Tactical Knives, Utility Knives, Killing Knives Rant

Cliff Stamp said:
Most definations of tactical tend to make it more of a multi-purpose design than a pure fighting knife, hence you have makers with fighting and tactical blades. The definations are really loose though and not overly consistent. You can find one maker calling a knife tactical, another calling it a fighting knife and another who just calls it a utility/camp blade.

-Cliff
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Right, as usual. If we accept that the implication of tactical is that it is suited for operators, then it has to be a well-rounded knife. What i mean is, if I know exactly what flavor of scheisse I'm going to come up against, then it's easy to pick the knife(s) suited for the tasks at hand. Problem is, most of the time we either have no idea what we are going to need to use a knife for, or we are just trying to anticipate surprise encounters, so realistically, I would pick the knife that does the most things well and the fewest things poorly, with the least built-in limitations of design and material. in other words, I would want a knife that can pry, chop, stab, saw, get dropped onto rocks from up in a tree, be tied to a stick, be sterile (unmarked), resist corrosion, edge rolling, chipping, etc, etc.... as well as withstand a bunch of improvised applications that most knives are not suited for. I'm not much of an optimist, but it seems that with all the technological advances in knifemaking in the last few years, we may one day have the proverbial "operators wet dream" of a knife.... hopefully by then i'll be retired... yogi
 
That is exactly the defination that many use and it makes sense given the actual defination of the word. McClung and Strider had probably wrote more on what the term means to them than any other maker. Interestingly enough their knives are very different in allmost all aspects of design and function as they each have specific aspects which they each think is critical. They agree on some things (knife should break and not take a set), but on many they are in opposition, the steel, the geometry, the handle, etc. .

-Cliff
 
The thing is it's really hard to get all of those to come together. If you are lucky enough to have a good entry kit or even an e-tool you can get rid of a lot of the more demanding uses of a knife and get down to the more convential: cutting, chopping, stabbing. Too many makers try to make a knife that does everything and end up with a so/so product. I think it's better to have a varied amount of tools that are the best at what they were designed for.
 
Cliff Stamp said:
Les Robertson for example strongly objected to Joe Talmadge's use of TTKK, because he didn't think the knife was tactical because you could readily break it with heavy prying.

-Cliff
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Got a copy of that quote handy?
A link?
 
I just did a quick search, under Roberston's name, it didn't turn up. The specific objection was along the lines of jamming the knife in a tree to use an an anchor point. Robertson was generally really strong on prying in general and used to use this as the main arguement for customs over production, for example heavy prying breaking a Randall but being fine with a Brend, a heavy ice block was one example. He had lots of specific other criteria, tactical knives could not have wooden handles for example. McClung would likely agree with him here but for different reasons.

-Cliff
 
When I was in SF in the late 60s early 70s I went through, Randall Bowies ( beautiful but heavy), Randall hollow handled knives ( great idea but the blades kept falling out) a Buck 110 and a tomahawk (better than it sounds but not perfect) and ended up with a Swiss Army Champ and a Loveless drop point or Ka-Bar. All of these filled a need I thought I had none were tactical. Now I still have the Champ and a Chris Reeves with a 9" spear point, with compass and fire starter.
What one would consider tactical is always based on what someone thinks they need at the time they define tactical. At one time a Scotish Claymore was a tactical blade with maybe a dirk for good measure. During the Civil War a bowie or Arkansaw Toothpick was tactical. Now a Leatherman might be a better idea.
What ever criteria you set up will never be right for all time and never right for all persons. Its fun to discuss this subject but will never succeed as a truly practical exercise.
 
I'd say the term "tactical" really applies to two kinds of knives. First, there are the pure fighting knives, optomized for self-defense, and with moderate to low utility capabilities. Daggers are a good example. An extreme example is the Spyderco Civilian, where the manufacturer specifically warns against using the knife for utility.

Then there is the combat knife, which is designed for dual purposes - fighting and utility. The Kabar is a good example of a combat knife.

Even so, many knives designed exclusively for utility can nevertheless be used as weapons. The butcher knife is probably the best example of this.
 
