My Initial Review of the Livesay RTAK

D

Defender

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Sep 8, 1999
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My initial Impression of the knife as I picked it up was "This Mutha is huge!" It sports a 10 inch long, wide flat ground blade, the handle is nicely curved and really fills your hand. One note, this isn't your typical fancy pants Handmade knife...the finish is a plain tough black Parkerization......You could almost mistake this for a military issue item if it didn't work so well! The edge wasn't very impressive (Im working on that now!) and the grind lines were a bit uneven. The Micarta handle is fit and finished extremely well but has a bit of an uncomfortable swell in the middle that takes some getting used to. By far the most impressive aspect of the knife was the huge tough-A$$ Kydex sheath....Its Big, Tough, Secure, and comes w/ enough 550 cord to rig a chute! To get an initial impression of how the Knife would perform I Chopped a bit of brush, Split some small diameter logs and Hacked down a small tree. The Knife performed well at all tasks but didn't seem to perform as well as a razor sharp Bolo or kukri.....I think this was because of the factory edge, which I'm now in the process of reworking. By stabbing the tip of the Knife into a good size log and flexing it a bit I can tell you that the point is extremely sturdy and that the blade will flex quite a bit and still return to true. All in all this knife is exactly as advertise, a large, tough, utility chopper for hard use. If your looking for something pretty.....buy something else, But if your really going to use the knife to its full potential pick up an RTAK its a good hard working knife for a reasonable price.

 
Its a bit thicker than I expected and certainly thicker than I like. The way it was ground actually reminds me quite a bit of a Machete. Im trying to thin the edge down quite a bit.
 
How heavy is this blade and where is the balance point? In regards to reprofiling, about how long of a job are you talking about?

-Cliff
 
Maybe an hour or two tops of work if that would make the knife more acceptable for North American Vegetation. The blade is fairly heavy, and seems a bit point heavy...this is definetly a utilitrian chopper but wouldn't make my short list of blades to use as a weapon (which its not intended for anyway).
 
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