Ancient Ninja Secret.
No, wait. The opposite of that.
This is the Cold Steel Spike. One of multiple variants, but this is the tanto point rendition which has, it must be said, maximum ninja cred. Just about everything you need to know about it is encapsulated in this one image.
The Spike is true to its name and it does not have an edge as such. Or rather, it is all edge. Maybe that depends on how you look at it. But it is a quarter inch thick triangle of 4116 stainless steel, tapered from spine to edge all in one shot.
And needless to say it comes to a wicked point.
If this knife is not on the Naughty List, it is only on a technicality. There is little to no utilitarian functionality built into the Spike. It is a knife for stabbin', plain and simple. Although that's not to say I haven't cut many -- probably ill-advised -- things with this knife over the years. This knife lived on one of my backpack straps pretty much full time for a while, and when you've got something like this what else are you supposed to do with it other than debark firewood, baton things, and chuck it at tree stumps around camp?
Cold Steel calls this configuration a "zero grind." This is an OG Spike, the original super dangerous version before they added the overmolded grip with built in crossguard. Without it, this variant of the Spike is incredibly slim. Employing it in the old icepick tradition, though, is a fraught proposition and you'll want to ensure you have a very confident grip over the bird's-head pommel so you don't have yourself a bad time.
The Spike is 67.9 grams, 2.39 ounces, and basically all of that is steel. The grip is very tightly wrapped in cord; undo it at your own peril. It's 8-1/16" long with 3-15/16" of usable, er, edge. The sharp part ends in a beefy ricasso with just a bit of a finger notch behind it which may or may not help said digit remain attached during use, slightly. It is every bit of 1/4" thick at the spine, at least at the base, tapering down its length finally to a needle-sharp point.
This version of the Spike is proudly (?) made in Taiwan. At about $30 back in the day this was never going to be a super premium piece of equipment. Rather, this is more the sort of thing you'd find in the back pages of all your seedy martial arts magazines, if such things even still exist in this day and age. It'd make an excellent movie prop, too. It has precisely that air about it as you'd find in something rated R and from the late 90's, early 2000's. Think the Matrix, Blade Trilogy, V for Vendetta. That kind of deal.
This is helped somewhat by the injection molded Nylon hard sheath, which just has so much of that Sam Fisher vibe. Notably, no provision was provided from the factory whatsoever for actually attaching this to anything, save for a length of black beaded chain which I lost instantly. Cold Steel apparently expect you to use this as a neck knife, which is profoundly silly. There are a pair of slots in it that will just about fit 1" webbing, and some rivet holes that are, alas, slightly too small to easily pass 550 paracord through. The Nite-ize Eclipse clip on it is not from the factory. (Eyy, "eclipse." How topical.) I added that myself to alleviate all of the above, and in my case it is solidly epoxied to the sheath. This allows it to easily ride in one of those otherwise useless little webbing loops that inevitably appear on the face of your backpack strap, or if you were a real smooth operator you could stick it through a MOLLE mount.
Oh, yeah. And you're not imagining things. The blade on my usual CQC-6K is now etched and stonewashed.
That is indeed a thing that has happened.
The Inevitable Conclusion
If your job regularly involves fighting vampires wearing Kevlar, you shouldn't leave home with out this.
