The Cold Steel "Bushman" had a hollow handle with a hole for tying it to a stick and making a spear. It was a pretty sturdy knife, stupid-looking but functional for 15 bucks or so. The spear concept seemed pretty hokey to me. Cold Steel makes good quality stuff, but was (and is) full of silly marketing gimmicks along those lines.

I also have one of these knifes that I carried in Vietnam with a brass "spark lite" and some other items in the handle. I decided to pass it on to my son when he gets older. He can compare it to my Gerber "wasp blade" survival knife and K-bar, and he can see what we used then. All the knives saw use but the K-bar the most. A link to his family past.

Paulr:

I am familiar with the cold steel bushman, but have never found out how you are supposed to attach a shaft to it. Just pushing it onto the end makes no sense unless you are supposed to epoxy it in place and that would defeat the versatility of a knife that could be used as a spear.

The knife I am thinking about looked stock with standard hilt, but the handle was hollow and according to the advertisements I remember, the internal threads were deep and staggered like a threading die so that you could screw the shaft on and screw it off, put the cap back on the handle and it was a regular fixed blade knife again.

This was a long time ago and I suppose people on the Knife forum might be able to remember who made it.

Bountyhunter

Bounty hunter - let me offer a different point of view:

RE: Bushman: There is a hole drilled in the handle that you can use to put a wood screw or nail through into the spear shaft. And the tapered socket is the only effective way to haft wood to a metal tool.

First, though, the shaft needs to be shaped - the Bushman socket is properly tapered - widest at the opening. That's actually the proper way to make a socket - be it for a bodkin arrow point, a lance, or an expedient spear. A straight cylindrical socket is very impractical to properly fit to a shaft without a lathe and even then it is a compromise as the wood shrinks and swells from drying out/getting soaked, will often split the shaft from transfering axial shock directly to the end of the shaft, etc.

Shaping the shaft for the socket is simple enough - use the Bushman as a drawknife (carefully - a leather glove on the off-hand is a smart precaution). Lay the shaft out in front of you, passing between your feet (grip shaft with feet)), across your strong-side thigh, and ending up about at your strong-side hip or a little short of that, depending on your body proportions. Draw, rotate, draw, rotate - it doesn't take very long. You can vary position/grip of the shaft by twining your feet/lower legs around the shaft - easier to show/do than write about.

Having hafted both types (hollow-handle knives and Bushman), there is no question in my mind that the Bushman approach is real-world superior - and after all, thousands of years of armorers using tapered sockets probably wasn't just tradition. I suspect that the hollow-handle knife designers never went to a museum and studied medveial weaponry details or visited aboriginal blacksmiths in the bush... even a modern shovel uses a tapered socket, not a cylindrical one, and the reasons are the same - grip, transfer of axial and lateral forces, fit, etc. For another modern example, examine a quality wood chisel with a wooden handle - tapered socket. (Cheesy ones are not made that way - the best ones are).

We have a couple of Bushman knives and a couple of mini-Bushmans. They are what I call "truck" or "car" knives - not routinely carried on person, but useful & cheap enough to keep in vehicle kits. Very sharp and easy to keep that way - I suspect the Rockwell hardness is not as high as we have become accustomed to so that they are far less likely to break - I can straighten a bend in the woods, but a broken knife... reading old Africa tales, authors claimed the abos prefered "softer" knives and spear points for exactly that reason.

I think the mini is a much more practical size - YMMV. And I have an issue with the lack of a guard when used as a knife, which is exacerbated by the taper towards the sharp. I think of them more as single-edged stabbing spear heads that can be used as a knife than the other way around... but Bagheera uses Bushman/minis as the kitchen and GP knives in his Scout Troop in Holland and has reported here very favorably about them in those uses.

Anyway, some food for thought - If a spear is an object, I'll argue strenuously that the Bushman approach is far more practical than any non-tapered socket in a hollow-handled knife.

Feel free to argue otherwise - I'm open minded.

Regards,

Tom

I have no argument regarding strength or ease of conversion for use with a raw shaft.

My thoughts were that any knife used in the manner of a stabbing spear could then be returned to its orignal configuration for regular knife tasks. If I owned such a knife, I would make a walking stick with matching threads (Preferably metal or fiberglass threading.) that could be capped to cover and protect the threads on the stick.

Since common sense (At least to those of us on these types of forums.) dictates that you never throw away your strongest weapon ("Asset", for the sheepls.), a soft blade is not that important since you will be controlling the blade mostly in a thrusting manner and not a slashing manner.

The deep threads that the knife had in the handle would better serve to retain the knife on the shaft from the forces of torque if the shaft to knife fit was not perfectly tight.

Do you know why the Romans had a multi wood shaft bundled spear with a thin bendable shaft with spear point protruding from the bundle and one of the primary ways it was used?

Bountyhunter

Hmm. Nope. I'm familiar with the pilum, but it only had a single wooden shaft. They were intended to pierce shield and/or armor, be difficult to withdraw, and bend from its own weight once embedded. They were thus an entanglement and if they were able to be withdrawn, were useless for the duration of the engagement - too bent to be effectively thrown back at the Romans. Clever, and very suited for the Roman tactics.

Do tell about the other Roman gadget - I'm not familiar with it.

Tom

Didn't know it was called a pilum, but the description you gave for its use is exactly what one of my history teachers taught us in high school.

You have to remember that in those days, a teacher wouldn't lose their job for teaching about "weapons" in school.

I always thought the center shaft was a bendable metal. Glad you "straightened" me out about that.

Bountyhunter <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Pete,

I'm not sure I remember the spelling correctly, but it's something like that. Someone probably has pictures of them somewhere on the WWW these days.

Tom

The pilum was a short, throwing or thrusting spear, used as you describe, & somewhat akin to the assegai.

The "bundled" handled thing you're describing was the faces (pronounced "fah-shees"), which had an axe head bound inside, and protruding from, a number of shafts. It was used as a symbol of power of the Roman Government, and is still used to adorn government edifices. Here in TN, the state House of Represenatives chamber has a couple of them carved in the marble rostrum around the speaker's chair.

I don't recall the origin of it, nor that it was used as a weapon, merely as a symbol of power (of the tribunes, I think--but memory is fading fast!)

And yes, the faces is the root word for "PHRASECENSOREDPOSTERSHOULDKNOWBETTER.".

David

Its actually spelt fasces
I quote " the bundle of rods with a projecting axe-head which was carried before the consuls as the insignia of state authority in ancient Rome"
From the Fontana Dictionary of modern Thought