ranger88 said:
Bear with me here. I've always carried knives with more traditional blade shapes. So I'm just wondering what's the purpose of a blade shaped like the ones shown in this thread. I mean, what did someone have in mind when they designed it? What will it do that makes it a good wilderness knife, And should I get one?
Those are very reasonable questions. This kind of knife is expensive and hard to sharpen. Why bother with it?
Tom Brown, Jr., was the inventor of the "Medicine Blade", which later evolved into the "Tracker" and WSK. ("Tom Brown Tracker" is a trademark owned by Tom Brown and licensed for use by TOPS Knives; no other knife can be so marketed, so variants are usually called WSKs.) He wanted a knife that would accomplish several tasks he frequently faced in the outdoors:
* making a rabbit stick (draw knife, quarter rounder)
* cutting down small trees (hatchet)
* making a bow (hatchet, draw knife)
* scraping a hide (convex dry hide scraper, concave wet hide scraper)
* cutting square notches for traps and triggers (sawback)
* throwing
I have my own reservations about that last usage.
If you look as the profile of a WSK, you can see the flat draw knife, the quarter rounder, the hatchet/dry hide scraper, the sawback, and the concave wet hide scraper as you trace around the contour of the blade.
Some WSKs, this one included, have a hole for straightening arrows and for applying leverage to cut very hard materials.
The sawback is usually the hardest part to make well and drives up the cost of the knife. TOPS does a poor job of it, in my opinion; the saw binds frequently. Beck's and Linger's sawbacks have classical offset sawteeth and do very well indeed. The Hardin WSK sawback is of unorthodox appearance, but it does the trick.
