why drop point?

RD, Your model would be fine if the internal organs were flat and stiff as cardboard. In reality the body cavity is more like a soft-sided suitcase stuffed with clothes. You can't rely on the dull curve of the back side of the drop point to push the contents out of the path of your point due to softness and irregular contours.

What I do as I open the cavity is guard the point with my finger tip while the side of the finger helps lift the abdominal wall away from the organs. The key in this application is that my index finger doesn't want to align with the center of a blade that is straight or bent forward (towards the edge) as long as I am gripping the handle. It is easiest to guard a point on a blade that has some back-bend or has a straight back.

WK, My rabbit cleaning ideas were influenced particularly on a trip where I didn't have a good table or similar clean platform to work on. Whacking the head off a rabbit with a large knife is not as convenient as removing it surgically with a fine point when you are more or less holding it in the air. Likewise, it's a hastle to split the pelvic girdle and remove the last of the large intestine with a large knife if you don't have a good supporting surface. Most of the other gutting processes could have been done with a heavier tip. Where we were working was on the hood of my car and I didn't want anybody to slip up.
 
Jeff
My test is for skinning and caping simulation only. When you go to take the jamies off them you have to cut up the inside of the hind legs at the least. If you are skinning for a boddy mount depending on the animal you have many cuts where you must place the point of the blade under the skin and slide it along the meat cutting the skin from the inside out without cutting any hair in one continuous cut. You cannot do this with a clip or trailing point because the point keeps poking into and getting hung up on the meat. That is unless you don't mind your game carcas to look like its been on the losing end of a knife fight.
As far as feild dressing just about any sharp instument will do. you just have to know what your doing ( don't take that wrong ). A hunting partner of mine feild dressed a large bull elk with a replacement blade broadhead once. It was early Sept. and he was starting to skin it with the same broadhead when I came along. The turkey left his knife stuck in a tree in camp the night before.
I have been feild dressing 5 to 6 biggame animals a year for the last 30+ years plus butchering hogs and cattle. I make a small incision low in the belly. If you right handed insert your index and second finger of your left hand in the hole. Spread the hole with your two fingers palm of your hand up tips of your fingers currled up and out against the inside of the stomach wall. Insert your knife tip about 1/2 inch into the hole resting your right hand in the palm of your left hand then move both hands in unisone using the two fingers of your left hand to move anything you don't want to cut out of the way and presto unzip to the sternum. With this method even a tanto will work, god forgive!!!

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Robert
Flat Land Knife Works
rdblad@telusplanet.net
http://members.tripod.com/knifeworks/index.html

[This message has been edited by R Dockrell (edited 03-16-2001).]
 
Drop points are also good for cutting seat belts and bandages and clothing off people. You don't need much of a drop to it if you can get them to hold still.

For gutting animals I think inserting a finger or two for a guide is a good idea even with a drop point. I think because that's right at the start of the field-dressing process and you haven't got your hands dirty yet ... I think a lot of people are still trying to keep their hands clean at that point ... I think that's most of the appeal of gut hooks in particular. That makes no sense at all -- your hands are going to get dirty before you're done regardless so you might as well plunge right in.


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-Cougar :{)
Use of Weapons
 
RD, You've just about got me convinced, with your skinning utilization. I will compromise and say I like the design of the sort of back-bent, drop-pointed, semi-skinner best for skinning large game. I also bring a special purpose "belly ripper" tool that is actually used for skinning more than abdomen opening. It isn't attached to a knife, just a special guarded hook blade with handle.
 
Originally posted by Seb:
I read that drop point is considered as "the ultimate user blade shape". But I don't understand what should be better with a drop point than, say, a clip point.

What a GREAT THREAD, filled with my friends, great opinions, good manners. A pattern for all intercourse on knives. I only intrude because the first question came from Seb in Bavaria
It was there in the Spring of 1947 that I saw my first droppoint, a traditional Bavarain hunting knife that slipped into the pocket on the side of the leather shorts worn by everybody all the men that is. Any one who has seen one of these knives will recognize at once the influence on my designs from then to now. A. G.
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