Can you have a fine point on a big knife and it be tough too?

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Is it possible to have a point fine enough to open the belly of a deer or small game animal such as rabbit or squirrel (their skin takes a finer point to penetrate than you may think) on a large bowie and have it still be tough enough to take digging holes in wood for bow and drill making or splitting wood apart? If you think so what steels could it be made of and with what type heat treats? Who makes one or could make one? Can you get one without it costing an arm and a leg? I don't intentionaly try to bend the tips of my knives to the breaking point but I have broken a fair amount of points on knives and a lot of them were probably just too brittle but on a large blade you have a thick piece of steel that takes a lot of force to bend transitioning down to a point that if it is thin will be able to bend much easier so it seems harder to make a large,thick blade with a thin,durable point than to make a thin blade with a durable point such as a pukko.
Please also see post #7.
 
If your blade is sharp enough the point shouldnt matter, just slice at the brestbone and insert point.

while a large stout blade is not really the right tool for the job if needed it can be done along with everything else you ask of it.

SKam
 
It is possible to make a fine point with thicker steel. The drop to the point has to start farther back on the spine. Then it will naturally taper to a fine point. This can be done on a standard size hunting knife with about a 4" blade length using 3/16" or even 1/4" thick steel. No need to field dress a deer with a bowie unless that's what you like to use.:)
Scott
 
The durability for point in wood is dependent more on just the thickness, you want a gradual taper and ideally a convex sweep, these prevent overloading from being focused right at the tip which would happen trivially for example on a short hollow ground point. You also don't gain (or lose) much strength in the point width, it is all in the thickness, however the point width is very important in penetration which means narrow tips can be much stronger than wide tips of equal cross section. The Howling Rat from Swamp Rat Knifeworks has the finest tip profile I have seen which can still do very heavy wood work, which means full strength stabs into 2x4 pieces of non-clear spruce and will either break out the wood, or go flat to the board without breaking. You can increase penetration by adding a slight sharpenen upper edge which is the military tip they run.

-Cliff
 
It is possible to make a fine point with thicker steel. The drop to the point has to start farther back on the spine. Then it will naturally taper to a fine point. This can be done on a standard size hunting knife with about a 4" blade length using 3/16" or even 1/4" thick steel. No need to field dress a deer with a bowie unless that's what you like to use.
Scott
Click to expand...

I definitely agree with that, my favorite deer dressing blade is between 3 1/2" - 4 1/2". Not that I've dressed a ton of deer, the ones I have though, that length seems Ideal. I would imagine a 7"+ big bowie style knife would be hard to maneuver while dreesing a deer, any imput by anyone who's used a big knife like that??

Darrell............
 
Darrell, I've done it with blades up to 6 1/2". I've used the Puma Whitehunter which has a 6 1/2" blade. If you choke up on the blade, actually not even touching the handle it can be done. It's something that needs your undivided attention because of the chance of slipping on a bloody blade. If the blade has a decent choil, you can grip it even better. With enough care, a person can realisticly use a longer blade to field dress an animal but a shorter blade is still the best choice.
Scott
 
Before the thread becomes one about field dressing game I should make the first post clearer by saying that I like to carry a 9"+ blade with me when I can when I am in the woods for any reason for the purposes of brush clearing, emergency shelter building and fire making,etc. I have field dressed a fair amount of large and small game in a number of different ways and have knives of all sizes that are good at doing that. I usually carry somewhere around a 4 or 5" knife devoted just to taking care of game. Most of the larger knives I have that can easily gut game are not strong enough for the emergency uses that I want a large blade to be able to do. The reason for my post is that if I am going to carry a tough 9+" blade anyway it would be nice to carry one that, if needed for defense for whatever reason, it could easily penetrate whatever it needed to up to the hilt. I used the example of opening up the belly of a game animal because if it can't do that easily it will not penetrate deep enough for defence. I apologize for any confusion and I appreciate all the input.
m
 
quote"The durability for point in wood is dependent more on just the thickness, you want a gradual taper and ideally a convex sweep, these prevent overloading from being focused right at the tip which would happen trivially for example on a short hollow ground point. You also don't gain (or lose) much strength in the point width, it is all in the thickness, however the point width is very important in penetration which means narrow tips can be much stronger than wide tips of equal cross section. The Howling Rat from Swamp Rat Knifeworks has the finest tip profile I have seen which can still do very heavy wood work, which means full strength stabs into 2x4 pieces of non-clear spruce and will either break out the wood, or go flat to the board without breaking. You can increase penetration by adding a slight sharpenen upper edge which is the military tip they run.

-Cliff"


I don't like hollow grinds in general partly for the reasons you mentioned,Cliff. Do you think a high flat grind of something like tripple tempered 5160 could come to a strong yet thin,narrow point? What would you think its geometry would have to look like?
Will the point on a Howling Rat easily gut game,and do their longer blades have the same tip geometry? Is there a picture on the web of the Howling Rats tip? Is it as thin as say the Swedish Army knife by Frost?
As always thanks for your help.
 
Here are the thickness of the point on the Howling Rat at 0.5 cm increments back from the tip : 0.18, 0.26, 0.32, 0.36 cm. You can just sketch this out on a piece of paper, it sweeps out in a smooth convex arc which prevents the very tip from being overloaded when prying. The larger blades have heavier tip profiles as you get better leverage with longer blades and thus need more strength.

Prying is such an opening ended criteria though, how much force do you want to apply, how deep of the point and in what type of wood. I have been doing a lot of digging lately on stock 2x4's, spruce, all the same type of wood, all clear sections, but still the strength of the wood can easily double from one piece to another, so you could easily dig quite aggressively through one piece and then snap on another with no progress.

-Cliff
 
The only way I can see keeping a hollow grind at "reasonable" strength is to use thick and wide, 3/16" or 1/4" by 1 1/2" steel. Bring the grind only about half way up and not deep. Leave the edge thick, then convex it. I still would rather have a full convex but a hollow is still possible.
Scott
 
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