Ethan Becker
Moderator
- Joined
- Sep 1, 1999
- Messages
- 3,564
This is a hard post for me...... Hank was a lot of things to me...... He was a friend, a collaborator, a hero, a role model....... I knew of Hank way before I knew him personally and I knew him primarily through his work at Atlanta Cutlery's, Museum Replicas...... He designed a number of blades which became legendary in the reenactment world..... The Society for Creative Anachronism and the Renaissance Fair people think of themselves as warriors and try very hard to make it "real" ..... T'is true that until the bones begin to break and the blood starts to flow that it ain't quite real but, they try damn hard and are very picky about their blades, their balance and, how well they actually fence is the standard, not how they look...... To many of them Hank was "the Old Man in the Cave, the guy who KNEW stuff.... His blades worked...... His tomahawks threw well, his Scottish broad swords balanced well and cleaved the hell outta stuff, etc, etc.,etc.......
He had an affinity for the Kukri.... The Kuk is a fascinating blade and part of that fascination is that it is still the weapon of choice for some of, if not, the most feared of all modern warriors, the Ghurkas........ In the twentieth and twenty first centuries it has been a given that when the Ghurka show up on the battlefield their enemies QUIT patrolling the Ghurka neighborhood...They do not slow their patrolling down, they EFFING, QUIT....... Not because of superior marksmanship but, because the Ghurka are absolutely fearless, sneaky and prefer to use the Kukri...... If a Ghurka is behind you and has his Kukri and he does not like you.........You are toast in a pool of blood .......
Hank and his partner Bill Adams imported enough Kukris to fill a warehouse or two and both of them collected and savored this most useful of edged tools......
Hank was used to taking blades of all descriptions and making them markedly better and he had a fencer's sensibilities when he tackled the Kukri design..... That fencer's approach, combined with a very fine appreciation of the classic Kukri is,IMHO what makes this blade so incredible........trying to approximate both Hank's balance and edge profile in a non convex blade was, frankly scary as shit to me.... I was screwing around with a blade designed by a man I consider to be both incredibly knowledgeable genius with an unparalleled track record....... I think I got close.....
I view the Kukri from the stand point of a fieldcraft tool, as well as a weapon ......I have been screwing around with them since the mid sixties....... My first out of town trip with my brand new drivers license at age seventeen was to drive to Marrietta, Ohio to buy a couple of Kukris from Adrian Van Dyke, who had the only Kuks I had ever seen......, they are fine tools and thanks to Hank we have one of the best I have ever held...... It has the balance and the nimbleness that is so often missing in the originals, it is excellent as a slightly heavy machete, and it has the ass to chop way above it's weight.......
Hank wrote two books on blades.... The Book of Knives and The book of Swords which are available from Baen Publishing and I recommend both highly.......
You can get an idea of the part of Hank I did not know by starting with his Wiki page....... A lot of layers there.......
Ethan
He had an affinity for the Kukri.... The Kuk is a fascinating blade and part of that fascination is that it is still the weapon of choice for some of, if not, the most feared of all modern warriors, the Ghurkas........ In the twentieth and twenty first centuries it has been a given that when the Ghurka show up on the battlefield their enemies QUIT patrolling the Ghurka neighborhood...They do not slow their patrolling down, they EFFING, QUIT....... Not because of superior marksmanship but, because the Ghurka are absolutely fearless, sneaky and prefer to use the Kukri...... If a Ghurka is behind you and has his Kukri and he does not like you.........You are toast in a pool of blood .......
Hank and his partner Bill Adams imported enough Kukris to fill a warehouse or two and both of them collected and savored this most useful of edged tools......
Hank was used to taking blades of all descriptions and making them markedly better and he had a fencer's sensibilities when he tackled the Kukri design..... That fencer's approach, combined with a very fine appreciation of the classic Kukri is,IMHO what makes this blade so incredible........trying to approximate both Hank's balance and edge profile in a non convex blade was, frankly scary as shit to me.... I was screwing around with a blade designed by a man I consider to be both incredibly knowledgeable genius with an unparalleled track record....... I think I got close.....
I view the Kukri from the stand point of a fieldcraft tool, as well as a weapon ......I have been screwing around with them since the mid sixties....... My first out of town trip with my brand new drivers license at age seventeen was to drive to Marrietta, Ohio to buy a couple of Kukris from Adrian Van Dyke, who had the only Kuks I had ever seen......, they are fine tools and thanks to Hank we have one of the best I have ever held...... It has the balance and the nimbleness that is so often missing in the originals, it is excellent as a slightly heavy machete, and it has the ass to chop way above it's weight.......
Hank wrote two books on blades.... The Book of Knives and The book of Swords which are available from Baen Publishing and I recommend both highly.......
You can get an idea of the part of Hank I did not know by starting with his Wiki page....... A lot of layers there.......
Ethan
