Spydero Mule Team – Everything You Need To Know

We’re picking up a lot of chatter right now on the subject of the Spyderco Mule Team. Tragically, this is the one Spyderco knife we’ll never get to carry, but it’s also one of the most important knives in the modern knife industry. In this article, we’ll break down what the Mule Team is, why it’s important, and why we don’t carry it at Blade HQ. Let’s jump in! 

What is the Spyderco Mule Team? 

The Mule Team is a compact fixed blade knife available exclusively direct from Spyderco. In design, it’s a Spyderco through and through. It has a tall and slicey flat grind, a neutral handle outline, and the trademark round hole in the blade. It ships as just the blade with no handle scales or sheath. You can buy those sepeartely if you want them. 

At this point you might be wondering why Blade HQ can’t carry it, and why it doesn’t have a handle or sheath. The answer is that, even though it’s a solid knife, it wasn’t made to sell like most production knives. 

Why does the Mule Team exist? 

The short answer is testing. The Mule Team is a simple knife that serves as a test ground for new blade steels.

In automotive manufacturing, a "mule" is a testbed vehicle the development team knows inside and out that they use as a control for testing prototype parts. It could be as simple as Toyota testing a new radiator cap in an otherwise completely stock Corolla, or as complex as building a whole car onto a new frame to see how it performs. 

Sal Glesser, a huge car nut, founded Spyderco. In fact, "Spyder" is a name for the sportiest of sports cars. As the knife industry’s premier research organization, Spyderco does a fair bit of testing on many aspects of knifemaking, and they needed a "mule" of their own. Enter the Mule Team. 

This knife is, by Spyderco standards, pretty basic. That allowed them to build an entire production process for it and isolate one variable: steel. Every time Spyderco wants to know how a new steel performs when being lasered, ground, finished, and used as an end product, they do a run on the Mule Team. At the time of writing, Spyderco has made it with dozens of blade steels and even ceramics. Very impressive! 

In addition to performance testing, Spyderco also uses the Mule Team to test how the steel will be received in the community. How do the end users like the steel? What feedback do they have? How does it stand up to the jobs the customers have to do? All of that is vital information for providing customers with the best possible product. And that, my friends, is the Spyderco way. 

Why doesn’t Blade HQ carry the Mule Team? 

Spyderco never made the Mule Team with the intent of selling millions of them. They have plenty of amazing knives for that. Instead, they make only a small run of it to learn what they need to know, keep samples in a library, and sell the rest of the run. They’re not expensive, especially considering the blade steels they’re often made with, and the runs are fairly small by knife standards, so they tend to sell fast.  

With that context, it’s clear why Blade HQ doesn’t carry the Mule Team. No specific model is made in sufficient quantity or for a long enough time to justify involving a retailer. But the Mule Team is still a cool knife, and many buy them for personal testing and collection. If you want to brave the aftermarket in search of a Mule Team in your favorite steel, it’s probably out there, but be prepared to pay handsomely for it! 

Why is the Mule Team so important? 

It’s hard to overstate just how much knife steel has evolved recently. Steels that we call "budget" and "low-end" today were top-of-the-line steels in living memory. Today’s knives are far and away the best cutting tools in all of history. And much of what we know about knife steels, including brands other than Spyderco, we learned on the Mule Team. Because Spyderco was willing to try steels made for springs, stamps, and structures on a knife, everyone learned just how powerful modern steel can be on knives. 

And the best part? Spyderco is still researching. I’m not privy to whatever they’re working on right now, but if I know Spyderco, they’re cooking with something new, and the whole industry will be better for it. That includes, but is certainly not limited to, the numerous excellent Spyderco knives we do carry!