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ellerToday's "shitty knife" is one I bought a long time ago but never posted about it because I wasn't entirely sure whether I should call it a shitty knife or not. It's one of those extremely rare cases where it's actually quite well made, with only very minor production flaws, and the whole shittiness is in the design. It's also a cross-cultural clusterfuck. (Let's not even think about concepts like "cultural appropriation"; it will only give you headaches.)
So, uh, what do we have here? It's a knife that's made in Ukraine (it took a few months to reach me, but I'm not going to blame the seller for that, at least; blame the inconvenient war) and was sold as a "small Yakut knife", though that's clearly not quite what it is. I'd describe it as "crossover knife with Yakutian-type blade design but puukko proportions, made by someone who culturally understands neither puukkot nor Yakut knives" - and if that sounds like a phenomenally bad idea... that's because it is.
I think I've mentioned before that I'm generally a "conservative" knife buyer - as in, when it comes to knives I want to use, I rely on the shapes that are proven to be efficient - but hey, when I see something that just has to be shitty in new and creative ways (rather than just the "normal", boring, technical fuck-ups), it's hard to resist.
The sheath is "classic Slavic design", I guess: very simple and straightforward, less focused on security and more focused on ease of drawing. It's not what I prefer (as in, I personally consider this design somewhat unsafe and generally do not use it), but very typical in all countries of the former Soviet union, and people clearly use it with some success, so, whatever. It's fine. I'm more worried about the knife than about the sheath, anyway.
The knife has the proportions of a puukko: straight-back blade, very short (approximately one palm's width), with a large handle that has a drop profile.
It just happens to have a "Yakut knife" (convex, hollow on the other side) blade... I'm showing it from both sides:
See how it's round, not flat? This is a typical thing of Yakut knives.
I will note that the hollowing is done in a slightly weird way, but... that's not even the issue, here.
But, okay, let's think positive and discuss all the things that went well. The first thing I noticed when I unpacked the knife was that, hey, the wood of the handle is nice! No sarcasm here - birch burl is appropriate both for a puukko and for a Yakut knife. (I think I have mentioned this before, but it's a popular handle material because it's an excellent thermal insulator, and the irregularity of the "rings" means it's not as prone to cracking as wood with a more regular year ring structure.) This happens to be a perfectly acceptable piece - not quite top quality (you can see it's taken from the edge of a burl, so it's most likely a leftover from another crafting project), but much better than I'd have expected for the price (which was on the low end of the spectrum for handmade knives). Could be much worse. Also, the blade edge performs well - I have no idea what steel was used, but it arrived very sharp and has a wonderful edge retention (I actually haven't had to sharpen it yet), which means it's good smithing work and had all the appropriate heat treatments and everything. That's great. On the purely technical manufacturing level, this is an excellent knife!
To understand the problem, we'll have to talk about the purpose of the two knife types that were combined here.
A puukko, at its heart, is a woodworking knife that's just versatile enough to do all the other tasks a Finn or Sami person traditionally needed to do, which is mainly hunting, fishing, butchering reindeer, and food preparation. (Anssi Ruusuvuori, whose book I already talked about, wrote that a puukko has to have the potential to be used for woodworking, and he will not consider a knife a puukko otherwise. It's a mandatory feature.) By the way, because I've only recently talked about the correlation between climate and wood hardness: that's also the reason why you only find this knife type with its typical "Scandi" blade grind, in Northern regions, but not anywhere near the equator. A "woodworking and allrounder knife" simply does not make any sense conceptually if the typical trees in your region have wood that happens to be very hard. (Hint: using the same tool for cheese and for Australian Buloke is obviously stupid, so, I think it's safe to assume that people generally don't do that.) It only works when your trees are not that much harder than cheese.
A Yakut knife... well, that's interesting, because the Yakut people live under very similar conditions (it's all very, uh, cold, you know) and are traditionally nomadic just like, for example, the Sami, but ended up with completely different knife design standards. And, no, the reasons for that are not completely clear - but it's clearly due to differences in lifestyle and use cases of these knives. (I've mentioned before that I think the hypothesis of Yakut blades being hollowed out to save metal is pretty dumb actually, because basic survival tools are the last thing any reasonable person would skimp on. The Yakut people survive in North Siberia, so, while I'm not an expert on their culture by any means, I'm going to assume they are perfectly reasonable people with the technological understanding to know what does and doesn't work for their lifestyle. Because otherwise they'd be, you know, dead, and all that.) Unfortunately, the Yakut people themselves don't know anymore (and, yes, people have tried to ask them) why and how this blade geometry was developed - it's been around for as far back as the archaeological record goes - but, hey, it clearly works for them. (And confuses the rest of the world.)
