Grayman Stabber

“And now for something completely different,” as the Monty Python skit goes. Yes part of my degeneracy I blame squarely on the crew of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But on a more serious note, this blog is truly about something different, a knife called the “Monkton Church Key.”

A few blogs back I said I was in line to get one of these distinctive push daggers from Mike of Grayman Knives. (Page back a few blogs for my review of his 8” Kordofan knife.) This stout stabber is made from ¼ inch thick steel and micarta®. That’s it, nothing especially exotic except the design. It came neatly tucked into one of Grayman’s plastic-lined nylon sheaths. The Molle compatible sheath fairly swallows up this nasty bit of self-defence knife and it would take up very little room on your pack or rucksack. With this novel design you have the option of a choked up grip or an extended grip. Grasping it by the very end you are provided with a substantial cross guard. The beauty of a push dagger design is that you never have to worry about your hand sliding onto the blade. With the Grayman design you never have to worry about your attacker’s knife sliding up your blade and smashing into the fingers of your knife hand. If you want a fuller, firmer grip, then you can choke up on the handle and wrap your fingers around the forward guard.

The black coated blade is symmetrically double ground in a chisel profile. Yes the back of the blade is perfectly flat. This does not reduce the penetrating power in any way. The one unique thing about a push dagger (that few people talk about) is the havoc it can inflict by stabbing in, twisting it like a door knob, and withdrawing it. The average knife handle does not give you the leverage to do this. For those of you who regularly practice “comma cuts” you will immediately see the advantage to this handle configuration. It is like turning a key in a lock. Mike says the name came from the habit of British Intelligence people training at Fort Monkton carrying “church keys” as a backup, last ditch, weapon. (It would also prove handy today to open your Boddington, or Guinness beer.) Most people today would not recognize church key as referring to a bottle opener. It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that if you grind the end off of one of these bottle openers a covert weapon reveals itself.

Like all Grayman Knives this bit of steel appears to be indestructible and deadly efficient. The price is well within the reach of even the greenest recruit. If you want a sturdy backup weapon you couldn’t do any better than to pick up one of these church keys. Now all I have to do is figure out where to add mine to my Eberlestock™ pack. Thanks Mike. (Please excuse my poor photos.) By the way, this is a stabber, do not expect it to have a fine edge for slicing. A double-edged blade this thick by nature cannot be sharpened to a high degree.
http://www.graymanknives.com/

Coming soon! A review of a rare handmade reproduction of William E. Fairbairn’s last known fighting knife, the Cobra.