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Dirty Rotten Commies!
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.
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...s/DSCF1349.jpg
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.
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...s/DSCF1350.jpg
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.
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...s/DSCF1356.jpg
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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it looks like the plastic blade you get a kid at a dollar store. use it as a digging stick.
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There are several factors taking place in this.
1: People base things on movies. They see a film where a guy uses a bayonet as a knife to accomplish any task from making toothpicks to slitting throats. Truth be told, a bayonet is only designed to poke a hole in flesh. Anything more is just a bonus.
2: You are talking to people that often times are limited in what they can purchase, either monetarily or legally and sometimes both.
3: Some people like what they like and you can't change it. It is like someone saying the AR is the best rifle, Kelty makes the best packs, Fords make the best trucks and so on. An opinion is just that, an opinion
I am surprised you spent $12 on that bayonet, especially knowing what you were getting. I bought a box of those bayonets about three years ago. 100 bayonets for $125 seemed like a good deal, but they all sucked. I took them to a gun show and sold them all for $5-10 each and I didn't think a single one was worth a penny.
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Good to see you out and about again Nate. I'll bet finals have been a B!
This particular item is going to get an edge properly ground in and it is going into the car kit, primarily due to the wire cutters being present. I also want to see how good the steel is.
It's something to do.
watch for PM coming.
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Goy a 4 pack of these with scabbard/frog....for Cheaper Than Dirt a few years ago.....cheap.
Found the same things ...so gave a couple away...and think there is still one in the red cargo trailer's JIC crate.
Not on my list of stuff to mess with anything soon.
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A bayonet was the first "bush" knife I ever bought. Courtesy of all the war movies my Dad and I watched. I thought it was B.A. Like the tube tent I froze my arse (well... feet and head) off in the first snow camp... I was pretty young. lol. Dem were da days.
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I think I'd rather have an Old Hickory butcher knife than that for woods use.
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That is the worst example of com-bloc [if it's even that] bayonet I've ever seen. At their best, they are little more than a functional knife with a few handy features for infantry combat and a few weak points that wouldn't be needed otherwise but that's just bad. If you manage to get this knife into fighting shape, please share results.
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Doing a rebuild of the edge is not a problem. If you have a good belt grinder you can make something pretty out of anything.
The steel content is what I am concerned with. If the steel is too tough to be easily sharpened it is a waste of time.
My real long term consideration is the fact that this bayonet was issued to com-bloc troops, so presumably every person that carried an AK, as good as the gun is, was issued a bayonet that was impossible to use as a field knife. It is almost as if they are saying, "Don't worry about needing a field knife you will not last that long!"
For all the good this device is they would have been just as well off if they had kept the spike bayonet of the MN, or swing up bayonet of the SKS, and stopped trying to trick everyone into thinking the AK bayonet would double as a knife.
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Sounds like Argumentum ad populum to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum
You pretty much summed up my thoughts on the "knife". It is a shank.
When I was in Iraq, I was upset that I wasn't issued an M9 bayonet. Of course, I was a truck driver...so.... I went to the PX and bought a Cold Steel SRK in Carbon V and strapped it to my Interceptor. Worked great as an ice pick and MRE opener. Of course, my trauma shears worked better for opening MREs. Luckily that is all I needed it for.
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Well that about sums it up....
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I worked on this thing for nearly an hour today and it is a lost cause. At least lost to the point of not being worth the effort.
Wore out one sanding belt and gave up. I can spend the time better on something more worthwhile.
At least after ten minutes on the belt sander I had turned the $2 Wahoo Killer into something I could use.
Poor Russians, having to deal with crap like this, no wonder the men drink themselves to death at 50!
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So glad you don't feel the bern.....
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