Mexican aluminum hilted bowie knives

[Pitt1999]

To my recollection I have not seen these discussed on the forum before. That might be because of well established information that I was not aware of before my observation of this knife type, but I would like to post something that I have learned about these here in case anyone else wants to know about a small detail of their construction. I purchased this because it seemed to be of decent quality compared to the others of these (I'm sure I don't need to say this but these are pretty common knives from my experience) I have seen. I'm not quite sure what brought me to do this, but I wanted to see how far the tang went into the hilt. The horn plates riveted on to the hilt would lead one to believe that the tang went at least to the end of the horn plates. To my surprise when I ran a magnet along the handle there was no attraction to the hilt until I reached the top of one of the horn plates near the guard. I've seen plenty of knives with partial tangs before but this seems like a rather shallow attachment for a functional knife, but maybe these knives weren't meant to be functional in the first place.