About the Largest Folding Knives
Folding knives, ranging from the famous Swiss Army Knife to the equally well-known Buck Knife, are useful tools due to their safety and portability. Once folded up, most designs are small enough to be tucked in a pocket. The virtues of the folding knife are useful even with bigger knives.
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Identification
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A folding knife has a blade that is joined to the handle by a pivot. There is a groove in the handle that allows the blade to be turned back into the handle by pivot. Thus the knife can be folded into itself.
Features
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Some folding knife designs lack a lock, or a mechanism for securing the blade in place once it has been extended. Most utility pocket knives and some switchblades are of this type. Switchblades differ from other folding knives in that they use a spring to extend the blade from the handle. However, many folding knives employ a locking device of some kind to secure the blade once it has reached full extension, including almost all of the large ones. This makes the blade safer and easier to use, especially when the knife encounters resistance during cutting. Buck knives are a common example, and employ a variety of locking devices such as slip joint, liner-lock or lock-back.
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Function
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The main virtue of the folding knife is that the blade can be folded into the handle, thus shortening the knife when not in use. This allows it to be safely stowed in the pocket, although not all blades small enough to be carried this way are "pocket knives." However, some are substantially larger than this. There are also folding knives with multiple blades or tools contained in the handle that are larger than the popular Swiss Army Knife. Fisherman, for example, like good-sized folding knives with a few different tools for gutting fish and tending their tackle.
Size
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A large folding knife is one that has a blade longer than 3 inches; 4- or 4.25-inch examples are not extraordinary. There are even larger folding knives available, but these are basically novelty items. A big knife with more than one blade will also have a correspondingly thick handle.
Considerations
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Big folding knives of this sort can be set in the pocket, but usually are quite bulky and better carried in a small sheath on the belt. The general virtue of the folding knife continues to carry over to the sheath, since halving the size of a blade allows one to carry a good-sized knife strapped to the belt rather than to the waist and leg.
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