larger cultellus
The cultellus is an awesome design, but I've avoided it because of it's choil, and because I was always happy with the rat tail. If the knife could be made without a choil, and made to be bigger that would be AWESOME. 1/8" thick, , with a shortened pommel. It would be one of the only truly compact knives of it's size in the busse range, with as much edge as possible in the 9" oal package, trying to avoid having extra length in the ricasso and pommel. it would also be the only slicer in that size, but still fairly strong at 1/8" thick.
rat tail type knife
going with the theme of "compact" in a given size, the rat tail is an excellent example of a knife that absolutely maximizes every last bit of area it has, wasting nothing, adding nothing that can be avoided. A larger version of this basic design would be AWESOME. The same type of straight backed blade with a slow sweep to the tip (keeping it acute), straight handle (micarta would be nice since it'll be larger and for heavier use), SHORT gaurd. I don't know if the talon hole will work here since the idea is to keep it as compact as possible, which the short gaurd of the rat tail acheives beautifully, but if there is one there can't be any wasted space in the ricasso.
-you could make one of these out of a thin nick (though you'd waste a lot of material from cutting down the blade)
shortened tank buster
make the edge 4.5" long, flatten out the back of the tac handle (to reduce the palm swell severity), and cut off the pommel. this is another "compact" idea, the tank busse is an awesome hard use design, but it's HUGE for edc in city. keeping it down to 4.5" and reducing the handle length would help make it more edc freindly while still keeping all the major design features/usability.
new axe
take the nmsfno, but make the blade into square axe pole, and at the end of it (where the tip of the nmsfno is) place a larger pauls hatchet type axe head (or the sh axe head, i just mean a basic style, nothing extreme like the crash rat or megaladon). The biggest issue with the 2 axes that have been produced so far (for me) is that the pauls hatchet was too light to do any heavy chopping, it was more efficient to use a fsh, and the swamp rat crash axe was far to heavy to use normally, with a pole that was akward given it's general shake and size. with that wide thick of a head like that you need a longer pole, but it can't be full metal unless you have a rubberized grip to reduce shock. The hardest part of doing anything like a nmsfno axe would be getting the balance of chopping power and weight correct.
and last but not least: the modified sar5
This is the knife that I had you guys custom make for me, but only very slightly tweaked. The only thing I did to this once it got to me from the custom shop was to cut off a half inch of the pommel and put new scales on it. the geometry of the edge and the shake of the handle is exactly what I asked for, just a touch bit shorter in the butt. This knife represents what I'm looking for in the above compact knives: it's 9.25" long with a 4.5" edge, no wasted space in the ricasso or pommel. it gives you the absolute maximum
knife in the smallest format possible in the 9.25" size. I love it where it's at right now, but if I was able to do a full custom from scratch, I'd have the talon hole style gaurd (wich would be a little bigger, and full thickness instead of tapered because of the sar5 mod). otherwise - this design is exactly what I wanted, and something sorely missing from the busse line up.
a thinner version would also be awesome
if this picture is against the rules feel free to remove it. it's not a drawing or photoshop, it's profile and geometry is actually busse combat work, just with different scales and 1/2" shorter on the butt.
http://i274.photobucket.com/albums/jj265/lastvisiblecanary/zIMG_6345.jpg
