Service
KA-BAR makes Army and Navy versions as well as USMC versions. They are the same as the Marine version except for different initials at the bottom of the blade and different symbols on the sheath. Marines today often give the blades, guards and pommels of their knives a few coats of non-reflective matte black spray paint to reduce reflected light and give them a little more protection against saltwater corrosion. Its moderate carbon and low chromium steel mixture allows the blade to hold an edge very well. The 1095 chrome-vanadium steel used in the blades of contemporary KA-BARs has a hardness of 56–58 HRC, while the guard and pommel are made from sintered 1095 carbon steel. Besides use as a fighting knife, the Mark 2 has proven its usefulness as a utility knife, used for opening cans, digging trenches, and cutting wood, roots, wire, and cable. In 1995, the design was updated with a tool steel blade, synthetic handle, and synthetic sheath marketed as "The Next Generation". As of June 2012 the "Next Generation" models have been discontinued.
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Famous quotes containing the word service:
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)