It's not just overall weight that can determine how effective a knife, sword, or khukuri is as a weapon. There are many factors involved. The most noticible in dry handling would be weight and the placement of the point of balance. With reproduction European swords you can see where placement of the center of gravity is important. Many of them feel light even though they are grossly overweight, up in the category of 5 - 10 pounds, contrary to popular belief the heaviest Viking era sword that I'm aware of weighed less than 3.5lbs and the average weighed aobut 2.5lbs. To hide this the makers will attach large weights to the end in the form of the pommel so the sword balances almost right at the guard, many historic pommels were very small and some were even hollow. Without this counter weight you would have an extremely unbalanced weapon, and you wouldn't be able to swing it easily.
The following shouldn't apply to an HI khukuri, because they're not heavy or unbalanced enough to through off their center of percussion too much, especially when you're only adding a larger tang to them. But regardless, I feel a rant coming on.
The problem with many lower end reproductions is the simple fact that they make large thick blades, usually to compensate for their lack of heat treating ability or becuase they don't understand what knives khukuris and swords were originally intended for, is the fact that they use large pieces of steel, read crowbars, with no distal taper and in some cases limited profile taper and attach a huge counter-weight to the hilt. While this does help make the blade feel lighter, it also has the effect of reducing the cutting effectiveness of the blade. Any blade has a center of percussion, and as you move the center of gravity closer to the hilt, you also move the center of percussion closer to the hilt. When this happens, the blade becomes vibration prone, and has been described by many smiths that I've talked to as being most like swinging a dumbbell around. When you strike the target with one of these lowend reproductions you will usually get a lot of blade vibrations, and the blade will feel almost like a tuning fork. Well, that energy for that vibration had to come from somewhere, right. That's right, it came from the kinetic energy of the motion of the blade. That energy could have been transmitted in two different ways. It could have gone into cutting into the target, or it could cause the blade to vibrate. When most of that energy is turned into a vibration you get very little penetration and the blade can basically just bounce off of its target harmlessly. I think that you can rest assured that people who own a Chiruwa Sirupati, the complaint that it bounced off the target harmlessly and vibrated so much that it stung their wrists will never come up. Well, maybe if they were trying to cut into a petrified stump like in the old Donald Duck cartoon that might be an issue, but.... Now, if it's a movie reproduction from some cheapo company, avoid it. If it's a Duncan Mcloed(however it spelled) dragon head katana, actually there is one good one made by the guy who actually did the props for the first season of the show, run for the hill screaming!
*****End of Rant mode*****
When you're going with something like Himalayan Imports and looking for a martial arts weapon I don't think you can go wrong as long as the khukuri feels right for whatever form of martial arts you're using.
Bob
PS, I did only a minimum of proof-reading, so if get lost, ask me about it. I typed one copy up, the forum was being upgraded so I saved what I had and put it into a text document. Well, that's what I thought I did, I only saved the first paragraph. D'Oh!!! And I'm too lazy to proofread that again.
So, some of this might be so poorly phrased that someone would need a crystal ball to figure out how I went from one topic to the next, or why I phrased something a certain way.
[This message has been edited by bobwill (edited 03-20-2001).]