So, we can only reasonably talk about the modern uses of Yakut knives. Which is... sure, some kind of allrounder knife. (They will even use it for occasional woodworking tasks despite the blade clearly not being optimized for that.) I think I've mentioned before that the convex shape makes it especially good at frozen stuff - it minimizes the contact area, so you can, for example, cut frozen fish without it freezing to the blade. (I have personally tested this. With a real Yakut knife, of course, and not the weird object shown here.) I have no doubt this is a very important design feature when you happen to live in North Siberia, for all the obvious reasons.
Another main difference is the potential use as a weapon. (If you're interested in writing fight scenes, this may be relevant for you!) The thing is - a puukko is not a weapon (as in, sure, you can hurt someone very badly with a puukko, but it's simply not the best tool for that job), but a Yakut knife sure is. It's a "hunting knife" not only in the sense that it's used to cut up the animal carcass after the fact, but the larger Yakut blades are combat weapons (which is something the Sami, whose traditional religion can reasonably be called pacifist, generally don't go for - and the Finns largely reject on philosophical grounds because they culturally don't like over-specialized anything and see no reason to develop designated weapons when they are perfectly able to kill enemies with any tool at hand), and the largest Yakut knives (which are almost machete-sized) literally used to hunt bears. As in, yeah, walk up to the living bear and kill it.
So. Uh. Very different use case, that. I will point out that the asymmetric blade cross-section of a Yakut knife makes stab wounds less likely to heal (no "it's only a flesh wound" with this knife type!), and thus considerably more deadly than a symmetric or near-symmetric knife blade. (Some modern combat knives have actually copied this feature. I will not provide any links because I'm simply going to hope you are not actively looking for a murder weapon. Suffice to say it's the mismatch of both sides of the wound that prevents it from closing.) This is also the reason why I don't take any Yakut knives for a walk: while I don't think the average German cop knows enough about blades to have seen Yakut knives before and identify their potential use as weapons, and it's arguably also not the primary purpose of Yakut knives, I really don't want this question to potentially end up in court. So, uh, blades like this stay at home, and far away from children, and all that. (It's a shame, but that's just how things are.)
The other side effect of this geometry, however, is that when you use it for cutting rather than stabbing, it has this tendency to cut curves rather than straight lines. This is actually a feature, not a bug - the Yakut people traditionally preserve meat by cutting thin strips from the dead animal. This technique actually requires curved cuts, so, how nice to have a knife with that in-built tendency, right?
But... what happens when you make it really really small? (This has a blade length of 7cm, which would be perfectly reasonable for a puukko but is much too small for a Yakut knife! Even the practice knives intended for small Yakut children have longer blades!) Uh. Suddenly, the vectors are fucked up, and the knife cuts really close curves. Like... It's not actually possible to cut in a straight line downwards with this thingy, but I've had excellent results with peeling a mango.
Summary of what went wrong with the design:
- Balance. Look, this handle is massive even by puukko standards, and the blade is very short and hollow, which incidentally also makes it very light... The equilibrium point is so far inside the handle it seriously fucks with any task that's not peeling fruit. Simply put, this is a paring knife, not a generic-use knife anymore.
- Handle profile. I've mentioned before that a drop profile is very ergonomic and comfortable on a puukko. On a Yakut knife, however? I will note that a more conventional Yakut knife also tends to have something similar to a drop profile, but one less pronounced (a tiny bit more rectangle-y... ?!? difficult to describe) without that sharp corner - it's usually more egg-shaped than drop-shaped, and with flattened sides. I suspect this has to do with potential combat grips, but, uh, let's not go into detail here. Anyway, this is something I'd really have to ask a traditional Yakut person with combat experience in order to be sure, because I have an idea how I'd knife someone with this knife type but guesstimating this stuff is generally a bad idea, so I'd really prefer an expert opinion. :)
- Handle shape / lines. It's simply not... streamlined... enough to pass as a puukko - draw-cut grips and paring grips get a bit awkward. Considering the fact that this knife is (...purely by accident, but still...) a fucking paring knife, this is especially tragic. (Hint: a paring knife on which you don't get a good paring grip is simply not a very good paring knife. Okay?)
- Blade length. It's simply too short for any of the classical use cases a Yakut knife is for. (And it's too, well, asymmetric to be used as a puukko.) It has an unfortunate tendency to cut really close curves. There are actually not many use cases for knives that have difficulties with cutting straight.
When do you need this knife-shaped object? Ah, yes. Imagine you're stuck somewhere in northern Siberia, and the mango you brought for lunch is (predictably) frozen solid, but you need to peel it anyway. (Who doesn't know this unfortunate situation...) You'll be very grateful for this amazing tool!
tl;dr: This is amazing craft, but, at the same time, so badly designed it's really fucking useless.
