Big knives titles.

J

JamesofArc

Joined
Apr 19, 2016
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310
This is for big knives over lets say 9 inches.
What catagory are your big knives in?

I feel the generic name of Bowie knife is not the proper name for most big knives.

What class do you put your knives in.

I consider my Ontario SP10 Marine Raider a survival knife not a bowie. Sure it has a clip point and a giard but that's all it has in common with the bowie.

My Marine Raider is built to help you make it from point A to point B with the least amount of supplys and with no supply coming. It's built to make trails, shelter, prepair wood for fires and processing game and maybe to kill with. That's more then the Bowie was made for.

My BK9 is a good knife but i dont consider it as much of a survival because its thinner. To me its more of a camp knife.

What category do you put your big knives in.
 
A consensus on just what constitutes a bowie knife is impossible. To a sizable portion of the population, your SP10 Marine Raider is a quintessential bowie knife. I don't get hung up on names or styles. If I like a knife, enough, I buy it.
 
My only big knife is a Skrama. It is sui generis, and definitely not a Bowie.
 
This is my go-to reference for the Jim Bowie knife: http://www.sonsofdewittcolony.org//adp/history/bios/bowie/knife_like_bowies.html

Interesting enough, the original Bowie knife described in the source above seems to be more plain Jane than the image of Bowie knives we have in our heads, with the aggressive trailing point and huge-ass guards and all. This isn’t 100% set in stone, but Jim’s knife was probably just an ordinary looking fairly large knife. It wasn’t the knife itself that gave birth to the legend, but the story and the man behind it.

On another note, perhaps big knives over 9” could be classified as choppers? Even then, factors like blade profile and point of balance would have to be taken into account.

My personal choice of big knife is the Nepalese khukuri.
 
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Language can be a frustrating thing at times, because understanding it depends on having a shared cultural context. We live in a world, where for a long time, we have been able to order a SKU from a website, or even a printed product Catalogue and with a fair and clear expectation of what we are going to receive. We can trace that behavior back to the original Sears catalog.

But, Jim Bowie’s famous knife fight happens well before that. It happens during the early days of the industrial revolution, in a part of the world which has yet to benefit from it. It is a world where things are still handcrafted by individual makers to the specific requirements of the user. A world before standardization and replaceable/interchangeable parts. A world where if you asked for a “James Bowie 01 fighter prototype”, no one would understand what you were saying. Few if any products were marketed that way.

So when the reports became popularize and people decide that they needed a Bowie knife, they didn’t imagine a particular thing; they instead were referring to a function. They wanted a knife that could be used in the manner employed by James Bowie; they wanted a full sized self-defense knife. The finished design would depend on the skill, imagination and artistry of the craftsman making the item.

n2s
 
I just picked up a bnib Esee-6 and I put it into the survival knife category. Imo this beast is built for hard use and will last for years. I have had bowies in the past but all felt like cheap crap compared to the esee. With the recent times and Climate of the world, I felt I needed a shtf,bugout fixed blade...I think I found it!
 
jdmvette said:
of course. Looking very much forward to the 2022 RE4 remake.

And I literally just ordered a J.Krauser knife after posting this
lol.gif
(that knife above is not mine)
Click to expand...
I digress, but hella nice. RE fan here too. Enjoy your incoming knife, man.
 
Ontario SP10 is one of the classic bowie knife forms. Some other common types would be spear point, Arkansas toothpick, straight back. I think the bowie knife has evolved in the last few decades to where now they mostly come without a guard or a clip point (like many large TOPS or Busse knives). To me, they're still bowie knives. Everybody's got a different opinion though. Fair enough, it's just semantics. Big knives are great!
 
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