Let's be realistic !!!

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pit man

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Nov 2, 2005
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As anybody will see from my previous threads I am as fond of knives as anyone else on this forum and one day in the not too distant future hope to have a Busse sat in the living room !
However to get to my point,I was last night looking at the Scrapyard website forum and read where somebody was saying that they would not put all their trust in the Scrapper 6 because it is not a full width tang,if anybody has seen the knife they will know it is a beast.
This got me to thinking that everybody (me included) is getting hung up on the idea that a knife has to be made of some super Carbon steel and be 1/2" thick or else it might break !!!!
So my question is this ,and please be honest,how many of you have broke a knife whilst doing normal tasks cutting rope,basic bushcraft etc?
I have seen previous posts where cheap Moras and Buck knives have endured great punishment and survived and I may regret saying this but I bet even Gerber blades take some breaking,well that may be going too far but you get the idea !!!
So to cut short my ramblings lets all stop for a minute and just think what we actually do use our knives for and maybe that 3/16" blade out of Aus 8 may be adequate for our needs after all.......thats not to say stop buying safe queens though !!!:thumbup:
 
The idea that a full tang is needed for a knife to do its job is not fact-based. Such a feature can make a knife, especially one intended for chopping, less effective than a similarly-shaped knife with a smaller tang (all of those fun facts of physics fudging foolish fantasies again). Under the assumption that the handle or handle scales break, it's easier to hold the knife with a full-tanged handle, but if something breaks your knife's handle, didn't it also just break your wrist or hip?
 
If you look at modern repros of "trade knives' you will see what the Indians and frontiersmen used for knives. They were very similar to cheap carbon kitchen knives we use today.

These knives could not chop or pry or dig like the overbuilt tactical fixed blades we see being sold as survival knives. But true expert survivors got by very well with knives that cut.

A wellmade knife of decent steel properly heat treated will hold up under a lot of real work, especially if it isn't used as a toy for throwing or in place of a saw, axe, or shovel.
 
pit man said:
somebody was saying that they would not put all their trust in the Scrapper 6 because it is not a full width tang
Click to expand...

What exactly does this mean? Sorry, but I am not a knife guru. Does that mean the tang through the handle is tapered? Or are they saying the tang isn't the same width of the blade? I guess that makes more sense to me. How many knives have a tang through the handle that is the same width of the blade? If that were true on some of my fixed blades, I wouldn't be able to wrap my hand around the handle. Did they mean it wasn't a full tang, as in all the way back to the butt of the handle?

Yes, and what do you think this person does whne putting their 'trust' in a knife? Somewhat OT but still related, I remember reading a story about a soldier (I think) who used a Strider knife as a piton, hammering into a rock face as an achor point. That's great and all, but the pitons I've seen haven't been 1/4" thick, either. Why wouldn't any fixed balde do the same job, as long as it was sunk in far enough and you affixed the webbing or whatever as close to the rock as possible?

People slay me with their elitist knife/steel attitudes sometimes. Sure, there are betters steels than others, and there are better made knives than others. But are you going to use the knife? If so, what do you see yourself doing with the knife? And beyond that, what are you actually going to do with it?

The Scrapper 6 looks like a fine knife to me, and at a decent price point. I'd consider buying one, if I was in the market for that sort of thing.

I dunno... I say buy what you like. There are great usable knives in all price ranges.
 
A full tang is a tang the same width and shape as the handle slabs fixed to it. This can be of uniform thickness or tapered. It does throw the balance further back towards the butt.

Some knives have a stick tang that is simply pushed into the handle, but can still be strong enough for ordinary work. Moras and puukkos are OK with this.

Knives like the Ka-Bar have a tang that goes through a series of leather washers and is fixed to the pommel -- also obviously quite durable, even under hard use.
 
Samurai, crusaders and countless others weilded swords without full tangs and they put them to more use than any member of bladeforum probably ever will. I dont think a full tang is needed in any way shape or form if the knife is well made.
 
HERESY!!!

If I were realistic my knife drawer would be empty except for my SAK Tinker, and a Leatherman. My hunting bag would have nothing more interesting than a Mora and perhaps a Fiskars hatchet purchased at Lowes.

I never know when my house is gonna be over run by thousands of LSD crazed babboon zombies airdropped from a Swiss bomber.
 
Gee pit man, haven't you heard of all the stories of the people that died out in the wilderness due to blade failure??? And then they go on to say that the knife handle found in the dead mans hands WAS NOT FULL TANG. Just kidding. I think the handle in question is more than adaquite.
 
I prefer a full tang. It's not a must. Also I don't think a knife needs(for me at lest) to be over 3/16" thick 1/8--5/32 is more like it.
 
I was thinking along the same lines recently while employing a can opener [church key] on a can of tomato sauce. Here is this cheap can opener, made out of some mystery steel, and it keeps punching hole after hole after hole in metal cans, year after year without any failure and with zero maintenance to the cutting edge. I know that I will never have the real life opportunity to work any of my knives to failure. This thought does not keep me from searching for some bigger and stronger knives though, I guess there is no hope:)
 
Check out what Wayne Goddard calls the ultimate combat knife in his book. Hidden tang knife with a screw on buttcap and micarta handle.
 
only knives ive seen break first hand were when they were not used for the proper task or just very low quality( friends old buck style, not sure if it was a true buck or not, snaped when he was throwing it at a tree. gerber multi tool blade snaped when a friend used it as a pry bar, not the smartest guy when it comes to tools. i broke a folding knife that was just junk the blade broke out of its grove back wards becasue the plastic scale came off the side. then the good old breaking razor blades.)

-matt
 
I don;t have near the knives that most guys here own. Yet I've owned and used quite a few....that's being conservative. I have yet to break one of my knives. I did however break the tip off a leatherman's fold-out knife doing something stupid.

Still, I like a full width and full length tang. Either December or January's "Blade" magazine had a custom knife in the very back of the magazine. A wood-scaled beauty with an approximate 3" blade length. Anybody see that? The tang looked like it was about 3/16" wide (depth) and it flared from about 3/16" at the hilt to about 1/2" thick at the back. I liked the look of it but it sure didn;t look like it would stand for any abuse.
 
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