Curious massive knife or machete

[francantolin]

I wanted to show you to this large, somewhat special machete knife, extremely massive, almost 1 cm thick at the heel and weight of more than a kilo.
The end of the blade looks like a Bowie and is really sharp

the handle looks more like a halberd with a shortened shaft. A litle Chinese Pu Dao style ??.
the sheath has an original and interesting shape,

A whaler flensing knife ?
A colonial asian or african Riflemen machete ?
Just a butcher / knacker heavy knife ?

So, will you have an idea of ​​the origin?
I will receive this soon

[Interested Party]

I couldn't help but notice that the front of the guard is shortened which would help with camp tasks. I have no idea what this started life as. The fish tail sheath with a wood screw and rigged for a horizontal carry would seem to be a clue to origin

[francantolin]

Thank you for the message!
I received my package,
so the blade is a little shorter than indicated: 31 cm long and 8 mm thick for a total weight of 1 kg. interesting the tang of the knife on the handle that goes all the way through the handle. I therefore opt more for a large cutlass knife than for a polearm. not a machete either given the weight of the object. some sort of cleaver or hunting dagger if I'm lucky Fairly old blade roughly reused: the guard is perhaps more recent and may have been mounted upside down. (see traces) the scabbard although it fits well has little to do with the length of the blade and the handle is quite rudimentary and seems newer too. I'm going to try to take it all apart a little...

[francantolin]

On the scabbard it seems that something was braided on

[Ian]

Hello fran,

Interesting Item. It seems to have been assembled from a bunch of largely unrelated parts. Given the thickness of the blade, I'm thinking this may be a cut down sword—perhaps a recycled broken sword—and what we are seeing is the ricasso end of the blade. Even so, it is a beast of a knife. You won't know a great deal about the tang and guard without taking it apart (a considerable task by the look of the hilt).

The criss-cross markings on the wooden scabbard suggest to me the application of a heavy duty reinforcing tape. There are some strong packing tapes that have a similar fiber pattern embedded in them. Given that the structures on your scabbard span a crack in the wood, this seems like a possibility.

At a guess, I would say this is a WWII piece assembled by a serviceman for a general purpose jungle knife.

[francantolin]

Hello Ian,

Thank's a lot for your message,
Do you think the blade can come from a cut down klewang ?
Or something more european ?
It looks like a shortened pioneer sword-cutlass .
Small original or shortened blade..

Here in comparison with my largest butcher knife

[francantolin]

Or if I cheat,
It can looks like an xxl bowie knife 😁
Can be good , the tang goes through the hilt until the red line

[Ian]

Originally Posted by francantolin

Hello Ian,

Thank's a lot for your message,
Do you think the blade can come from a cut down klewang ?
Or something more european ?
It looks like a shortened pioneer sword-cutlass .
Small original or shortened blade...

Hi fran,

Best I can tell, the blade seems to be monosteel, which might suggest a European blade, but there are plenty of 20th C examples of local blades made in Asia from monosteel also. In one picture you show a red line around the the top of the blade, where there is a narrow, flat section of blade adjacent to the guard that looks like the bottom of a traditional European ricasso.

I think it is a much modified blade recovered from another weapon. In this regard, Japanese soldiers were proficient at repurposing captured blades during WWII. American GIs did the same but to a lesser degree.

[ausjulius]

Originally Posted by francantolin

I wanted to show you to this large, somewhat special machete knife, extremely massive, almost 1 cm thick at the heel and weight of more than a kilo.
The end of the blade looks like a Bowie and is really sharp

the handle looks more like a halberd with a shortened shaft. A litle Chinese Pu Dao style ??.
the sheath has an original and interesting shape,

A whaler flensing knife ?
A colonial asian or african Riflemen machete ?
Just a butcher / knacker heavy knife ?

So, will you have an idea of ​​the origin?
I will receive this soon

I'm going out on a limb and saying it's African. One of these bayonet inspired knives that appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century.
These appear both in West Africa and East Africa, especially in the German colonies in these regions.
Some are very strange looking beasts. they mimic bayonets and many times have gun like feathers, sling swivels or catches, screws and knobs on them.