So, uh, what do we have here? It's a knife that's made in Ukraine (it took a few months to reach me, but I'm not going to blame the seller for that, at least; blame the inconvenient war) and was sold as a "small Yakut knife", though that's clearly not quite what it is. I'd describe it as "crossover knife with Yakutian-type blade design but puukko proportions, made by someone who culturally understands neither puukkot nor Yakut knives" - and if that sounds like a phenomenally bad idea... that's because it is.
I think I've mentioned before that I'm generally a "conservative" knife buyer - as in, when it comes to knives I want to use, I rely on the shapes that are proven to be efficient - but hey, when I see something that just has to be shitty in new and creative ways (rather than just the "normal", boring, technical fuck-ups), it's hard to resist.
The sheath is "classic Slavic design", I guess: very simple and straightforward, less focused on security and more focused on ease of drawing. It's not what I prefer (as in, I personally consider this design somewhat unsafe and generally do not use it), but very typical in all countries of the former Soviet union, and people clearly use it with some success, so, whatever. It's fine. I'm more worried about the knife than about the sheath, anyway.
The knife has the proportions of a puukko: straight-back blade, very short (approximately one palm's width), with a large handle that has a drop profile.
It just happens to have a "Yakut knife" (convex, hollow on the other side) blade... I'm showing it from both sides:
See how it's round, not flat? This is a typical thing of Yakut knives.
I will note that the hollowing is done in a slightly weird way, but... that's not even the issue, here.
But, okay, let's think positive and discuss all the things that went well. The first thing I noticed when I unpacked the knife was that, hey, the wood of the handle is nice! No sarcasm here - birch burl is appropriate both for a puukko and for a Yakut knife. (I think I have mentioned this before, but it's a popular handle material because it's an excellent thermal insulator, and the irregularity of the "rings" means it's not as prone to cracking as wood with a more regular year ring structure.) This happens to be a perfectly acceptable piece - not quite top quality (you can see it's taken from the edge of a burl, so it's most likely a leftover from another crafting project), but much better than I'd have expected for the price (which was on the low end of the spectrum for handmade knives). Could be much worse. Also, the blade edge performs well - I have no idea what steel was used, but it arrived very sharp and has a wonderful edge retention (I actually haven't had to sharpen it yet), which means it's good smithing work and had all the appropriate heat treatments and everything. That's great. On the purely technical manufacturing level, this is an excellent knife!
To understand the problem, we'll have to talk about the purpose of the two knife types that were combined here.
A puukko, at its heart, is a woodworking knife that's just versatile enough to do all the other tasks a Finn or Sami person traditionally needed to do, which is mainly hunting, fishing, butchering reindeer, and food preparation. (Anssi Ruusuvuori, whose book I already talked about, wrote that a puukko has to have the potential to be used for woodworking, and he will not consider a knife a puukko otherwise. It's a mandatory feature.) By the way, because I've only recently talked about the correlation between climate and wood hardness: that's also the reason why you only find this knife type with its typical "Scandi" blade grind, in Northern regions, but not anywhere near the equator. A "woodworking and allrounder knife" simply does not make any sense conceptually if the typical trees in your region have wood that happens to be very hard. (Hint: using the same tool for cheese and for Australian Buloke is obviously stupid, so, I think it's safe to assume that people generally don't do that.) It only works when your trees are not that much harder than cheese.
A Yakut knife... well, that's interesting, because the Yakut people live under very similar conditions (it's all very, uh, cold, you know) and are traditionally nomadic just like, for example, the Sami, but ended up with completely different knife design standards. And, no, the reasons for that are not completely clear - but it's clearly due to differences in lifestyle and use cases of these knives. (I've mentioned before that I think the hypothesis of Yakut blades being hollowed out to save metal is pretty dumb actually, because basic survival tools are the last thing any reasonable person would skimp on. The Yakut people survive in North Siberia, so, while I'm not an expert on their culture by any means, I'm going to assume they are perfectly reasonable people with the technological understanding to know what does and doesn't work for their lifestyle. Because otherwise they'd be, you know, dead, and all that.) Unfortunately, the Yakut people themselves don't know anymore (and, yes, people have tried to ask them) why and how this blade geometry was developed - it's been around for as far back as the archaeological record goes - but, hey, it clearly works for them. (And confuses the rest of the world.)
So, we can only reasonably talk about the modern uses of Yakut knives. Which is... sure, some kind of allrounder knife. (They will even use it for occasional woodworking tasks despite the blade clearly not being optimized for that.) I think I've mentioned before that the convex shape makes it especially good at frozen stuff - it minimizes the contact area, so you can, for example, cut frozen fish without it freezing to the blade. (I have personally tested this. With a real Yakut knife, of course, and not the weird object shown here.) I have no doubt this is a very important design feature when you happen to live in North Siberia, for all the obvious reasons.
