I got into a discussion with some stupid twit on a British survival forum concerning best all purpose knives. We all know that is never a good thing and leads to all sorts of problems and in this case it was on an international level.
At any rate this moron stated that the AK bayonet had to be the best all purpose knife because he had one and it was excellent and since there had been probably 75,000,000 to 100,000,000 of them manufactured it simply had to be best based on numbers in use. This goofball had several supporters on that forum and I made no progress in instilling any common sense into them.
I had never paid much attention to the AK bayonet since a bayonet of any form is usually NOT a very well thought out knife. A bayonet, even if it looks like a knife, has a totally different function than a general purpose knife. On several occasions I had kicked them aside as I walked across the ground and never even picked one up to examine it.
So I decided to take some of my own retirement cash and buy an AK bayonet and see if it is as good as these Brits claim.
Thanks to E-bay I was soon parted from my $12 (free shipping) and within days I had my prize in hand. Yep, $12 with the scabbard for an issue AK bayonet of the second pattern. Not a cheap knock off but a true piece of Soviet surplus cutlery.
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Looks like a nice rugged GP knife with a scandi grind heavy full tang blade, strong rivets, hand filling grip, good blade shape?
!!! WRONG !!!
This knife is a POS for anything other than its purpose as a bayonet!
Here is a picture of the opposite side of the blade.
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Do you see any sign of a grind on that blade? Nope you do not. It is not a scandi grind, it is instead a chisel grind. The entire grind is on one side of the blade just like a wood chisel.
A chisel grind has the distinction of being usable only for those who use the dominant hand for that grind. A leftie can not get much use from a right side chisel grind. And for most use the chisel grind tends to cut in a circle and not a straight line. It will almost always curve off away from the grind.
Additionally, the edge that is present is not a cutting edge. This thing would not open a package of MREs! The sharp side of my plastic spork or one of those plastic knives from Wendy's has a better cutting edge than this. And it would take you a week of file work to improve on the situation. I gave it the file skip edge test, which has been perfected over the years to the point that it is a dependable estimate and I find the hardness of the metal to be around 58-60 Rockwell. It is soft enough to file, but hard enough to be a pain to file.
That is probably excellent bayonet strength, and a bayonet with a chisel edge is no real problem because it is not intended to do general knife duty, it is intended to stick, stab and intimidate.
To make this item a usable GP knife I estimate an hour of belt sander and sharpening stone time will be needed. It is not hopeless, because I have a belt sander for such use. Were I a Soviet trooper with no access to such devices I would consider myself SOL when handed this bayonet.
In fact, after a quick check of all search engines I find that the commies do not issue a general purpose knife to their troops.
The spine of the AK blade sports a series of fine serrations which my British friends referred too as a "wood saw". Fact is, the serrations are best used for cutting webbing and rope. The serrated edge is also a chisel grind and the teeth have no kerfing for use as a wood saw.
The one place where this bayonet does shine is when incorporated with the scabbard to function as a nifty wire cutter! I tested it on both square fence wire and barbed wire and it did a fine job right up till the neighbor that owns the fence showed up.
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My only conclusion is that either folks do not know what the function of a knife is, they have never used a knife extensively and know no better, or they really do not own one of these atrocities!
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