Thick & Thin, or is Bigger always Better.

Amos, I'm right there with you except for this sentence:
I think this trend is fueled by the knife magazines and holliweird.
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IMNSHO, it's all about a market share.
Create a perceived need and be the one to fill that need.
It works well.
Just look at all the blackticles & sharpened prybars out there.

I'm not saying that they are bad or useless, just that the perceived need wasn't there 50 years ago.

While we're at it :D
I do believe, again IMNSHO, that the Sheffield Bowies of the Bowie heyday were the equivalent of the United Cutlery fantasy pieces of today.
As someone said above "the knife of the barroom dandy"
Then again, I'm a big fan of the old Sheffield Bowies...go figure :D
 
Amos, I agree with you. I spend a lot of time bumming around the woods fishing, camping, hunting, and most of the time just walking around. I have tried the USAF survival knives, and even when sharpened shaving sharp, they still have a tough time on dry maple and oak, or slicing through apples. I found the same to be true with my fallkniven f-1, and a few spyderco folders I used to use. Now most of the time I carry a Russell Beef skinner, sheep skinner, butcher, boning, or paring knife. The blades are 6" at the most. Over the past years these knives in simple home made sheaths have covered many miles on foot and in canoe with me and never let me down from building camp to butchering and camp crafts I haven't broke one yet. Some times I will carry an old Norlund hatchet, or Snow and Nealley ax. That said I have friends that carry thick knives, and have nothing against more modern thicker blades. joe
 
Sodak, your contribution to the thread you linked to made good sense to me. I noticed you also carried your CS Trailmaster on your pack. :D

Another forgotten, easy to carry tool is a good folding saw. I've carried the Coughlan until I misplaced it a while back. It did a fast trick cutting smaller stuff 4-5 inches and less. However, my favorite for a relatively light, versatile, chopper is the basic Tomahawk. Nothing fancy. Just the basic thing. Not only does it chop well, but I've found it great for scraping and shaping walking sticks and the like. You can also pop the handle off and use it as a kind of Ulu for food chopping and for scraping various things, large hides, wood, etc.. Then pop it back on the handle and off you go again.

The hawk can be separated for packing along. If you break a handle you can use the hawk head to shape a new one. One thing I really like on the hawk over and ax is that centrifugal force pushes the head tighter on the handle rather than trying to pull it off.

Mostly I was making observations of my own experiences. The one thing I might be harping about is how one constantly hears in conversations and all over the web about how only the big, thick, kewl, blades are the only thing you can really count on and anyone who carries anything less is a fool. Not too long ago a fellow made a comment on here that anyone who thinks a Mora or an Opinel is a real life didn't know anything about knives.

Like Jackknife and others on here, if it don't carry light and easy and cut like the dickens, I ain't packin it.

I still have my eye on one of those big, crown stag, bowie types at Cabela's. I keep remembering that big old knife that Sam Elliot always carried in those Louis L'Amour movies. I keep thinking a big ol blade carried low shoulder holster style would just go real nice with my single action and either my hammerless coach gun or my lever gun. Just the thing for fightin griz and skinnin outlaws. :D

My SAK and my Mora keep being the ones that get carried around. As soon as I can get around to making a good sheath for my Utica Sportsman, that and the companion ax will get the nod. Though I may pack them with their sheaths separate.

Good stuff guys, from both sides. Once size doesn't fit all.
 
You are right on. In this day and age, most of us are never in a live or die situation. A small knife of SAK will more then do. Jackknife has shown us this in his articles.

I know that I went through the phase of thinking that I needed a big knife. What I found was that I rarely used it and then I just used it to get some use out of it.

Even when I am hiking, there is a trail that I am on. Hardly a chance for a major survive or die situation. All though, I do make sure that I have a lighter and a whistle just in case.

Thanks for the thoughts.
 
I like either a Hawk and a smaller knife like a mora or my SS4 or a larger knife like a bowie or kukuri. The hawk and small blade are better because they are more specialized but the large blade can do everything just not quite as well.

I think the main reason for thin blades on older knives is how expensive steel used to be.
Look how rare full tangs were. You can have a thicker blade so long as you have a higher grind to even it out. I like Scrapyard knives a lot but I do thin the edge quite a bot and some like the Dumpster Mutt which had a very obtuse edge that was useless for anything but an entry tool. The SS4 on the other hand was perfect with just some minor edge mods.
 
Amos Iron Wolf said:
Sodak, your contribution to the thread you linked to made good sense to me. I noticed you also carried your CS Trailmaster on your pack. :D

Good stuff guys, from both sides. Once size doesn't fit all.
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Good points Amos, and thanks - good thread!
 
