Curious Iranun kampilan feature

[xasterix]

Originally Posted by kai

Hello Gavin,

Yes, kampilan blades do have a bit of flex (and will return true if things are not overdone).

As you assumed, Ray was referring to the blade setting a bend from poorly aligned cutting attempts; usually, this can be manually straightened out again. (Obviously, this should be avoided with antique blades; OTOH, some trial & error is part of the valuable hands-on research and old blades can be surprisingly resilient...)

Regards,
Kai

Yup, you got it... a bit of cutting error, and the kampilan blade should return if no successive attempts are made; but an accumulation of cutting errors- misalignment, hitting environmental stuff- can put a huge bend, or even a wave-like series of bends on a kampilan. It's easily straightened out though- I use my hands or knee. I bend the whole blade in one direction, then the opposite way; then do smaller adjustment bends as I go. A bent kampilan in the battlefield would set back the wielder probably 1-2 mins to get everything straight again. But the important thing is that it doesn't break- and so far I haven't broken any kampilan blade yet, only bent.

After that cutting session, my kampilan had a wave-like series of bends; my 2-handed vertical and backhand attempts there were incorrectly done, and the blade state reflected that. I straightened everything out after 2 minutes of bend/unbend with my hands.