Another main difference is the potential use as a weapon. (If you're interested in writing fight scenes, this may be relevant for you!) The thing is - a puukko is not a weapon (as in, sure, you can hurt someone very badly with a puukko, but it's simply not the best tool for that job), but a Yakut knife sure is. It's a "hunting knife" not only in the sense that it's used to cut up the animal carcass after the fact, but the larger Yakut blades are combat weapons (which is something the Sami, whose traditional religion can reasonably be called pacifist, generally don't go for - and the Finns largely reject on philosophical grounds because they culturally don't like over-specialized anything and see no reason to develop designated weapons when they are perfectly able to kill enemies with any tool at hand), and the largest Yakut knives (which are almost machete-sized) literally used to hunt bears. As in, yeah, walk up to the living bear and kill it.
So. Uh. Very different use case, that. I will point out that the asymmetric blade cross-section of a Yakut knife makes stab wounds less likely to heal (no "it's only a flesh wound" with this knife type!), and thus considerably more deadly than a symmetric or near-symmetric knife blade. (Some modern combat knives have actually copied this feature. I will not provide any links because I'm simply going to hope you are not actively looking for a murder weapon. Suffice to say it's the mismatch of both sides of the wound that prevents it from closing.) This is also the reason why I don't take any Yakut knives for a walk: while I don't think the average German cop knows enough about blades to have seen Yakut knives before and identify their potential use as weapons, and it's arguably also not the primary purpose of Yakut knives, I really don't want this question to potentially end up in court. So, uh, blades like this stay at home, and far away from children, and all that. (It's a shame, but that's just how things are.)
The other side effect of this geometry, however, is that when you use it for cutting rather than stabbing, it has this tendency to cut curves rather than straight lines. This is actually a feature, not a bug - the Yakut people traditionally preserve meat by cutting thin strips from the dead animal. This technique actually requires curved cuts, so, how nice to have a knife with that in-built tendency, right?
But... what happens when you make it really really small? (This has a blade length of 7cm, which would be perfectly reasonable for a puukko but is much too small for a Yakut knife! Even the practice knives intended for small Yakut children have longer blades!) Uh. Suddenly, the vectors are fucked up, and the knife cuts really close curves. Like... It's not actually possible to cut in a straight line downwards with this thingy, but I've had excellent results with peeling a mango.
Summary of what went wrong with the design:
- Balance. Look, this handle is massive even by puukko standards, and the blade is very short and hollow, which incidentally also makes it very light... The equilibrium point is so far inside the handle it seriously fucks with any task that's not peeling fruit. Simply put, this is a paring knife, not a generic-use knife anymore.
- Handle profile. I've mentioned before that a drop profile is very ergonomic and comfortable on a puukko. On a Yakut knife, however? I will note that a more conventional Yakut knife also tends to have something similar to a drop profile, but one less pronounced (a tiny bit more rectangle-y... ?!? difficult to describe) without that sharp corner - it's usually more egg-shaped than drop-shaped, and with flattened sides. I suspect this has to do with potential combat grips, but, uh, let's not go into detail here. Anyway, this is something I'd really have to ask a traditional Yakut person with combat experience in order to be sure, because I have an idea how I'd knife someone with this knife type but guesstimating this stuff is generally a bad idea, so I'd really prefer an expert opinion. :)
- Handle shape / lines. It's simply not... streamlined... enough to pass as a puukko - draw-cut grips and paring grips get a bit awkward. Considering the fact that this knife is (...purely by accident, but still...) a fucking paring knife, this is especially tragic. (Hint: a paring knife on which you don't get a good paring grip is simply not a very good paring knife. Okay?)
- Blade length. It's simply too short for any of the classical use cases a Yakut knife is for. (And it's too, well, asymmetric to be used as a puukko.) It has an unfortunate tendency to cut really close curves. There are actually not many use cases for knives that have difficulties with cutting straight.
When do you need this knife-shaped object? Ah, yes. Imagine you're stuck somewhere in northern Siberia, and the mango you brought for lunch is (predictably) frozen solid, but you need to peel it anyway. (Who doesn't know this unfortunate situation...) You'll be very grateful for this amazing tool!
tl;dr: This is amazing craft, but, at the same time, so badly designed it's really fucking useless.
no subject
Date: 2025-03-30 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-30 01:15 pm (UTC)"THE SIBERIAN MANGO."
Hey, you never know! XD I mean, I was quite surprised when a work colleague alerted me to the fact there are Siberian chilies (and generously gave me seeds, too, so I can confirm that plant survives in North Germany just fine), so, a lot is possible - but, yes, I'm afraid we may have to wait a while for mangos from that area.
no subject
Date: 2025-04-02 01:42 am (UTC)