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.