Hey everybody. Rick here and welcome to another segment of Getting to the Point with Rick. And today, today’s going to be fun. We’re going to talk about my Bowie grind. And the reason it’s going to be a lot of fun is I want to explain where I got a little bit of history of kind of where the Bowie came from, what we think of as the American Bowie knife, and maybe some variations that you may not be aware of. A lot of those different variations and grinds and blade styles, they all kind of were responsible for what I came up with with my rendition of the contemporary Bowie knife. And I say contemporary, that’s kind of like nowadays what you see a lot in folding knives, small fixed blades, large fixed blades, and both custom knives as well as production knives. And the Bowie itself really transcends a lot of different thoughts and shapes and sizes. So I’ll go into that a little bit. And the reason why it’s a lot of fun for me is because I got to dive into my collection and bring out—so it’s almost kind of like show-and-tell day. I got to bring out some of the knives out of my collection. I have some original 1800s Bowies, kind of like the Sheffield Bowie, what we think of as the historical Bowie, and then kind of just take you on a little bit of a history on where we’re at today and where that Bowie—what we think of as the Bowie—how far it has come, how it came to be, where I’m at right now in the Bowie knife, and maybe get a little understanding of it. So the history of the Bowie is really pretty vast. It’s been studied a lot. A bladesmith named James Batson—Doctor Batson—did a lot of study on the Bowie knife, from Jim Bowie, James Bowie, all the way back to the story of the Sandbar Fight, which was kind of like the start of what we can think of as the Bowie and how it was actually made or designed. A lot of other contemporary people have been studying it as well. Bruce Voyles, a lot of you know him from Blade Magazine, he’s done a lot of study on the American Bowie knife. In fact, he co-authored a book—it’s called the Antique Bowie Knife Book. It’s been out of print for a while, but if you can find it, definitely grab it. It’s a great picture study of historical Bowies. In fact, one of the Bowie knives that’s in his book, I have in my collection. I’ve got it on the table in front of me, and I’ll show you that because it’s very interesting. When you think of a Bowie knife, you wouldn’t think of this one. So we go all the way back to the Sandbar Fight and Jim Bowie. We think of the Alamo—Jim Bowie was there—so there’s a lot of history surrounding it. Some of it is fact, some of it is fable. I won’t get too deep into that because we’d be here for a long time. So let’s get into the Bowie shapes and what they were actually used for. Way back when, a lot of you think of the Bowie as a clip point. This one I have here is probably one of my favorites. It goes back to the 1850s. It’s about ten or eleven inches long. It’s what we’d call pretty ornate nowadays, but you can see the Bowie clip point. It has a double guard. So when you look at this knife, if you go into an antique store or flea market and see something like this, you immediately think—that’s a Bowie. Because it has that traditional Bowie shape. Now here’s another one, and this is where we start getting into what you don’t think of as a Bowie knife—but it is actually a Bowie. This is an original Bowie, and it looks like a dagger. It’s a double-edged spear point blade. So why is it considered a Bowie? Well, a lot of what we consider Bowies were carried on the frontier and during the Civil War. People carried these and referred to them as Bowies. This one doesn’t have the clip point—it’s more of a spear point—but it was still considered a Bowie knife. I would say this one was more of a self-defense tool. So now we’ve got the traditional clip point Bowie and then something completely different that’s still considered a Bowie. Now let’s talk about folding Bowies. Yes, there were Bowie folding knives back then. This one here has about a nine-inch blade, and it folds. I still wouldn’t put it in your pocket, but it is a folding Bowie. You can see the clip point and double guard. Now I also brought one of my own Bowies that I made about 25 to 27 years ago. This is a Mediterranean-style Bowie. It has Damascus steel, an Impala horn handle, and a mammoth ivory butt cap. The blade is about nine inches long, and you can clearly see the Bowie lines in it. So now let’s move forward a bit. In the early 1900s, the U.S. military started experimenting with different bayonets. They wanted something that could be used for multiple purposes—not just as a weapon but also for clearing brush and general tasks. Instead of carrying both a bayonet and a knife, they tried to combine them. That’s where the Bowie-style bayonet came into play. This one here is a 1906 Bowie bayonet made for the .30-40 Krag rifle. It looks like a Bowie, and it definitely has that American feel to it. But it didn’t work very well as either a bayonet or a utility knife. Still, it shows how influential the Bowie design had become. Now moving into more contemporary times, one knife that really stands out is the SOG Bowie. It was designed for special operations units during the Vietnam era. It has a distinctive profile with what I call a double hump. This knife actually got me interested in making knives back in 1987. A friend of mine had one, and I saw him using it—it really stuck with me. So when I started designing my Bowie blades, I pulled from all of that—historical Bowies, military designs, and knives like the SOG. You can see that influence in my knives today. The XM-18 Bowie, the Eklipse Bowie—we’ve used that design across multiple platforms. We even brought it into the three-inch version, which is something we haven’t done before. We also introduced the Frontier Bowie on the Jurassic, which pulls from some of those older straight clip designs. I’ve always been a student of history, and being able to take something from the 1800s and bring it into modern knife design—that’s really satisfying. When you pick up a Bowie blade, you’re not just looking at a knife. You’re looking at history. You’re holding something that has roots going all the way back. So that’s a short look at the Bowie and where my design comes from. We’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming out this year based on Bowie and other styles. Thanks again for joining, and we’ll see you on the next episode.