I Need Something Witty To Do With My Subject Bars
So today I went to Ax-Man with my mother, who needed some spice bottles, and what did I buy?
A set of three scalpels with ten blades you can swap around.
I had a good well sort of reason for doing this. See, one of the characters who shows up in my writing alot, Shane Kelly, uses scalpels a great deal during the course of his adventures. So, I thought I could make my writing more realistic if I had my own set of scalpels to use as reference tools.
Hey, authors do this all the time! With guns and...whatnot.
The first thing I noticed was that scalpel blades are really thin. Really, really thin. This also means they're delicate. I can bend then with my thumb. So they're not the best stabbing weapons in the world unless it's just an in and out (i.e., the stabber doesn't twist the blade when it's in the stabee, and yes, I know how wrong that sounds). I don't think it would take much pressure to break it.
Of course, depending on the intention, this might not be bad. Leaving a snapped-off scalpel blade in someone would constitute another level of mindfuck. Plus, leaving the blade in means that it keeps cutting if it gets jarred. Depending on where it is--in a major muscle would be very painful, in any organ it would do serious damage and probably be fatal--it could lead to a slow death.
Or just a whole lot of pain.
Those suckers are small.
I found the best way to hold it, or at least to get the best control of the blade, was to press my index finger a few centimeters away from the place where the handle meets the blade, and press the end of the handle against my palm. I could control the path of the blade the best that way.
Of course, I only experimented with cutting paper, so that might not be the best grip for cutting into something deeper.
I'd conclude that scalpels seemed like weapons for small detail work. Because the blade is so small and thin, the stabee would have to be restrained or otherwise unable to fight back, or perhaps not aware of the attack until it's too late. A killing blow would have to be planned out--the blade was a little less than an inch long. Unless it's into an artery or organ, it simply wouldn't go deep enough to kill.
Incapacitate, maybe. But again, it would have to be planned out.
I've seen villains (never heros) throw scalpels in movies. I don't think you can do that in real life. The blade isn't long enough to stick into anything that well.
So, yeah. Those are my thoughts on scalpels.
Maybe they were helpful to someone else, too.
A set of three scalpels with ten blades you can swap around.
I had a good well sort of reason for doing this. See, one of the characters who shows up in my writing alot, Shane Kelly, uses scalpels a great deal during the course of his adventures. So, I thought I could make my writing more realistic if I had my own set of scalpels to use as reference tools.
Hey, authors do this all the time! With guns and...whatnot.
The first thing I noticed was that scalpel blades are really thin. Really, really thin. This also means they're delicate. I can bend then with my thumb. So they're not the best stabbing weapons in the world unless it's just an in and out (i.e., the stabber doesn't twist the blade when it's in the stabee, and yes, I know how wrong that sounds). I don't think it would take much pressure to break it.
Of course, depending on the intention, this might not be bad. Leaving a snapped-off scalpel blade in someone would constitute another level of mindfuck. Plus, leaving the blade in means that it keeps cutting if it gets jarred. Depending on where it is--in a major muscle would be very painful, in any organ it would do serious damage and probably be fatal--it could lead to a slow death.
Or just a whole lot of pain.
Those suckers are small.
I found the best way to hold it, or at least to get the best control of the blade, was to press my index finger a few centimeters away from the place where the handle meets the blade, and press the end of the handle against my palm. I could control the path of the blade the best that way.
Of course, I only experimented with cutting paper, so that might not be the best grip for cutting into something deeper.
I'd conclude that scalpels seemed like weapons for small detail work. Because the blade is so small and thin, the stabee would have to be restrained or otherwise unable to fight back, or perhaps not aware of the attack until it's too late. A killing blow would have to be planned out--the blade was a little less than an inch long. Unless it's into an artery or organ, it simply wouldn't go deep enough to kill.
Incapacitate, maybe. But again, it would have to be planned out.
I've seen villains (never heros) throw scalpels in movies. I don't think you can do that in real life. The blade isn't long enough to stick into anything that well.
So, yeah. Those are my thoughts on scalpels.
Maybe they were helpful to someone else, too.