Paper knives are, perhaps, the most common example of items made from bullets. Their simplicity, involving only a standard bullet and a flat piece of brass, makes them ideal for the non-artisan trench art maker ! Examples usually have an elaborate sabre shape to the blade and are often etched with places or just the ubiquitous ‘Souvenir from France’.
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More unusual are ones made from copper drive bands, with the band left thick for the handle and flattened out to form the blade.
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In the pictures below is one using a fleschette dart for the blade. These were anti-personnel weapons tossed in handfuls from aeroplanes onto the trenches below before the advent of machine gun technology in aircraft.
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Even more uncommon are those made from shrapnel splinters; obtaining a long thin piece of the cast iron casing from a shrapnel shell, leaving the handle in the naturally contorted state and then flattening and polishing the lower half to form a blade.
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