Archer26 said:
As I said before, there is no such think as a tactical knife. Its just a word to sell knives. Much like Ninja, Seal, SAS or even Hunting. It dosen't describe a blade shape like bowie, clip point, tanto or drop point. Or even what it does, its just a dumb military sounding name for mall ninjas.
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Amen brother.

Calling knifes "Tactical" based on aesthetics is like calling ugly military-looking guns "Assault Weapons", or potato chips with a bit more BBQ flavour "Extreme". I don't really think it's meaningful.

Aren't we forgetting that what makes knives such useful, versatile tools also makes them such deadly weapons, and vice versa? Just as the vast majority of "tacticals" sold will be used only for opening mail and bubblepacks, we've seen that boxcutters can be used to great effect as weapons. And what makes a good general-purpose knife good will make it a good weapon, too.

I think that a lot of us knife knuts may let ourselves be blinded by the knife industry's advertising. Marketers seek to sell more knives by differentiation and innovation and hype. But from a practical perspective, I'm not sure that a person you've just stabbed in the gizzard would feel much difference between a "utility" knife and a "tactical" knife. And I'm not sure that the differences between the tactical knife and the utility knife would really improve the stabbing and the target's stabbedness, from your point of view.

And with the tables turned, the fact that an assailant is going for you with a SAK as opposed to something from Dork Ops is probably not going to make much qualitative difference in your stabbee experience.

Getting cut or stabbed messes people up, frequently fatally, and will usually take them out of the fight. It's the cutting or piercing effect of the knife that does this, not aesthetics like colour or blade profile or branding. And when the chips are down and you really need it, you aren't going to care whether your knife is coloured l33t m4ll n1nj4 t4ct1c4l bl4ck or hot pink with orange tigerstripes so long as it gets the job done. OTOH, it might make a difference in terms of your post-stabbing interactions with your local law enforcement community :).

The wilderness survival folks say that the best survival blade is the one you have on you when you need it in a survival situation; I think that the same would go for knife fights. And like survival situations, it's not the knife that's going to win the fight, it's the guy wielding the knife. Having a tactical knife doesn't make you any more dangerous than you'd be with a utility knife, and I'm sure that having to fight with a kitchen knife is going to make an SAS trooper noticeably less lethal.

YMMV, of course, and this is just my insomnia-induced two cents. You are free to differ :).
 
To Cliff
The blade fell off the handle?

Yes, the blades would come loose if the knives were pushed too hard i.e. abused like hell. Since I abused all of my knives, this was a problem as CRK were not known to me then. If you notice I own a Reeves now.

For me the best knife starts out as a really, really sharp wrecking bar.
 
To Cliff.

Yes I destroyed two Randall suvival knives. When the first went kaput they gave me another and it went down the tubes. Like all hollow handled knives the weak point is where the blade is fixed to the handle. The Randals had short tangs that where epoxied into the handle. This would fail when the blade was use for chopping or or splitting.

Sorry about the late reply
 
Thanks for the information, the join is always a point of contention in that design though there are rarely actual direct experience with problems, not uncommon with high cost knives.

-Cliff
 
A knife is argued to be tactical by those that use that label if it is designed to be used in a tactical situation, similar for example to how a hunting or fishing knife is defined. It means a lot to some makers, but generally is just a promotional term not well or consistently defined, similar to "surgical stainless".

-Cliff
 
A knife is argued to be tactical by those that use that label if it is designed to be used in a tactical situation, similar for example to how a hunting or fishing knife is defined. It means a lot to some makers, but generally is just a promotional term not well or consistently defined, similar to "surgical stainless".

-Cliff
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Exactly. You beat me to it. Many hunting knives are equally 'tactical' and can perform much the same way walking both sides of the street so to speak. For example, some of Doziers knives are used as tactical knives just because of the horizontal sheaths they sport.

STR
 
At the very basic, a tactical knife should be able to stand up to a certain amount of prying but then bend and return to "true" when the stress is stopped. That means a user can see that the knife is being "stressed-out" by the bend and stop at that point and still have a straight knife.

I don't care what makers say, all knives should stand up to some prying as there is always side stress on a blade when doing even simple things like putting a point onto a stick.

Any tactical knife that breaks suddenly without bending first is pure trash. It means that it was too hard and not tempered enough. A high Rockwell rating isn't everything.
 
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