Kaiser blade

"Some folks call it a Kaiser blade. I call it a sling blade."

- Karl Childers

A Kaiser blade is a double-edged sharpened tool used for the purposes of cutting through thick vegetation such as undergrowth, weeds and brush. The curved blade is affixed to the end of a wooden handle that is approximately forty inches in length. Other common names for this tool are ditch bank blade, briar axe, and surveyor's brush axe, but it has since become popularly known in current culture as a sling blade.

In the 1996 drama Sling Blade, mental patient Karl Childers was remanded to the care of an Arkansas state hospital in Benton after murdering his mother and her lover with a Kaiser blade. Some time after he was released, he described the tool to a young boy named Frank Wheatley. He later described it again to the abusive Doyle Hargraves just moments before he killed him with it by delivering two swift strokes to the head.