At Cold Steel’s Special Projects Division, you’ll find nearly the entire range of Cold Steel products but with emphasis on the personal favorites of company president Lynn Thompson. Twenty-five years of martial arts experience and his current training regimen of two hours daily, every day, gives Thompson an outlook focused towards traditional weaponry and modern self defense. The new Special Projects Division also gives Cold Steel its first retail level enterprise and a direct line to the consumer.
On the Lynn Thompson Blog at Cold Steel Special Projects, Thompson recounts his discoveries of unique ancient weapons during his world travels and explains how he put them to work in training and developed Cold Steel’s modern counterparts. Thompson’s own goals when founding Cold Steel in 1980 included mastering the use of every weapon the company sells. Decades of devotion to that goal earned Thompson a special Master at Arms Award from a group of professional martial arts trainers attending the annual Cold Steel Challenge in September 2010.
Cold Steel’s products often depend heavily on Lynn Thompson’s own ideas and offer users knives and tools with a blend of martial arts potential and practical applications. Thompson’s latest hunting knife design took its shape from ancient weapons of the Celts and the warriors of ancient China, but refined itself on a boar hunting trip in Australia. The prototype proved it actually worked but actual use on boars pointed out some possible improvements to the handle. Other products undergo the same sort of careful hands-on testing. Buy a camp shovel from Cold Steel and you’ll find a serviceable camp tool with a history as the backup weapon of the Russian Spetnaz or Special Forces. A walking stick from Cold Steel traces its ancestry to weapons carried by African tribesmen, Irish travelers or American frontier gamblers. Even replicas of battlefield arms from Native America — destined for display but capable of lethal combat — meet functional standards and hold up to genuine tests.
Read all of our Cold Steel Special Projects reviews below
