Kunai - Design

Design

The kunai was conventionally wrought in ranges from 20 cm to 60 cm, with the average at 40 cm. The kunai was used by common folk as multi-purpose gardening tools and by workers of stone and masonry. The kunai is not a knife, but something more akin to a crowbar. The blade was soft iron and unsharpened because the edges were used to smash plaster and wood, to dig holes and to pry. Normally only the tip would have been sharpened. The uses to which a kunai was put would have destroyed any heat-treated and sharpened tool like a knife.

Kunai normally had a leaf-shaped blade and a handle with a ring on the pommel for attaching a rope. This would allow the kunai's handle to be wrapped to act as a grip, or when used as a weapon; to be strapped to a stick as an expedient spear, to be tied to the body for concealment, or to use as an anchor or piton. Contrary to popular belief, they were not designed to be used primarily as throwing weapons, though they can be thrown and cause damage. Instead, they are a thrusting and stabbing implement.

Read more about this topic:  Kunai

Famous quotes containing the word design:

    Westerners inherit
    A design for living
    Deeper into matter—
    Not without due patter
    Of a great misgiving.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.
    Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)