Last week I bought myself a really nice machete for work. Now, we are supplied with them, as they are an essential tool of our trade, but what the management gets is trying to balance the reality that we beat the ever living daylights out of our machetes with not buying total crap.
Oh, total crap. We had one office dubber who was in charge of supplies for about a year. He's no longer with our company, for a variety of reasons. But he bought a bulk order of machetes for wicked cheap one time. Turns out they were that super cheap chinese steel. It would bend when you tried to cut something and the blade would fold and warp. It was like having a bit of aluminum foil. They were total garbage and we all (the field crew who actually used them) complained like it was the end of the world and they bought us some better ones. Which I've been using. But there comes a time when you just want a really good tool and you are willing to pay for it yourself so it is YOURS and yours alone.
I settled on the Condor Yoshimi machete. It has a tanto blade (it is a sharp angle at the end of the blade instead of the usual rounded curve on most machetes) and has a hand and a half grip. It is also a bit heavier, weighing in at almost 3 pounds, but it is balanced so well that even one handed I haven't found it putting any strain on the forearm that is doing the cutting. Part of the reason it weighs so much is because the blade is pretty thick. That prevents the blade from warping or twisting. It also gives it some nice heft when cutting, so gravity is helping me cut every time I use it ;-) The blade is 19inches long, which is just about the size I like. Any shorter and you can't hack from a distance. Much longer and the machete gets tangled up as you're trying to swing it. The handle is wood, which grips a lot better when your hand is wet from either sweating like a pig or it is raining out. Trust me, I've seen enough machetes go flying out of people's hands over the years to realize it is a basic safety requisite to have a good grip.
The sheath is kydex, a fancy name for plastic. We'll see how it holds up over the winter when the temps plunge below freezing for weeks or months on end. A leather sheath will eventually get a hole torn down in the lower extremity where the blade pushes down on it or the blade will cut the leather siding. And the strips of leather where the sheath attaches to your belt is always thinner and those are usually the first things to go. This kydex sheath will obviate those problems. I'll just have to hang around and see what problems do arise with it instead :-)
Since it is mine, bought and paid for, I don't have to worry about getting "leftovers" from the lot of garbage machetes we have on hand. While the office is now buying better UK steel machetes, we still have those chinese crap ones in case of emergencies. We have found they are good for about 1 week of hard use and then they crap out on us.
And that is that. I got a new toy and I wanted to share. Class dismissed!
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