John and others, please give advice!

J

Johan van Zyl

Joined
Oct 11, 2000
Messages
372
Gee, guys, I've got this WWI kukri made in 1915. John Powell wrote me and said it's quite a rare mark I. So now I'm very protective of it and do not want to do anything to damage it. The problem is, it looks like it's been chopping wood for the last 85 years without getting sharpened! It's blunt like you've never seen blunt before. I want it sharp again, but realise it's got to done right! John and others, please give me good advice to help me do the job as well as can be. My Lansky is definitely not the tool! Something tells me an electric grinder is out of the question too. So is it just a matter of stones and elbow grease? Do I retain the curve of the steel rounding down to the edge? (It's just the opposite of hollow-ground.) I realise there are so many of you out there knowing what to do.
 
1st question: why do you need it sharpened?
 
...Like Pen says: why sharpen?

ANy old or antique blade that is sharpened or modernly modified in any way will lose its intrinsic value. If you took a good 500 year old sword (hey, of course it ain't gonna be sharp any more), and you did a little touch up grinding or sharpening, you would be destroying the age wear that makes it look old.

There's a difference between restoration and resharpening. Choose wisely.

Keith
En Ferro Veritas
 
You'll devalue it by even polishing off it's original patina, so I'd be real careful about even cleaning it.
 
Johan,

It's your knife. Do whatever makes you happy.

I usually do not sharpen my older knives. First, the knife is an artifact and I would not want to sharpen or use a knife like that because I would not want to damage a piece of history. Second, a knife that old has been through many hands, and we can't be sure that it still has enough integrity to hold up to hard use. It might do well, or suffer a castostropic failure, you don't know. You can't just look at a blade and tell whether someone has damage the blade temper, or, weakened the handle; perhaps the hidden tang has suffered from corrosion, or the rezin had dried?

It sounds like you knife has had a long and productive life. The knife has probably been sharpened often, and perhaps recently. It is not a 100% condition pristine antique, and provided the thing holds together, it is not going to loose a great deal of value.

If you want to use it then try to put a working edge on it by using a flat sharpening stone or a ceramic stick. Sharpen it slowly by freehand and you will end up with something close to the original edge (a more or less convex edge). Don't forget to let us know how it performs. We hate to use our older knives; But, we all want to learn from them.

n2s
 
Pen, Keith, Uncle, Sylv & n2s, I respect all your answers and thank you! Must say, when I read what Pen, Keith & Uncle wrote, I was dumbfounded in my ignorance. All the time I had been thinking along the lines of: "Good restoration of an old khukuri = sharpening". But what you said rings true after all. This Mk I of mine has seen a lot of action, whatever type it may be. Besides the bluntness, however, the only "damage" the blade and tang has, is the patina of age. The original handle was lost long before I procured the khuk, and I had to carefully make one for it, painstakingly copying photos kindly provided by John. Dunno if that sorta disqualifies it from being antique, though....
Here's a pic of the MkI in question. I hope you can open the link, and the pic:
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=163867&highlight=Johan
 
Can't see the pic.

Putting a handle on it doesn't ruin the value of the blade, but it does not necessarily raise the value of the khukuri as a whole. You would need to create a handle that looked like the original and then spend time disstressing it, dirtying it, and otherwise wearing it down to "look" like the antique. And then, you would definitely want to disclose this fact to anybody who was speculating. You have to think of it as more than monetary value, it also has scientific and historical value. There have been whole chapters of history written on a single artifact before...imagine if it had been a fake, or otherwise altered...:(

If you want to display this khuk, think of how best you would want to show it's history. Imagine all the work it has done. The hands that have held it. The travelling it has done to get to you. Now, shoot for conveying that image when you hang it.

my 0.02
 
I think everyone (myself included) has asked such a question in the past. Check out the work of a guy who does much of what you're looking at, Alex Huangfu.

www.chinesearms.com

Alex takes old blades, often bereft of fittings, and restores the blades, then reworks period-style fittings for pieces. He is very knowledgeable in the area of preservation/restoratin, and is located in China.

Keith
En Ferro Veritas
 
Johann,
All these nice fellow forumites have answered the question: leave it as it is. This is an antique and not to be used.
 
And so they are, John! And I'm fortunate to have heard from them. And I'm fortunate for being able to own the Mk I! What a pleasure to be a khuk collector/enthusiast!
 
still wishing I could see the pic...:confused:
 
If you right mouse click on the pic that isn't there (!?), you can view the properties for the link - in this case is shows the pic was hosted at photopoint, which if my memory serves either had connectivity problems or went belly up all together. Unless someone saved a copy on their machine to re-post, it's gone.
 
Snuffie, you're a genius to know all this stuff. To me it's clear as mud. The boffins in my area just tell me with a smirk: "Your computer doesn't have the memory to open the pic!" But I know I opened it many times before.

I know a swell guy in the good ol' U.S. of A. who reads these forums regularly and has a copy of this specific pic on his computer, but I can't bring myself to pressurising him to go to the extra trouble of putting in on again (!) Maybe a pic of some other Mk I will do just as well. Maybe even one w/o handle, like mine was when I got it...
 
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