"Who's your Daddy?"

Here's that Machete by Mr Hossom:

machete05.jpg
 
Most of the good quality bowies I've seen have much finer edge geometry from the maker than machetes. Granted I'd thin out the machete's edge too, but since they're generally softer the edge still has to be left thicker to prevent serious rolling. So no, I certainly wouldn't assume the machete has a thinner edge. A full height flat grind on thicker stock can easily be just as thin as a machete's narrow edge grind.
 
Hear is a Machetti I use, in the filed, quite often.

TE-02.jpg


I prefer a Machetti over a Bowie in must situations. I really consider this a large camp knife-- OAL 17 inches w/12 inch blade, 2 inch wide/440c steel.

Love the pics of Jerry's work; thanks for sharing Xaman ...
 
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that is awesome!
I was thinking a little bit about this yesterday, and my opinion- for what it's worth- is that a bowie IS a machete. There are numerous regional variations on 'The Big Knife'. Some are called goloks, some are called machetes, some are called khukuris, etc. In the American pioneer west, a huge jungle knife probably wasn't necessary. As a weapon, it was only a back up to a firearm, plus there is a distinct lack of enormous leafy vegetation. Hence, a downsized blade that was still capable of doing things like chopping wood and other big blade stuff.
All cultures have their own tools, designed to work within the parameters set by human technology and nature, for their given region.
It's all semantics, what things are called, I just see the parallels.:)
 
...hear it is put back in it's new home. This bald is quite heavy and make short work of most things around camp!

TestTE01.jpg
 
fxrandall - I may be marching down the path of pointless semantics, but if you stuck a double-guard on that thing, most would call it a bowie.

Looks to be a great chopper in any event, regardless of the label.

Roger
 
That is why I reefer to it as a camp knife; not quite machete and I do not consider it to be a Bowie.
 
Now we're getting to the fun and folly of trying to define the pros and cons of machetes v bowies when there are no distinguishing rules between the two and all are free to inject personal instincts/biases.

I had no clue that there are at least 4 kinds of machetes--machete, machetti, machette, Tai bushknife. I could probably name 10 variant bowie subspecies inclusive of camp knives. Fxrandall offers up a machetti which is probably more a camp knife which strikes me as comporting to at least 3 types of bowies all possessing features tying them back to the camp knife which exhibits at least some characteristics of various machete morphs having been shown by academic knifeologists to have significant morphological and esoteric differences from the Tai bushknife.

Burt Foster adds a guard and ferrule and hamon to a 12" Philipine bolo (a machete I believe) and calls it a bolo bowie (still a machete to The Possum and the wilderness gang). Did anyone here think he would call it a machete, with its connotation of a utilitarian tool of soft steel and plastic handles used mainly by illiterate villagers in steamy jungles. Naw, smart marketing dictates a name dripping in romanticism, charisma, and historical significance--the bowie. I could be wrong but I believe most of us would concur that a bladesmith catering to ABS machete collectors might need a second job.

Can anyone see the great contribution James Bowie could have made to knife systematics had he been named James Machete?

Roger and I wrestled around a bit over knife semantics a while back without inciting so much as a murmur, so I'm ready to toast names without meaning and join the fun found in the "soft" insanity of systematicless humanity.

ken
 
Here's a machete I made awhile back.
MacheteD_wholeleft.jpg


Forged from 1084, with a clay heat treat. Took me a few tries to get that right. ;) As people have said, this is an expensive way to get a machete. But it's fun swinging it through tree limbs etc.
 
Oh, thanks, Win, for adding Parang to the bowie/machete identity conundrum. But whatever you call it, I'll take it too. In elk camp, however, I just might call it my Parang camp bowie. At Blade it might be a Tai Parang bushmachete.

Please connect the dots for me concerning Oley Fermo-Jimmy Fikes, as that connection is even more confusing than naming big blades.

ken
 
Ken Williams said:
Oh, thanks, Win, for adding Parang to the bowie/machete identity conundrum. But whatever you call it, I'll take it too. In elk camp, however, I just might call it my Parang camp bowie. At Blade it might be a Tai Parang bushmachete.

Please connect the dots for me concerning Oley Fermo-Jimmy Fikes, as that connection is even more confusing than naming big blades.

ken
Click to expand...
Ken,
Oley Fermo was/is Jimmy Fikes username here.

Win,awesome knife! :thumbup: :cool:

Doug
 
all these pictures are making this thread quite exciting! I'm bringin me camera home tonight to snap some shots too!
 
Needless to say mowing lawns the way I saw it done required ultra-sharpness. Don't know how they did it, but I'm sure they could give me lessons.

I agree with you, David, about the machete's capacity to do more than slicing mangos and fix'n salads. I usually limit the use of my machete to chopping light brush in building duck blinds and defer to an ax even for small trees, mostly because keeping that soft steel sharp is too demanding and I don't yet have a quality bowie, though that will be corrected soon. But judging by what I saw in Panama, those guys were logging with theirs.

ken
 
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