooler you’ll never look back.

Full Disclosure: Dometic provided a sample CFX3 45 electric cooler free of charge to the author for the purposes of this review.

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Long Term Review: Benchmade Auto Triage and 917BK

I have to admit that prior to using a Benchmade Knife, I was a sub $100 knife guy. 

My thought process here was pretty simple – affordable knives do work, and if I ever lost a knife it wouldn’t hurt my wallet as much as a more expensive knife.  Yet like so many other tools, knives are something where you get what you pay for – and my time using affordable knives has seen me do a lot of sharpening, with a few unexpectedly sharp surprises along the way.  I’ve had an affordable knife open more than once in my pocket, and had a knife for a short while with a locking mechanism that quite simply didn’t lock – so let’s just say I made a point to handle these knives with extra care.  And, when it came time to use one of these knives, all it took was a few dirty cardboard boxes or a quarter of an elk to make a noticeable difference in the edge.  All of this left me wondering – what did paying more for a knife really get you? 

In 2019, I decided to find out what owning a good knife was like, and I picked up a couple of knives from Benchmade so that I could use them day in and day out for a couple of years before ultimately writing this review and sharing my experience.  The first Benchmade product I picked up was the Auto-Triage.  Actually, I picked up two, because I wanted to put a proper rescue knife in the hands of a real first responder so I enlisted the help of Adam, who is a Fire Department Captain in my home state of Colorado.  I simply asked him to use the Auto Triage as his duty knife and let me know what he thought.  I would adopt the other Auto Triage as my Every Day Carry (EDC) knife to see how I got on with it. 

The auto triage is part of Benchmade’s Rescue knife family, and as such the knife features an auto opening hook, and a carbide glass breaker.  There are two major types of blades to choose from – the drop point blade (serrated or non-serrated) is 3.58 inches long, and the opposing bevel blade is 3.35 inches long.  The handle is 0.58 inches thick, which when compared to some of Benchmade’s popular EDC knives, works out to be between one to two tenths of an inch thicker.  Weight for a drop-point Auto Triage is 5.75oz.  As an auto knife, it’s also important to check out the automatic opening knife laws of your state before picking one up to make sure you can legally possess one.  Thankfully in Arizona, auto knives are still good to go.

For folks who live in areas where auto knives are not allowed, I also picked up a 917BK, to get to know one of Benchmade’s manual opening rescue knives.  The 917BK has a 3.48inch blade (the serrated version is found on the 917SBK) a manual opening hook, and the same carbide glass breaker as found on the Auto Triage.  The handle on the 917 is slightly narrower than Auto Triage at 0.55 inches.  Weight is 5.28oz.

I have medium to large sized hands based on glove size, and both of these knives feel fantastic in my hands.  Benchmade has clearly designed a knife handle or two over the years, and both of these knives can be manipulated with confidence whether you have wet hands, bloody hands from procesing game, or even hands covered in brake fluid when you’re trying to recover a crashed vehicle that somehow managed to lock it’s rear brakes on and you just need to cut a soft line to release the brakes.  I’ve had no problem finding the controls on either of these knives with mechanic-style or nitrile glove on.  The Auto Triage also has a textured grip inlay in the aluminum frame, and while this does serve to provide additional grip, it can also make slipping the knife into a pocket for carrying more of a challenge.  The tradeoff here is that it takes more effort to pull the knife out of your pocket – and that is a good thing to help keep this knife from jumping ship. 

Speaking of in your pocket, both knives ride well in any pocket I’ve placed them in and their size has not proved to be an issue during carry.  There are definitely times when I’m reminded that I have a knife in my pocket, but carrying these knives has never led to any discomfort from sitting on them, or feeling like you have too large of an item in a pocket.  The one notable exception here is with what I’ll just call performance seats like you would find in a track car where you’re sitting on a covering over carbon or in a molded seat.  If your going to be spending any time in such a car, don’t carry anything in your back pockets.  I normally wear pants and shorts from brands like 5.11, Kuhl, prAna, and Mountain Khakis, so I can’t speak to what life is like when carrying these knives in Jeans or other styles of clothing – but I would expect similar results.

