What size steel for a machete?

An 18 in machete, 2 in tall at the ricasso with a 1/8 in spine, comes from 2 1/2 × 1/8 in bar. BladeStock sizes the bar at ricasso height plus 1/8 in, which here is 2 1/8 in, and there is no 1084 width listed between 2 and 2 1/2 in, so 2 1/2 in it is. On thickness, 1/8 in is already the heavy end for a machete. Factory blades are usually under 3 mm (about 0.12 in), and one common 18 in factory machete measures 2.2 mm at the base. If you change anything, go thinner, not thicker.

The calculator starts on stock removal for this pattern. You need the whole profile in bar, about 23 1/4 in per blade with clean-up, so a 24 in bar gives you one blade. That is about 33 oz of bar for roughly 19 oz of finished steel. Forged, the same 2 1/2 × 1/8 in bar draws out a long way: about 15 in per blade, three from a 48 in bar, around 21 oz of bar for about 15 oz finished. The forged blade comes out lighter because the calculator assumes a forged blade has a distal taper; it doesn't assume one for a ground blade. The hard part of forging one is the heat treat, not the stock. On KnifeDogs, a smith's first 1084 machete, heat treated in a coal fire, bent near the middle of the blade, and one reply suggested it would be hard to get an even heat along a blade that long for the quench.

What a machete is for

A machete is a farm and bush tool before it is anything else. In tropical and subtropical countries it is common for cutting through undergrowth and for field work. In Latin America it also does household jobs such as cutting up large pieces of food, and it is widely used for splitting coconuts and for yard work. Carter Rila's 1999 notes on the development of the machete sum up the work as chopping corn, cutting cane and clearing jungle paths and fields. He gives field machetes (machete de monte) a range of 18 to 26 in, with cane machetes (machete cañero) down to about 12 in, so the 18 in preset sits at the short end of the field range.

The shape follows from the work. Rila describes large working machetes as butcher knives enlarged fourfold. In practice that means a long, thin, mostly straight blade. The KraftyDesign blank is that general pattern, a long straight blade with the edge sweeping up to a point near the spine. Thin is the point of it. Blades are usually under 3 mm, and the BladeForums thread on machete thickness keeps coming back to balance and weight, because the tool is swung all day. Rila adds that it takes a mighty arm to swing one longer than 22 in all day in the heat. One poster's view is that if a job needs a 1/4 in blade, you want an axe instead.

The word is Spanish, a diminutive of macho, a sledgehammer (the derivation given by the Real Academia Española and the American Heritage Dictionary), and has been in English since the 1590s (first as macheto). Museum collections show it as a plantation tool. Bristol Museums hold a machete from St Kitts and Nevis cataloged simply as a tool for cutting sugar cane. The National Museum Jamaica has a cane bill, a hooked machete type that originated in the 1800s and was made in Europe and the United States for harvesting cane; the hook makes it easier to pick up the cut stalks. Industrial machetes came with cheap rolled steel. Rila credits rolling mills with the even sheet and bar stock that thin, flexible blades need, and names Connecticut, England, Germany and later Czechoslovakia as the main producers once the machete spread through the sea trade. The best-known maker in Latin America was the Collins Company of Collinsville, Connecticut, which bought its site in 1826 to build an axe factory, added machetes and other edge tools, printed catalogs in Spanish and Portuguese and ran factories in Central and South America. Its classic Connecticut machetes were forged; the overseas plants it built in the 1950s punched blades from plate and ground them instead. The company closed in 1966.

These next claims are unconfirmed; take them as stories, not history. Rila writes that the American machete grew out of the plain whacking sticks native people used to beat through the bush, and he reports that some trace its design to the sailors' cutlass or the Californios' espada ancha, which he argues against, since a tool has no need for a guard or basket hilt. A local history of Collinsville says Collins machetes were so common in Central and South America that people called a machete a Collins, and that 90% of the machetes sold there were Collins-made. ConnecticutHistory.org has Collins selling machetes abroad by the 1840s, and a community post on Patch puts the first ones in 1845. Neither the 90% figure nor the 1845 date turned up in a primary source.

Stock for a machete

A maker on BladeForums who makes a lot of 18 in machetes tested 0.110 in and 0.135 in stock and found the 0.135 too heavy; his advice is to stay under 1/8 in if you want it quick in the hand. Thinner still works: in the same thread, two machetes at 0.096 in (14 in blade) and 0.075 in (22 in blade) are described as fairly flexible, with no worry about them breaking.

Widths assume blade height + 1/8 in rounded up to stock; thickness is the finished spine rounded up. Change the inputs above for your own pattern.

Steels that suit it

Questions