Can I Use My Bowie Knife as a Punch?
Your bowie knife is a very handy tool, indeed. It provides you with numerous benefits and uses, whether you are hunting, camping, fishing or even just working around your home. However, while that knife is an ideal tool for many different things, from cutting to slicing and even blazing a trail through the underbrush, you’ll find some things that it should not be used for. What should you not use your knife to do?
Let’s take the screwdriver usage as an example. Chances are pretty good that the tip of your bowie knife is going to fit well into the head of a screw, whether it’s a flathead screw or a Phillips head. However, actually turning the screw requires that you exert pressure on the tip of the blade. Unfortunately, the metal is not designed for this type of use. Usually, what happens next is that the tip of the blade bends. You might even find that the tip snaps off completely is you are using significant force.
Pry Bar – If you think that your bowie knife would make a great pry bar, you’re wrong. These knives are not designed with this use in mind. While you might have no choice in the matter, you should make this type of use a thing of last resort. If you do attempt to pry things with your bowie knife, you’ll find that you can damage the tip or even bend the blade of your knife. This will require expert precision to repair and might even break the blade off.
In addition you should never use your bowie knife as a chisel or a punch. Both of these uses require specialized tools to accomplish, and bowie knives are not such tools. While they might be used in an extreme emergency, do not expect your knife blade to hold up well under this type of mistreatment. In fact, you can bend or break the blade quite easily doing this. You can also injure yourself severely if the blade were to slip.
As you can see, bowie knives, while ideal tools for a wide range of different uses, are not designed for some purposes. The basic rule of thumb should be that if another type of knife wouldn’t be right, then bowie knives would likely not be a good fit, either.
Dylan Sabot is the owner of an online bowie knife store featuring the Cold Steel bowie knife. Additionally, Dylan is also the President of an online butane lighters store.