While back, I came up with the notion of a knife with a fat, tubular-shaped handle I thought would be fun to twirl and play with. Made a rough prototype of PVC pipe, an old butterfly knife, and some epoxy, and then went back to my usual business.
Chuck Pippin, a silat guy and knifemaker who has done some steel for me–link over in the sidebar–saw the drawing and offered to have a go at making the knife.
Life, as it is wont to do, gets in the way, so he didn't get around to it until now.
It's early in-progress, but a couple of pictures, to show the forged Damascus slab he is using, and the rough cut. I'll post more images as he progresses.
This is way cool, as I told him, like serialized installments of an adventure story. What will happen next?!
Stay tuned.
I remember. The one in my head was 1.25" wide 1/4" thick foot-long bar stock and a 5" long 1.25" diameter dowel; rough tanto shape on the blade, say a 2" diagonal, just sharpening the edge(s?) to within half an inch of the dowel; cutting the dowel in half the long way and sanding down the cuts enough to take the quarter inch the steel replaces; maybe sand the dowel end edges a little.
ReplyDeleteThis knife looks remarkably like a "canopy breaker", a knife carried on some older ejection seat-equipped aircraft. The shape of a Plexiglas canopy (not the more modern polycarbonate) is such that, should the canopy separation system fail (and you have enough time and altitude), you could supposedly break the canopy from the inside, hop out of the cockpit and pull the parachute ripcord. Funny, I looked at this knife for about fifteen minutes, wondering where I'd seen it before, and then it finally came to me: I had spent around 2000 hours with one of these clipped to the left side of the cockpit on a fighter aircraft.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I figured I was reinventing the wheel -- there are survival knives with tube-handles, inside of which are fishing line and hooks and like that. I had a diving knife once that had a K-bar type handle. Got a Finnish puukko that's about twice as much blade as hand.
ReplyDeleteI think like your breaker, the handle needs to be heavy, both for manipulation and for striking. I've seen knives with blades on both ends, ala Darth Maul's light-spear, but those wouldn't be all that useful, save for maybe chipping out an ice cave or serious mayhem ...