Fine-Tuning the Big Machete

By Patriot Outdoor News

This is the time of year I find myself with a machete in hand more than any other season. It’s time to hang early-season deer stands, which often means hacking my way to a stand tree then hacking shooting lanes through the woods. A good machete is awfully handy.

In Honduras I saw a wide range of styles. The typical Central America pattern is an 18-inch willow-leaf shaped blade. But there were plenty of bolo or rozador blades with heftier tips for more efficient wood chopping, a panga style or two, and a few sickle cumas that were more targeted towards clearing reeds and grasses. What really stood out, however, was how much machete sharpening was going on. Everywhere I looked, somebody was crouched down working on the machete blade with a file—in the coffee fields, on front stoops of adobe houses, and simply on the side of the road. The steel in most machete blades is soft and prone to dulling, even more so considering that the blades are whacked against the ground frequently. The folks I ran into relied on a machete blade—for their employment in the coffee fincas and pineapple fields, or for gathering sticks and kindling to …read more