Ebbtide said:
Are khukuris, bolos, machetes, parangs knives?
Are swords knives?
Are we talking about tactical knives?
The ones you'd find if you went to a vendor's website and clicked on the button marked "Tactical"?
Yes, parangs, machetes, and such are all knives. They are of different lengths by the way, not all parangs have three foot blades, there are small working ones with 8-12" blades commonly used as utility knives. Yes some of them are very much tactical by most definations, a gurkha's khukuri is very much a tactical knife. It would also be hard to define tactical so machetes being used by soldiers as not being tactical knives.
The US isn't the entire world, in many places these blades are very much what you would get if you asked for a knife, and what is a small/large knife changes as well. I showed by SHBM to a maker who forges parangs and while he liked the shape and general feel he felt it was tool small and light for any serious work, which is ironic considering how it is described on the forums.
Take a look at this :
http://www.robertsoncustomcutlery.com/images/vanmarpathfinder.jpg
which is promoted as a tactical knife, and now reference it against small parangs, goloks, borongs, machetes, etc. . They are very similar in design, which should be obvious as they are made for the same type of use, being mainly chopping tools. The TUSK by McClung is another large tactical blade which is essentially a small parang, the Rat Mastiff another, sold more for utility than marketed as tactical, ut the Busse Combat line has similar blades and they were always tactical in part of the market promotion.
Such as the humble belt knife or folding knife that now has to live up to the labels "hard use" and "made to take abuse".
Again, this is not new, knives always did this, and long before the use of modern tactical market. Alvin has been repairing and posting pictures of slip joints on rec.knives for years, broken blades, cracked tips, etc. . No "operators" using them, just coyboys and the like, and of course not every knife has to do these types of tasks without problems, hence the repairs, the critical issue is that many knives are so promoted when they can't.
(And if it is made to take abuse, is the abuse really abuse?)
It isn't abuse to use a tool as it is designed to be used, that should be obvious from the defination of the word which is using a tool incorrectly so that it is overstressed.
ghost squire said:
.... the tactical knife genre didn't invent things like chopping and prying for a knife to do.
Yes, they always existed, probably from the very beginning. Not every knife needs to be contrained to cutting paper, just like not every knife has to be able to efficiently cut down saplings. The same goes for all tools of course, even prybars, there are finishing prybars used by people who make and restore furniture and these are very different from the wrecking bars used in demolition. What is abusive to one is not to the other.
Ebbtides arguement, that knives are only precision cutting tools and it is abusive to knives in general to use them outside this scope of work, comes from the fact that there are lots of knives which grossly fail at those tasks. Then people defend the performance by characterizing the work as improper *in general* thus it is ok that the knife failed. This ignores the fact that lots of knives don't fail at that work and that the knives which often fail are *promoted* as being able to do it.
You can't define a task as being abusive without knowledge of the tool, and even the lightest cutting knives, when made properly, are far more wide in scope of work than Ebbtide and others would restrict them. I have used Alvin's paring knife for example for sod cutting and digging in the ground. Now this constantly gets referenced as abusive. However consider that the general design of the blade is intended to be used for cutting very hard materials, including used carpet for example. Now if you can cut used carpet full or dirt and grit can't you also cut sods - yes you can.
Alvin's commentary now on the development of a larger blade showcases the development from a pure light cutting knives to more utility based patterns with a much broader scope of work. Every aspect of the knife has to change, the steel, the heat treatment, the stock thickness and the geometry. There is a good deal of it in the current thread on "Mad Dog vs Swamp Rat". Even the smaller knives that Alvin makes have very different scopes of work, he describes for example different edges on the multi-blades for different work, some are made for light cutting and some are made for rougher work such as scraping.
-Cliff
