Kunar River light combat knife

Joined
Oct 23, 2006
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So I had a buddy who's doing some fighting in Afghanistan right now got me all revved up on an idea for a new combat knife he had. He's in the mountains over there and like all mountains they suck to walk up and down everyday so the less weight you have the better you feel.
He knew exactly what he wanted in a combat knife because of his multiple combat tours in the past ten years or so. It's always cool to work with somebody who knows what they need. He wanted something sorta similar to a Gasconade in size and shape but light.
This is what I came up with.
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It's 1/8" o-1 tool steel with a full height convex grind to save weight. Thinner than normal carbon fiber scales and lanyard tubes instead of pins also for weight savings.
The blade shape has near the same amount of drop as a Gasconade for power cuts, splitting with the tip/belly area and to keep from cutting the gut sack when you're gutting an animal. The belly is there for slightly better slicing and for dressing game if he wants to supplement his diet over there with a goat or when he comes home and wants to do some hunting.
The tip was a concern since the steel is thinner than normal and it's a full height grind, both those things make for a weak tip if it's too pointy. So I blunted it quite a bit to keep that from being as likely to happen.
Light prying is where thinner steel looses out to the thicker stuff. Heat treated the same each knife will be equally tough but a thicker knife won't flex as much as a thinner one and it'll have a more robust (thicker) tip with the same grind as a thin one. So prying is a no-go with this one but there's always trade offs when optimizing any design.
If you're interested I filmed one of the two days of testing I did with the knife.

[video=youtube;u5pfeUjVUvU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5pfeUjVUvU[/video]

Thanks for looking. God bless the troops.
 
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