Edge failure... help

yiu yin yau yu........that is the chinese phrase that came from this story.

The blade has enough room to swim even through the tightest joint.
 
Astrodada said:
yiu yin yau yu........that is the chinese phrase that came from this story.

The blade has enough room to swim even through the tightest joint.
Click to expand...

You are right.

In Mandarin, we say: you2 (swim) ren4 (blade) you3 (have) yu2 (extra)

The story's name is "pao2 ding1 jie3 niu2". Pao2 ding1 is butcher, jie3 means to separate something in parts, niu2 is a cow.

There is another saying to go along with this story. shu2 (be familiar) neng2 (can) sheng1 (produce) qiao3 (skillful). Familiarity or experience produces skill.

The above was written by Red Flower when I got up from my computer to use the restroom. I have to keep a close eye on everything around here!

Star Treck once had a story about an alien culture that the treckers couldn't understand, because all their speech was allusion to various episodes of their mythology. Chinese is really like that. There are a lot of stories every Chinese child knows, and (usually 4 word) sayings to go along with them to illustrate some point that might take many more words to explain if you talked it out in detail.

Suffice it to say that most Chinese kids could tell you the ideal method of cutting up a cow. Now actually doing it is another thing.
 
That sounds like pouring oil through a coin ;)

A thousand arrows and a thousand bullseyes.

Just don't hang sheep head and sell dog meat.

Horse seen, deer indicated.


Don'tcha just love chinese.;)
 
many cultures have coins with holes in the middle. This makes it easy to carry them on loops of string, and you can eve use standard 'loops' to produce bigger denominations of money, the same way we wrap coins today.
 
I've given some more thought to the reprofile vs sharpen-it-away-over-the-years approaches. I think intended use makes a difference.

I have to admit, one of my most frequent users as a garden tool has a chip on the end where a friend smashed it into a rock. It doesn't affect the utility for my use because the chip is on the tip, so I haven't bothered with the chip other than touching it up with a file to align the edges.

If the khuk is used for splitting a chip won't make a lot of difference. On one used for cutting or chopping it will. Look at the nice cut edge when you sever a branch. The wood fibres are cut, not crushed. However if you have a chip in the blade the fibres will be crushed and torn where the chip is. You won't chop as deeply either.

In Nepal, the khukuris as farm tools are consumed over the years. I suspect how often they are sharpened or reprofiled depends on the use. If you're digging potatoes or splitting wood it doesn't make much sense to continually sharpen and/or reprofile. If you're cutting wood, butchering, etc, then it does.

If the khukuri is used as a weapon then it should be maintained with no chips. A weapon may be called upon to cut bone. Such a tool should be maintained so that any cut it has to perform is a good one. It is too much effort for not enough benefit to maintain a farm tool in the same manner a weapon should be maintained.

I still think that it would take many years for one of us light users to consume a khukuri, not to mention the years required for consuming a HI afficionado's whole collection!
 
It's amazing how tough Bone is. I remember an old article n the GH Khukuri done by Ron Hood. He chopped deer legs with it and the thing looked like a serrated knife after h was done.:eek:
 
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