Of bolo rush & bolomen

[kai]

Hello Miguel,

If I may add a point or two in support of that, the Leyte-Samar sundang (also known as garab or talibon in some parts of those Visayan islands) is for instance configured that way for a reason.

Like the sagging (i.e., convex) shape of the cutting edge is supposed to split more efficiently a coconut nut

And then the pointy tip was designed to scoop out the copra [dried coconut kernel] efficiently ... like what the tourist in the pic below is trying to learn.

Well, he's obviously playing with a freshly opened coconut not copra. Else he wouldn't smile that much anymore...

AFAIK, copra is really not that difficult to remove from the shell since most of it is already detached due to the drying process - wouldn't something like a spoon work much better/faster? I somehow have a problem imagining the thin tip of Bill's nice garab being used for working copra! BTW, isn't the copra trade a fairly recent (i.e. colonial) phenomenon? From my travels, ripe coconuts seemed to be of very little interest to any local population - they only utilized young coconuts (or, at least, still fairly soft ones for making coconut cream).

And then the (short) length of the sundang/garab/talibon was deliberate -- that was done so that the coconut farmer need not spread his arms farther apart than necessary, while extracting the copra from the shell.

That's definitely too much of a stretch for me...

Regards,
Kai