I have ordered a KNIFE from Lutel

F

FullerH

Joined
Nov 25, 1998
Messages
12,632
Lutel is a company in the Czech Republic well-known for their swords, but, perverse sort that I am, I ordered one of their daggers rather than a sword, hence the posting in this forum rather than the Sword Forum. I actually ordered it from Art Elwell, aelwell45@msn.com, at A Work of Art. He imports them and sells them in the States. The item that I ordered is Lutel Number 10005, their French Dagger, that looks so like a traditional Bowie Knife that I could not resist the thing. It is beautiful! Go here http://www.lutel.cz/index2e.htm and run down to #10005 and say that you don't agree! The resemblance to the traditional idea of the Bowie is uncanny!

I will very likely buy a Viking sword from them eventually; but this will do for now, it will do very nicely!
 
Hugh--nice looking knife. The angularity of the clip is surprisingly modern. Please post your impressions after it arrives.
--Josh
 
Josh, I am sorry that I had not said that. Yes, of course, I plan to do just that and I will be taking pics witha Polaroid and will forward some by snailmail to anyone who can post them for me, as I haven't the ability.
 
Please post your impression of the knife. The pictures look good but the grind lines look blurred in their pictures. Thanks
 
I've never seen a picture of an old dagger like that. I wonder if the idea for that clip didn't come from across the border in Spain. Some styles of navaja have a similarly shaped clip.

Of course, with a blade almost a foot long, it probably wasn't a lightweight fighting knife, but it also seems to fit between two other different styles; the original Bowie, which looked like a Sheffield butcher knife, and the exaggerated curved clip-pointed massive knife of later legend. Could that, too, have been altered under Spanish influence?
 
Esav, your guess is as good as mine on all of those origins ideas, but I will add one more, just to really mix things up. A while back, a smith posted pics of a Seax knife that he had just finished over in SwordForums and I made the mistake of saying that it looked more like a traditional Bowie from the 19th Century than it did any variety of seax that I had ever seen. Boy, did I get jumped upon! It seems that my ideas of seax knives, while very much broader than many peoples', are still too limited, as thewre really were seaxes with clipped pointed blades, large swedges, and with curved blades! This was all very new to me, especially when I was the one defending hte CASI Hanwei version of the seax by Paul Chen that has a spear pointed blade from those in NetSword who maintained that a seax had to have parallel straight edges with a very straight and angled tip that goes from the shorter top edge to the longer bottom edge, which is the one that is sharpened. That is what most think of when you mention seax or sax knife and it is the most common form, but it is far from the only one.
 
All these clips on big, big knives make me wonder how many small knives these people carried, if any. Maybe they actually did do a lot of choking up on the blade for finer work.

(I have to make it clear, I'm totally guessing here. I really don't know the range of medieval knives in size and use.)
 
Wow. I just checked the currency conversion and these daggers are in the $140 range. I really like the Landsknecht Daggers.

Their war hammers are great, too. Without physically examining one to determine their quality level, it's hard to tell, but these seem like a great value. Anyone with more experience with these kind of products care to chime in?
 
Good stuff! Thanks fer sharing. Lutels stuff is top notch. I do prefer the Arms&Armor Shifford Viking to any of the Lutel Viking pieces. Comparable in price and maufacture, so pass it off as personal taste.

A little off topic, but while we're on the topic of heavy knives (which the falchion in descended), check out the seax thread on the HI forum, which is a design thread for the nepali smiths who will soon be doing repros of the seax. Thread included numerous pix of historical and modern seaxes, and you can see the variety of seaxes there are and were.
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=239409


The seax, bowie knife, khukuri, bolo, etc, are all cousins, fulfilling the role that all work and service knives have filled for millenia all around the world. If you handed a bowie knife to an Anglo Saxon in 800CE, he'd certainly call it a seax.

Keith
 
I'll be posting more, but the first impressions are as follow: there are no grind lines on the blade, it cuves smoothly from the back spine dpwn to about an inch from the edge, where the curve sharpens noticeably towards the edge. It would be fairly easy, I should think, to put a Moran-style edge, the rolled edge that is tronger and better supported than a straight-angle one if you have the appropriate equipment and knowledge, which I do not. It is a fairly heavy blade. The edges are not rebated but have not been sharpened, making it suitable for re-enactments. If you were to do live steel work with it, you would need to blunt the point and to rebate the edge further. The hilt is of the sword type, with the tang going through it, as illustrated in their section on making their products. It is a "sort of" rat-tail tang, in that it is a threaded piece welded to the blade's tang, but the joint appears to be extra solid, as compared to many that I have seen or read about, and all corners have been radiused to relieve stress. The hilt and pommel are octagonal in form, with some roughness in the mating of the steel pommel to the wood, the angles of the pommel to exactly match those of the grip and there is a small gap, but that is to be expected in the price range of the dagger; the Roman Riding Sword that I got from Patrick Barta at TEMPL last year was virtually a steal at the $240 price that I paid and is still a very good buy at $100 more, to give you an example. The blade is satin finished and very nicely done, as is the guard, it is only in the pommel area that I found anything to niggle about. It came, as do all Lutel blades, with a nice scabbard of leather with a steel reinforced throat.

The feel is very light and quick, remarkably like my Ontario Hell Belle. If fact, the two knives are similar in many ways and could probably be used in similar fighting styles. Sharpening the swedge would make it deadly in James Keating's Back Cut technique that he recommends for Bowie fighting, and the blade has plenty of length at about 11.5" for good reach and reasonable if not grweat belly for cutting. The only lack for a great fighting knife is its minimal guard, at least in my eyes, although I have read that some prefer that.

More later.
 
BTW, the dagger has a blade 11" long, 1 1/2" wide and 1/8" thick, the swedge is 3 7/8" long by 7/16" deep.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top