Knife Tangs

The following is an extract I wrote some time ago (over a year ago in fact) on You Tube for all those getting hung up about tangs in knives"






A note on Tangs Ok I'm actually not one for splitting hairs over what the knife world classifies as a "full tang knife" But for the sake of any argument here on this channel (for everyone). I'm going state what I define as a "full tang knife" "A full tang knife has a tang of which whose width approximates the width of the blade at the point of which blade become handle and continues to the butt of the handle at this width (give or take dimensional changes to allow for hand ergonomics). The tang will have no machining done to lighten/skeletonize the handle, other than metal which is removed to allow the placement of rivets or screws for fixture/location of the knife scales and or injection moulded grips. A "hole" can be present for a lanyard. As far a any "strength arguments" go (on YouTube reviews), this is all subjective and really of non scientific basis. UNLESS one was to test knives with exactly the same blade geometry and handle geometry, except one model has a milled out/skeletonized tang; under a bending moment, to destruction. Do this many times to obtain an "N" number for statistical purposes, to test the hypothesis that the full tang will fail less under the same load as the lightened handle. Now, my mechanical engineering friends tell me that whilst removing "excess metal" from a tang will indeed lighten it, it will also "weaken" it under a given bending load. As to whether this "weakening" would affect any expected or even unexpected function of the knife in a human hand, this is entirely up to what one does with the knife. To be honest, my in excess of 20 years old ONTARIO SPEC PLUS MARINE knife, old rusty 1095 high carbon steel, injection moulded KRATON grip, AND dare I say it narrow/rat tail tang, has NEVER let me down, and it even got lent out a few times too (where I had no idea of how they treated my baby LOL).Yes it has been used multiple times as an improvised lever, something which a knife is simply not designed for. The knife in the above video and any others with milled out handles, they will require special maintenance if submerged in either fresh or sea water as water will ingress into the grip and can depending on the situation affect the materials of construction, hence one would def have to remove the grips to administer some "after care". If this latter thing is not an issue then let's not get too hung up about this tang business. As far as stuffing materials into the milled- out handles go, well IMHO this is pure gimmick under real conditions other than for wanna be survivalists, who are definitely carrying their TORX head drivers, Allen keys, at the ready in a situation to move those scales and extract some "survival" implement. The whole marketing ploy behind the suggestion from manufactures stating this, is to distract one away from the "full tang argument" (if you believe this, like I've said) and try and turn this simple manufacturing technique into a "feature" and or "benefit". My advice, don't be a sucker and fall for this rubbish. Just get out there, go: hunting; camping; fishing or do whatever you do in the great outdoors and leave marketing garbage back in the big city. Full tang; milled out tang; rats tail; partial tang; tapering tangs etc etc............blah blah blah, what the heck! I own them all and no knife of mine (they all get used not just for looking at) are still in one piece.

BCT