French Kate a bottle opener?

cardo

cardo

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Is the French Kate also a bottle opener? I've seen knives like that since I was a kid and never thought it could be used as a cap lifter. As a pre-pubescent kid, I thought it was a funny shape for a knife. As a young adult I thought, 'well if you get off on that sort of thing...". Just now, looking at the GEC site, that I saw it as a bottle opener. Has the shape subtly changed over the years or has it always had this dual functionality?
 
Pipeman said:
It could chew up the NS shoe/bolster.
Click to expand...

Eh, not much. If they're ground correctly, the liner and spring are the focal point, at least on most I've seen. There's typically a subtle angle taking the bolster out of the equation.

Of course, I can pop one with my ring (tungsten carbide) and it doesn't even blink. Turn it around, align the Square with the cap, and off it comes.
 
I was just coming here to ask about the french kate.

Whats the history of this knife design?

Was it to cater to women, truckers :D ?

Seems a strange design.
 
I don't know how true it is but I heard they were popular during prohibition era as it wasn't blatantly obvious you were packing around a bottle opener.
 
This thread deserves a picture. Here's a Marbles French Kate (image from vendor's site). How could you not want this, even if it won't actually open bottles?? :rolleyes:
5" closed, stainless clip blade, smooth bone AND stag covers with scrimshaw of an OWL!!! :eek::thumbup::D:thumbup::eek:

WYBjQG4l.jpg


- GT
 
I have a Northfield in red stag, and it both slices and opens bottles quite well. The spring does protrude slightly above the bolster.

Kate1blade_zps1a708951.jpg~original
 
Somewhat off topic. I've seen old cowboy spurs called "gal legs" with the same shape as the French Kate knives. The leg part held the rowel. I always thought it was just a risque nod to an older, simpler era. Google gal leg spurs for some images.
 
I don't think the original run of French Kates by GEC would take the cap off a bottle. They (GEC) changed the pattern mid-run so that they would lift a bottle cap. There's a several page long thread about the GEC French Kate somewhere around here.
 
If you like a slice of citrus fruit with your bottled beer, it would be the ideal tool for that.

I believe that leg knives have a long history, and may go back to a time when a man might want to show he was a "player" back in the day when a glimpse of a woman's ankle was considered tantalizing.

Though on further research they may just be an offshoot of "figural knives" which might be in the shape of a shoe, or a fish, or a person, or a gun, or other object that the blade folds into, and have been around since the early 1800s if not earlier.

I still have this image of a western gambler pulling out one of those while he is sitting at the the table with some of the working girls of the day, though perhaps that's just from watching too many Hollywood westerns.
 
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I have one I got as a Christmas gift this last year. I carried it along to a friend's for New Years and it worked great opening bottles.
 
This lady leg pattern has been around at least a hundred years. Been around a long time, built and tried by many different makers over time. Also lots of older advertisers used them from the twentys thru the fifties.
 
singin50 said:
This lady leg pattern has been around at least a hundred years. Been around a long time, built and tried by many different makers over time. Also lots of older advertisers used them from the twentys thru the fifties.
Click to expand...

Spot on for this particular lady leg knife pattern.

Carl W. Tillmanns
U.S. Design Patent D45,546
March 31, 1914

Bernard Levine wrote about the lady leg knife in the May 2014 edition of Knife World.
 
As Al says above, there's at least one long existing thread about this pattern. According to what I've read here previously, the knives were once sold in saloons, and possibly in bordellos, and purchased, in part, as a souvenir of having visited.
 
Just checking, and there are actually NUMEROUS prior threads relating to this pattern (we did have a poster who had a tendency to post a thread about a pattern he came across, then another thread when he thought of buying one, then when he ordered one, and so on...!)

Here's a couple of links:

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/s...-order-of-the-leg-knife-is-no-longer-a-secret

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/853909-GEC-s-French-Kate-Knife-has-been-revealed

I've only had limited experience of this pattern, but it seems that some work as a cap-lifter and some don't :)
 
Thanks for the links to previous lady leg threads, Jack. They were interesting and informative!! :thumbup::thumbup:
I was surprised by the number of posters who found this pattern distasteful. I realize that the appeal of a slipjoint pattern is very subjective, but the almost unanimous rejection of this particular pattern seems unusual. I'm sure I'll buy one sometime, although finding out in one of Jack's links that 2-blade versions exist may have me searching for a while before I buy.

- GT
 
You're welcome GT, I'm surprised Woodrow hasn't been in this thread promoting the pattern! ;) :D :thumbup:
 
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