Bowie mania, let's see the Bowies.

In many states, a bowie is simply a big knife, so, seeing as how top swedge is a clip.....

First photo is the original Scagel, along with rough forging of this very knife, from some 15yrs back, now. Aside from beating blade on anvil horn, chopping a v-notch in 1/4" thick mild steel plate, and throwing the 52100B blade point first into concrete before final polish, AND this very knife being fumbled before my very eyes and dropping point first onto concrete, I kinda wonder if the blade will hold up? (wink!)

This is one of 12-15 of these made to date by PJ Tomes...handle views are left, bottom, and right...shaves, as well.











 
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These knives remind me of days when men were men. They had 1 maybe 2 knives and depended on that knife everyday. I wonder how looking for a knife back then was like or did you just have one made by a local Smith.

Cool knives everyone. They are all works of art.

I picked this Buck Kalinga up at the fathers day factory sale. Kalinga Pro S30V made by Joe Houser.
I made the two tone sheath just messing around with two types of leather. The other Buck is a long version of the 192 Vanguard with another 2 tone sheath.


 
BladeScout said:
Tachee of the Western Cherokee delegation to Wahington.

All below description of the knives in this post are by a gent named James Batson, who knows a thing or two about Bowie knives:

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"This view reveals Tahchee’s Bowie knife is sheathed with a portion of the handle encased. There is also a hint of the hilt edge being wrapped with a white metal. If Tahchee’s waist is about 16 1/2 inches wide and the artist sized the knife by proportion, then the total length of the sheathed knife is about 14 1/2 inches."

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"Rare Coffin Hilt Bowie Knife"

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"American Made Classic Coffin Handle Bowie Knife

The knife has a 14 1/8 inch overall length, a 9 1/8 inch blade, and a walnut handle with a silver wrap. The knife in the sheath is an approximate size & likeness to the one in Tahchee’s sash."

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"The Carrigan Knife

An American made Classic Coffin Handle Bowie Knife exhibited in the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock. According to family tradition, James Black made this knife in Washington, Arkansas. Photo courtesy of Historic Arkansas Museum"

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"American Made Classic Coffin Handle Bowie Knives

Acquired by Bowie Knife Collectors Bill Wright (top knife} and Jack Royce (bottom knife). Photo courtesy of Bill Wright"

"Every serious Bowie Knife collector has a copy of the Old Lithograph of Tachee."

-JB
Click to expand...
Awesome info.
 
I'm sure Somebody would probably call this a Bowie.

Someone before me in it's 100 or so years made a crude sheath for it and carried it into the outdoors, luckily it was oversized enough that I had some leather to work with.

I don't exactly consider this 6" blade a Bowie myself, but the first " Bowie knives " were butchers after all.
 
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"i don't exactly consider this 6" blade a Bowie myself, but the first " Bowie knives " were butchers after all.", and "That's essentially what the original bowies looked like, just generally bigger for fighting." are speaking from hearsay....

I could make a very good case of "original bowies" being anything but only large butcher knives, except maybe for cheap local smith big knives.

Many were much more a small cutlass, with sharpened clip for back cuts, adapted from longer landed gent horseback blades, of an age when a rider carried a brace of pistols, and when those were discharged, the cuttin' commenced, with more and more time spent afoot in towns by these same gents who also studied formal blade training as a matter of gentry, just small enough to conceal under riding/over coat. You will note later many southern laws against carry.

To this day, Alabama's one statewide knife law regarding bowies is that you may carry one openly, but not concealed. Wielders of that time of singleshot pistols were fast draw artists of the back cut from concealment, impossible to defend against, and the bowie was the full-auto assault rifle of the age, running across the south and up the rough ports of the Mississippi, their bars, and nightly duels, and with similar amounts of mayhem making the local, and later national, press, which combined with lurid make-believe yellow press, led to a Congressional Act banning "bowie knives" from before the Civil War all the way until the 1950s.

Those were NOT crude large butcher knives which were used in advertised formal schools of the times. Jim Bowie merely popularized something, already existing, in his own way. Such schools were widespread in port cities of the Gulf Coast, and up the eastern seaboard. This ad is from New York, early 1800s....note his using same classic blade fighting techniques to which he added "hunting knife". Note also amusing typo of handgun range, likely 21yds, dueling distance.

 
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Here is another one of my mini Bowie knives, (Linder branded)...

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The handle scales are polished natural colored white bone. The little bugger is actually quite nicely put together. It has gimping on the spine of it's pretty thick full tang blade. Probably best suited as a novelty, or a desktop letter opener, but seems it could do more if pushed into some other limited service :)

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And here, where I made one of Ontario's SP darlings, (the SP-5 Survival Bowie), into my own form of wall art. This one is one of their more recent specimens, being made in 1075 carbon steel, (prior manufacturing was using 1095 carbon steel)...

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