[A. G. Maisey]

Thank you Oiluj, for clarifying the handle slab material. The further clarification provided by your additional photos is also useful.

The handle has certainly been damaged, it was originally a hidden tang hilt, and it has been damaged.
How & where it was damaged can only be a matter of guesswork. The brass screw is probably original, & the steel screw is a replacement. This repair work could have been done anywhere at any time where there was not ready access to matching materials, nor need for there to be matching materials. It is the sort of thing that we all do on Sunday afternoon, when we're 20 miles from town, the hardware shops are closed and we want to finish the job we're working on. This sort of repair work does not need to be tied to any wartime scenario, nor to any other specific set of circumstances.

I don't know where the idea of "military" came from, but yes, I do agree that this sort of blade cover is not able to be attached to any military association. Similarly, the blade does not bear the indicators of factory production, whilst it does bear the indicators of a smith's work. However, it is extremely unlikely that this blade is the product of any East Asian or South East Asian smith. Blades from these parts of the world are overwhelmingly fixed to the hilt with adhesive and usually have a stick tang.

In my opinion the handle is original to the blade, & that blade was designed to perform a specific function --- what that function might have been is something we're still working on.
The handle has been damaged, & this damage has revealed the rough finish to the underside of the tang, which would have been hidden, prior to the damage that has occurred to the hidden tang handle. When we make a knife that will have the tang hidden --- either by use of enveloping slabs, or as a stick tang, we do not remove tool marks & etc from that tang, as the roughened surface assists with stability of the handle.

All of this discussion I find to be interesting, it is most certainly outside my own particular interests in edged weapons, but I do have a background in bladesmithing & custom knife work, & I do have a fondness for chisel grind blades, this is what has caught my interest with this knife under discussion.


Colin Henshaw

I've just done a bit of searching on thatcher's knives, & I tend to agree that "thatcher's knife" might be a pretty fair sort of guess.
I know nothing about thatching, but I have lived in houses with thatched roofs, & have seen them being repaired --- in Jawa & Bali there are still houses in out of the way places that do have thatched roofs, in fact, there is a hotel in Bali where the accommodation is Balinese style cottages with thatched roofs.

I do agree that the blade of this knife was designed as a tool, rather than as a weapon --- but of course, anything can be a weapon, given the need.

Bob A

Knives with a chisel grind need to be used in only one hand or the other, a knife made to be used in the right hand cannot be used effectively in the left hand. Additionally, the blade geometry is designed to perform a limited number of functions, or perhaps only a single function.

Overall knife design is also dictated by intended use.

I've spent a great deal of time in Jawa & Bali, & in those places chisel grind knives are very much favoured, with each variation of the knife having a different function. We can see something similar with Japanese kitchen knives, each knife that has a chisel grind has been designed to carry out one function exceedingly well.

What function could it perform?
It is a heavy blade with a chisel grind & a trailing hilt.
Such a design would work well to remove thin slices of relatively hard material, it could be a carpenter's knife for squaring timber, it could function in a similar way to a draw knife, but with a push or slice action rather than a drawing action, it could be used to strip bark, either green or dry, it would work very well to ringbark trees. These are things that readily come to mind, but I guess if we really put our minds to it we could hypothesise any number of uses it could be put to --- as I've said, I like the thatcher's knife idea, I've seen thatching being done, & I reckon it could be pretty useful in that work.