TFW blades are made by Blade Culture International. If you look through their site for a few minutes you’ll see what I mean.
I’ve had a TFW kukri as a beater blade for the past few years. The blade itself is pretty good. I’ve chopped dead hickory, deer antler, 6x6’s, etc and it’s still going strong.
It definitely has a differential heat treatment. The spine is very soft, and I saw some slight deformation when I did some batoning with a hammer. The edge is definitely in the 58-60 hrc range like they say, and the edge retention is excellent.
The wood used for the handle is extremely brittle, and I experienced cracking within a few weeks even though I oiled the wood immediately out of the box. Whenever I really pushed the blade by chopping something hard, it would start to split, but I just glued the wood back together with flexible super glue. I’ll upgrade to G10 eventually.
The sheath is just ok, the blade rattles in the sheath, and the leather seems thin, but it’s otherwise functional.
The kukri is one of the toughest blades they have, so I don’t think I would have had as good of an experience with some of their non-full tang models. I’ve heard good things about the Panabas after they redesigned it.
Also, Cold Steel makes a decent barong for the price, and their magnum kukri (which isn’t really a kukri) flows a bit like a talibong. They just came out with a kris sword too, but I can’t say anything about it.
