Bought a $7 paint scraper from Harbor Freight for breaking down primals and it outworks the fancy de-boning knife I paid way too much for. Sharpened it once in two years and it still glides under silverskin without tearing anything up. Cheap stuff wins way more often than people want to admit.

Honestly your free time is too short to be miserable for a week just to get to the good part. Here's a tip though, and I'm only saying this because it saved Dune for me: skip to page 100. Like actually just flip there and start reading. The stuff you miss is mostly world building and weird names anyway, and the story makes sense without it. If you still aren't hooked by page 130 or so, then yeah, bail for good, and you only lost one night instead of seven. I've done this with like four books people swore I had to "push through" and it works more often than you'd think. Life's too short and there are too many good books that grab you on page one.