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Old 09-30-2020, 01:15 AM
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TexasJack TexasJack is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Southeast Texas
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A few months back there was a local group that held a challenge to make a railroad spike knife. A friend of mine - who is also a Forged-in-Fire winner - was in the contest and I went to see it. Everybody had a great time and it was interesting to see what techniques people used to try to best utilize the time limit. Came time to test the knives and my friend's knife lost pretty badly. It was a great looking knife, but he made a dagger. The contests slashed bottles and sandbags and stuff like that. A dagger is a great "poking" knife, but a terrible "slashing" knife.

This kinda plays back to Dana's point about knives being designed to do specific jobs. A great hunting knife is not a great carving knife. A dagger is pretty much only good for one thing while a bowie might cover a broader range. If you've ever tried to use the wrong knife to gut and skin a deer, you can easily appreciate how much the design affects how well a knife performs on a task. I have a very long blade for cutting watermelon or brisket, but it would be a nightmare gutting a deer.

That even extends to the materials of construction. Butchers like to have blades that sharpen quickly - don't even think about using a vanadium steel in their blades.

Speaking of Boy Scouts, back when I was young, a big reason to join was that they all carried a big pocket knife. ( I seem to recall it being a Barlow knife.) When my son was in Scouts (about 20 years ago), the church where they met decided to build a new, giant mega-church. When the kids moved to the new church, the folks who ran it asked the kids to help them by unpacking a couple of truckloads of chairs they bought. Of course, the Scouts were happy to help. We probably had 60 boys and at least one parent for each helping with the project. And exactly TWO of us had pocket knives. TWO!! I #### near wore out my blade slashing boxes open and cutting tape. Sad to see how good traditions have been thrown away by the snowflakes that run things these days.


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