Knife Test: What is Nuclear Tough?

Joined
Oct 24, 2002
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I apologize for my absence. I have been recuperating from my last round of knife testing, and am only now able to capture the results in writing to share with you all. For those of you familiar with my prior knife tests (See Battle Rat vs Stihl Chainsaw, Don’t Drink and Knife, Halloween Knives) both I and my trusty assistant, Marty, like to take knife testing into previously unexplored territory. Sometimes this involves risk of personal injury. Never one to shy away from my knife testing responsibilities, this latest test carries on the tradition, as you will soon discover.

Intrigued by the Busse slogan “Nuclear Tough” Marty and I decided to test a Busse Battle Mistress against a local custom-made “big hacker.” Most of you are familiar with Busse’s famed Battle Mistress (BM) – the great INFI steel, the robust design, and the durable Micarta handle slabs, so I won’t go into any greater detail describing this knife. However, I doubt very many of you are familiar with the knife I used to compete against the Busse. This specimen was hand-made by Shaman “No-Thumb” McKunkel, a local forger and long time Alaskan native. The knife sports a 10 inch, ¼ inch thick, flat ground bowie pattern blade of 1096, a large brass hilt, and a rubbery handle molded over a perforated full tang. The perforations go completely through the handle and are used by the maker to compensate for a missing thumb on his right hand. The knife can be held in the normal fashion, or all four fingers can be inserted in the perforations to ensure a secure thumbless grip. If anyone is wondering how Shaman got his nickname, well, all I can say is there’s some things you shouldn’t stick your thumb in, and the mouth of your neighbor’s Doberman is one of them, especially after you shoot him in the gonads with a pellet gun trying to persuade him to stop crapping on your lawn. Of course you can’t blame old Shaman, if his thumb hadn’t gotten in the way he’d have an entirely different nickname now, and he’d be singing duets with Barry Gibb.

Anyway, Marty and I researched the concept of nuclear toughness and figured our test would have to approximate a thermo-nuclear event. Your average nuclear bomb generates heat on the order of 10 million degrees. Our tests would have to involve lower temperatures, since we had no actual nuclear bomb handy, and our research on the Internet indicated it would be very difficult for us to construct one from scratch without some essential materials a government busybody decided ordinary citizens shouldn’t own. I won’t go into my Libertarian views about individual rights and “Big Brother’s” interference with what should be a God given right to blow stuff up. I’ll just say I am well aware I am now on some kind of list, and those guys in dark suits following me around in the Ford with the government license plates can go conduct their own knife tests.

Instead of a nuclear bomb, Marty and I opted for a large microwave oven. We figured it made stuff hot, and people call it “nuking” when they use one. For some lucky reason I convinced Marty to use his new Panasonic microwave. He was proud of it and wanted to show it off, and a little voice in my head kept saying you are not suppose to put metal objects in a microwave oven. Man, was that little voice right!
As soon as we placed the two blades in the oven and turned it on bolts of lightning that I swear could have come from a Midwestern thunderstorm filled the oven and arced around outside the device like a Van DeGraff generator on steroids. One bolt hit Marty in the chest, sending him reeling into me, which lucky for him grounded out the charge and restarted his heart, which Marty tells me stopped when he saw the flames shooting out of his new microwave oven. Ever the quick thinker, I reached over and pulled the plug on the oven before the fire could spread. Marty followed my actions with a shot of water from the kitchen sink hose. This put out the fire and left the kitchen full of black smoke and the smell of ozone. I suddenly remembered the knives, and without taking proper precautions (like an oven mitt), I opened the oven door and grabbed the first knife I could see through the smoke. The knife I grabbed happened to be the Shaman creation. The heat from the microwave fire had turned the nice, tacky handle into a very hot glob of molten rubber. When my hand closed around the hot mass I instinctively tried to toss it away. However, part of the handle stuck to my hand and the rest remained on the knife. When I tried to throw the knife away the rubber stretched from the knife to my hand like one of those rubber balls attached to a paddle. As I’m sure most of you can remember, the rubber ball only goes out so far before the rubber band pulls it back toward the paddle. This is exactly what happened with the knife. It flew half way across the kitchen and then the rubbery tether pulled it back in my direction. Attached as it was to my hand I knew instantly I had to take evasive action or risk being skewered by my own custom knife.

So I ducked....

Marty did not.

The errant blade whistled past the top of my head and hit Marty smack dab on the bottom of his, which is to say, his chin. Fortunately, the blade had spun in flight and only the broad side of the blade struck Marty, which of course knocked him colder than an Alaskan barbecue in January, but spared him the indignity of an accidental decapitation.

More water from the hose brought Marty around in no time, but my hand was still painfully aware of its new rubber coating. To make matters worse, Marty’s wife, Prudence, came home at that moment to discover her kitchen in a shambles, her new microwave a smoldering ruin, and her husband lying on the floor babbling incoherently about nuclear bombs and Busse Battle Mistresses. I have to say I think this woman has it in for me, because, without a pause, she immediately turned on me and said, “Kliff, what the hell did you do now?” Whereupon she picked up a broom and began chasing me around the kitchen. I managed to retrieve the Busse from the oven (it was warm, but no worse for the wear), and reel in my Shaman while only being struck in the head twice by the broom before I made good a hasty retreat from Marty’s house.

A doctor managed to remove the rubber heat-welded to my hand without the loss of too much skin. Marty’s doctor told him his heart had only experienced a minor coronary event, and that open heart surgery was probably not needed. Prudence grounded Marty for a month, and he is not allowed to play, er, test knives with me again. As for my own conclusions from this test, well, I have another knife test axiom (Do not put knives in microwave ovens) to go with Knife Test Rule #1 (Do not drink and conduct knife tests), and Knife Test Rule #2 (Do not give away knives for Halloween). I am slowly developing a fairly comprehensive list of knife test do’s and don’ts, and I am happy to share them with my friends here at Bladeforums.

Marty tells me the next test (yeah, like he listens to Prudence) will involve a survival situation wherein he strips me of all my clothes and drops me off in the middle of the boonies during the winter with just a knife to help me survive. He says if I make it through he’ll forgive me for destroying his microwave oven. Hey, it’s the least I can do.
 
Boy was I in the mood for a good laugh! Thanks Kliff. Please keep us up to date with your testing stories.
Thanks, Bill Daniel
 
Kliff, that was great! Umm, stay away from explosives and combustables and tell your buddy he has to drop you off in the boonies with one match.
 
That was...uh...unique. But I did enjoy a good laugh. Keep up the good work, just tell Marty to take cover whenever he's near a "nuke".
 
Great post, Kliffy, another masterpiece! Thanks for sacrificing your body (and Marty's) in the name of science. ;)
 
Great post Kliff! I was laughing so hard I had to stop and wipe the tears from my eyes and catch my breath before I could finish reading it. My wife actually turned off "Trading Spaces":eek: so I could read it to her. She doesn't turn that show off for ANYTHING, so I must have been making quite a ruckus. I had to stop about six times while reading it to her to wipe away more tears, catch my breath and give my now aching ribs a rest.:D
Too funny!
 
Everyone, please make the folowing notation in your record books:

Battle Mistress 1
Microwave 0

Now that's realistic knife testing!
 
That was excellent. I am sure there is a sit-com in there some where. Perhaps you can call it the Adventures of Kliffy and Marty; two guys who are always playing with knives and innovatively becoming a nusance to all living things - especially themselves.

n2s
 
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