The first time you use either of these knives you will instantly begin to appreciate their quality and level of performance.  Starting with the blades, both knives are made using quality steel (S30V for the 917BK and N680 for the Auto Triage), and while there are certainly better and more exotic steels out there, the performance and durability advantage is obvious when compared to the $20 knives I’d been using in the past.  Performance shows through in edge quality, but the biggest difference I noticed was in edge durability – I could get a <$100 knife to be split-a-hair sharp, but it was only a few cuts away from loosing that level of sharpness, even when setting a similar edge angle.  With both of these Benchmade knives, you keep a sharper edge much longer, even when you’re cutting things with magical edge dulling powers, like game hides and dirty cardboard boxes. 

This improved edge retention benefits the user in two ways:  Less sharpening, and a knife that is usually sharper as you’re not completely dulling the edge if you use your knife for an extended period.  This means that when you do go to sharpen your Benchmade, you just need to hone and strop the edge.  You don’t have to reshape it like you would sometimes have to do on other more affordable knives.  And these particular Benchmade knives are so much more than their respective blades.

Each of these knives have a rescue hook and glass breaker, and if your sitting there thinking that you’re never going to use either of these features – I thought the same thing too when I first got these knives, but I quickly learned how versatile they are.  Yes, the rescue hook can lance through seat belts and other textiles in a rescue situation, but it also does an outstanding job of cutting everything from zip-ties to mesh bags of fruit you’re tying to open.  Using the hook is a much safer alternative to using the main blade in those cases as there are things you don’t want to cut nearby.  You can tuck the hook into a bundle of wires held by a zip tie and not have to worry about the point of your main blade nicking a wire in the bundle, and in so many other applications where you want to make a more protected cut.  The rescue hook is one of those tools you’ll find yourself using all of the time. 

The glass breaker on these knives is something that I hope folks never have to use – but in the interest of preparing you for what it’s like, know that it works far better than you think.  It turns out, safety glass works a little differently in real life than it does in the movies.  As Adam reported:  “I had the opportunity to use the glass breaker on a number of cases, and it’s almost comical how little effort it takes to shatter safety glass with a carbide glass breaker.  Factor in the adrenaline and stress that everyone will experience to some degree when they’re using such a tool in a real situation, and it’s easy to see how someone would smack a panel of safety glass much harder than they would need to.”  I’ll call that a win.

 

Mechanically, both of these knives have been absolutely flawless in their function, and ‘accidental’ drops in the mud, sand, snow, with only an occasional rinsing for cleaning have done nothing to impact their operation.  The blade control mechanisms have worked perfectly, and I’ve had no accidental openings or other unexpected behavior, which is not something I can say about some of the cheapie knives I’ve used in the past.  Its nice to know that you can carry either of these knives, and know that you’re packing a tool that will perform day after day no matter what happens. 

I recently sent the 917BK into Benchmade to try out their Lifesharp service, which is a full cleaning, servicing, and sharpening of the knife at no cost to the owner.  All you have to do is pay for shipping your knife to Benchmade.  My 917 was returned to me cleaned, grit free, and sharp as new.  Not bad for the cost of a small flat rate box and five minutes of my time.  It’s also worth noting that Benchmade will provide replacement belt clips at no cost to the owner too.  That’s a much better deal that what I’ve done in the past that involved reshaping and re-tempering the belt clip off another knife…  But that’s another story.   

So it’s all sunshine and rainbows with Benchmade knives then? Honestly, I’ve been pretty happy with my purchases.  And that purchase price is about the only real drawback that I can find about either of these knives.  You pay some good money upfront, and if I’m being honest its the purchase price that has kept me from jumping in sooner.  But as they say, “Buy once, cry once”.  I’m glad that I did.  Now, every time I go to loadout a pair of shorts or pants, I know I’m packing a quality tool with me, and the recognition of this fact has also helped me build the habit of making sure that my knife is always in my pocket.  Just like we pay more attention to make sure that we’re not leaving our $1500 smartphones behind, it’s pretty easy to build the same habit to check for your knife before you walk away.  There is no changing the fact that losing one of these knives would be a bummer – so make sure you don’t leave it behind somewhere.

Benchmade’s 917BK and Auto-Triage won me over, and after more than a year of using these knives, I’ve learned that there is definitely value in paying more for a knife.  I kept pushing this article back further and further as opportunities continued to present themselves for use in harsh environments – from the desert sands of Glamis to the snows of Colorado, these knives have been rock solid performers.  So if you’re in the market for a quality tool that will last you a lifetime – I don’t think you can go wrong with a Benchmade knife. 

FULL DISCOLOSURE: The Author purchased the Auto Triage knives covered in this article. Benchmade provided a sample 917BK at no cost for comparison here.