This blade carries a rich history and is built for versatility—but I’m curious, can anyone guess what it’s called? 🤔

[Steely_Gunz]

So - what is the purpose of the cutout near the handle?

Sighting tool for when you throw it like a boomerang

The cho, as I have been taught to call it, is just part of a khukuris DNA. Stories such as it being a blood drip and the like have been around forever, but I don't think the reason for it is settled fact. Some say it could be a representation of a scared cattle hoof or perhaps represents the genitalia of a fertility goddess, etc. Nepal is a beautiful mishmash of cultures and a lot of what things are called and why they are called that or what purpose they serve largely depend on who you ask and what they were taught.

However, to many old timers like myself, a khukuris without that cutout isn't a khukuris. It's a KLO...khuk-like object

 

[Kailash Blades]

So - what is the purpose of the cutout near the handle?

We have a thread discussing the cho we posted a while ago

That's what logic would dictate, but the feature has been on khuks for centuries and I don't recall seeing pics of knives snapped off at the cho (that's the name for the notch). I'm sure somewhere, somebody has snapped a blade at the cho, but i wouldn't worry so much about it happening to a good quality blade.

Their only experience that we have with blades that are broken at the cho are on full tang blades. For this reason, we think that it can act as a stress riser in some circumstances. However, The fact that we don't see any rat-tailed blades that are broken at the cho suggests that the tang shoulders on a traditional khukuri handle is more likely to break first and in our blades this has never happened in what would be considered normal use.
Another compounding factor is that when people have full tang blades, they tend to do very rough and sometimes silly things with them. This creates an environment where Cho is put under stresses that it wouldn't be seen on a rat tailed tang, which again helps explain the difference in occurrence that we've seen