Pros: Overall Quality, Materials
Cons: None
Awesome hunk of steel
I bought a torpedo circa 2000, when I was really into throwing knives with friends on my family farm. When I was recently visiting the farm from the city I live in now, I threw it with those same old friends, reliving older, simpler times. Back during our knife throwing heyday, we developed the rule that whoever was holding the torpedo would throw first, followed by others with larger throwing knives, then smaller throwing knives, and finally finishing things off with throwing stars. If that order were ever not followed, the torpedo would inevitably hit another knife and destroy it. All the marketing mumbo jumbo about using it for defense or hunting is ridiculous of course - it's a dramatically heavy chunk of metal that is obtrusive, requires an obvious windup, and is not really possible to throw accurately more than maybe 30 feet. It's also a lot harder to control its spin than with a knife (since you have to grab it relatively close to its tip to have the right leverage to chuck it), so we always just treated throwing it as an exciting gamble. When it sticks into a solid coin of a tree trunk (the only really appropriate target if you're not trying to pulverize something), it really hits hard and can be difficult to remove (it even eventually broke our favorite hundred pound, two-foot-thick stump in half). If it hits flat, the temper of the metal can cause pretty amazing and scary rebounds - we had a lot of close calls over the years where it hit a slightly upward-angled target and flew back to the same distance we threw it from, requiring us to quickly duck, but somehow no one was ever directly hit. Inevitably with throwing knives, it was lost after a throw at some point (its momentum can cause it to bury itself pretty deeply in looser dirt), and spent a winter and spring buried in leaves and dirt. But someone eventually threw a knife right next to it and it was re-found, with all the blackening gone, and slightly rusted. No matter though - the abrasion of throwing quickly re-polished it, and the rust-dulling of the tips is inconsequential, because the force behind any straight-on hit still easily drives it deep into a wooden target. Without the blackening, I believe the metal rings more, so as it slides out of your hand it flies through the air with a satisfying, shimmering ring, and if it rebounds, it gives a loud tenor bell stroke of warning. If you buy this product, you're buying something that CANNOT be destroyed, and will provide decades of hyper-masculine joy.
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