+1 on the Sharpmaker. Super easy to use and provides excellent results.

If you're using Doug's Rittergrips remember to use the 30 degree slots to keep the factory grind angle.

I will def. keep that in mind. Thank you.

I was surprised to see on another forum a picture of one of these with a chipped blade. The poster said he was just chopping away and a chunk of the blade came off. No sound indicating he had hit a nail or bullet or anything hard.

Yesterday I went to a gun show. No bargains and no beef jerky. I really miss the beef jerky vendor because he had some really good stuff. I wonder if the show kicked him out to make room for more guns, ammo, and knives. It was pretty packed with dealer tables and customers. Lots of guns and ammo, but no bargains.

The usual gun show style knives. Mostly junk. A few decent used knives that seemed to be randomly priced. Saw a fair number of generic decent lock back knives (Gerber, Buck, etc.). To me they are a basic $5-$10 knife used. I saw some as low as $5 and a couple that someone had priced at $50. Most were priced at $15-20 so if I had wanted one for $10 I probably could have gotten it for that.

The strangest looking thing I saw was some kind of machete looking blade labeled USMC. The thing was maybe 16 inches long and had a blade that was at least a quarter inch thick and maybe 2 inches wide. I picked it up and the thing was heavy - probably at least 5 pounds. The dealer tells me they were issued to marines in WWII to chop off limbs (arms and legs type limbs) in cases were the marine was so badly injured he needed a field amputation. The guy actually said this with a straight face. Based on the heft of the thing, if it was sharpened I can believe it could chop a leg off. It was one big chunk of steel.

I believe the knife you refer to is a M1942 Bolo Knife (United States Navy Hospital Corpsman).

They use to be very common in surplus stores. I bought one as a kid and tried to sharpen it, but the edge was too thick to take any kind of edge.

I have found nothing of there use or intended use (but would be only slightly less useful than an entrenching tool (the WWII/Korea/early Viet Nam wood and steel variety) as last ditch hand to hand fighting implement.

(My battalion(2/7) Sergeant Major earned a Silver Star in Viet Nam for effectively demonstrating the proper use of an entrenching tool to several Viet Cong.)

A corpsman knife.

Maybe it really was used to implement emergency amputations.

I suppose it could happen if there was a flaw in the forging process. I have to admit that I baby my Wetterlings. I carry it in my pack and would only use it for light duty like dressing a whitetail or making a featherstick. I have other hatchets and axes to beat up chopping out a stump.

Reading up on military gear I came across a reference to that knife that suggested that its origin in WW2 was in the Pacific where it was intended to be used by navy corpsmen as a short machete to chop poles to use in setting up aid stations and for litters. As we all know the Marines don't have medics from their service branch like the army does. Marine medics are all navy corpsmen.

--- Insert old joke about the guy trying to stay as far away from combat as possible by joining the navy and becoming a corpsman here. ---

It happened more than once. A good number of them were pacifists and volunteers.

A couple of points about the axes mentioned.
We used to heat an axe before using it in cold weather to avoid it chipping. The steel takes a lot of stress when chopping and if it is hard enough to hold an edge it can become brittle when cold.(not red hot, just warm to touch)

Bones (beef) will often chip an axe edge because they are so hard and grab the steel.

The knots in hemlock are the worst though.
Hemlock knots take out nice half moon shaped chips.
I am not sure why knots in hemlock are so bad but they are, especially the thin pin knots.

The way these bones and hemlock knots take the chip out is a bit interesting.
They don't dent or bend the steel. It isn't like what you see if you hit a nail or a stone.
It is more like they grab it and pull the chip out of the edge.
When you look at the cut the chip is still right in there. If you dig it out it is still sharp and shows no noticeable deformation.
It really is like it was simply plucked out of the edge of the axe.

I have had chips taken out of the edge of a decent machete when trimming branches off hemlocks too.
It was the knot in the centre of the branch as it entered the trunk that did that. Again, nice little crescent shaped notches neatly removed from the edge, about the size of a fingernail.

Hey Art in FL-I'm not trying to be a Smart alek but, The USMC IS of The Dept.of The Navy,Same tree,smaller branch so to speak.

Using a machete, or other relatively thin bladed tools, a trick to cut down the chance of damage is to always chop at an acute angle. Like your shaving the wood or bone. Coming at a chunk of wood square the wood cleaves and spreads away from the edge but as soon as the blade slows the wood closes tightly around the blade. Efforts to extract the blade which is gripped like a vice by the wood then fatigues the metal and it cracks. I've seen chunks torn out of otherwise reliable and tough tools because of this.

<hangs head> <digs toe of boot in the dirt>
I've done it a couple of times myself when I got impatient and tried to bull my way through a job with a tool not designed for that sort of brute force technique.

Coming at the wood at an acute angle allows the blade to slice the wood and the slice is thin enough that it can't tightly grip the blade. Cutting at an acute angle one way and then completely removing the flap by chopping at an acute angle the other way allows you to make progress. It takes a little longer to chop through a log this way but it works.

The thinner the blade and the tougher the wood, or bone, the more acute the angle you come at it.

Also, if you do get a blade stuck, get another tool and work around it chopping at a shallow angle until the stuck blade is freed. Don't try to wrench the stuck blade out. With luck the stuck tool comes out intact.