I have a 20 yr old Green River Russel 6" butcher knife with a very thin blade and it does 95% of my kitchen cutting, I also have a 10 model of the same knife slightly thicker and it cuts watermelons and other large round foods.

Take a bar of 1/4 in steel and see how it well it cuts, it won't. You have to thin that 1/4 way down until it becomes an edge; therefore thin cuts!

I had a CS Recon Scout and the more than 1/4 blade was stupid! I know have a Becker BK9 as a chopper in place of an hachet as I believe it overs more utility: chopper, slicer, and draw knife all in one (draw knife...which is why I am not a fan of recurve blades).

It is just easier and cheaper to find a quality long knife than it is to find a quality hachet, of which there are only two brands: the Wettlings and Brusks (and you hardly see them on the used section of knife fourms).
 
Not too many years ago if you had a knife much bigger than about 4 inches, you got laughed out of deer camp or camping or hiking as a tenderfoot who didn't know his knives. Boy, how times have changed! Now if the blade isn't at least 5/32' thick and 7" long you will not be able to function in "the wilderness". Much of my hunting, fishing, camping and hiking experiences have been with only two knives. A Buck Pathfinder and a SAK and sometimes a folding saw. I never "battoned" chopped dug with my knives and managed to start fires, dress game and fish and camp in relative comfort.

I recently bought a Becker BK-7 on a whim to see what all the fuss about big knives is about. I'm going to have to keep it in my pack so I don't intimidate the "sensitive" crowd and use it when not too many people are around. This is based on my last camping trip where some campers were uneasy about my Pathfinder, so I used my SAK for the rest of the trip just to avoid problems. Meanwhile we'll see how the BK-7 does in the bush compared to the Pathfinder and a recently obtained Mora (Ragnar rocks!).
 
here's another question just to mingle in, what thickness of blade do you all think would be best for a 14 inch bladed bowie convex ground???? :D
 
pootsythesamurai said:
forged of course :D
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Then, if the smith is good, really good as in ABS master, make it no more than 3/16 at the guard with a distil taper all the way to the point down to 1/8, at the point. With a knife this size made out of strait thickness stock you will have the handling of a crowbar, if there is not a real taper to the blade.

I had the great fortune to have as a friend, Bill Moran. Many times I sat in his shop and watched him forge a blade, and Bill loved big blades. But he could make them balence in the hand to feel like a much lighter knife because of the thinner stock and taper that he carried all the way to the point. In his later years he experimented with different thickness blades on his camp knives, and he got down to 1/8 on some of his latest work before he fell into ill health. He had a woods behind his shop and he would take his latest knife out to experiment how well the camp knife chopped. He'd hack away at hickory, locast, oak. Every stage of camp knife got to be thinner than one before it. The Maryland camp knife was lighter than his old Rio Grande camp knife. His Colorado camp knife was lighter still. He never stopped seeking the most efficiant blade, and was always trying different things. His last knives were down to 3/16 to only 1/8 at the spine by the guard, tapered down to a fine point of 1/8 to 1/16, differential temper. He experimented with 5160, O1, L6, and used W2 at one point. Again, he was always experimenting how to make a better blade. I saw him hold out a limb off a hickory tree in his left hand even with his shoulder, and with his 1/8 inch camp knife in his right, cleanly chop off a foot long section of limb like it was balsa wood. That knife was light for its size, but sheared thru that wood like it was'nt there. And yet when he tested the knife according to the tests he laid out for the ABS master smith stamp, that 1/8 inch camp knife would bend to 90 degrees without breaking and could be straitened out to be used some more. Some edge cracking was permitted.

Over my 30+ year friendship with that man, I learned that the thinness of the edge is what lets a knife cut, but it also needs a thin blade in back of the edge not to bind up or drag. Even with his expertly ground convex edge, his thicker bowies and camp knives did not cut as well as the knives he made later on, after the early 80's. Bill never stagnated in his knife making, he just kept getting better untill he seemed like a Yoda charater, doing the impossable with a knife right in front of you, and making you doubt what you saw. He came to believe that a thin blade profiled the right way with good balance and lighter weight would penitrate deeper into the chopping materal because of the higher velocity of the swing.

For a monster size bowie, don't go thick.

Sorry for the long winded answer.
 
yea, was thinking that but i think i said 3/8 or a 1/4ish :D so i don't know :confused:. I'll give the smith a buzz see what he thinks again, he hasn't really started into it yet. I hope :D, cheers
 
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