Boba Fett’s survival knife: Accuracy vs. Authenticity

I’ve been thinking about this item a lot recently, as a possible easy project to bang out with the drill press and benchgrinder some weekend. We don’t have many references to non-vibro knives in the Star Wars galaxy, and its identification as a “survival” knife lends itself easily to my purposes of wilderness adventure and interpretation. With a beefy 5 or 6 mm spine, I can easily see it being perfect for batoning firewood and other tasks around camp (in GFFA style, of course).
The problem is, there are two versions of Boba Fett’s ‘survival knife’ out there – so which one is ‘right’?
The knife on the left first appeared in Dr. David West Reynold’s Star Wars Visual Dictionary (1998), and the middle item is the tool Jeremy Bulloch wore in his shin pocket on the set of The Empire Strikes Back in 1979:

One appears to be made of metal, and the other is a plastic Paterson Chemical Mixer (above right) with its handle cut off, and is what all the really diehard ESB Fett cosplayers put in their pockets.

[Sidebar: when I see folks referring to the examples from the SWVD as ‘fake’ “Because [they] were reimagined/created for the Star Wars Visual Dictionary”, I really have to wonder what they are in this hobby for?… do they actually want to be immersed and inhabit this exciting environment?, or just want to brag and play hyper-screen-accurate dress-up where their only interaction with the public is photo ops? Because if I was at a reenactment and asked a longhunter if I could take a look at his knife, only for him to pull out a bladeless handle, it would be such a letdown. I guess I’ll just never understand folks who invest so much time, effort, and money into their kit only to cut corners when it comes to authenticity. Whatever. /end]

(Being very familiar with the SWVD knife for 20 years, I was very confused at first when I saw the stirrer referred to as a knife, because it is very clearly just a slotted plastic stick.)

With nothing in the Visual Dictionary for scale, once I stumbled on the Paterson identification, I could use its dimensions for a jumping-off point. Per blueprints produced by longtime propmaker Wizardofflight, the stirrer is 33mm wide, which (with careful application of a little sixth-grade maths) gives the SWVD knife a length of 196mm or 7.7 inches.
But: here arises a problem. At first glance, the handle perforations of the mixer and SWVD knife appear to be the same size and shapes (except that the mixer has four holes, obviously, and the knife has five). However, even if you add another hole to the Paterson pattern, if you line up the butts of both knifes, the layouts don’t line up: the SWVD holes are wider and more oval than those of the original prop:

Ergo, if you made a knife with the Paterson mixer as a blueprint, it would look correct sticking out of your pocket, but it would not be identical to the knife prop that is seen in the Visual Dictionary!
This is when we get into the real brain-food aspect of this hobby – obviously if you’re planning on in-universe adventuring in the wild, having an actual knife instead of a plastic stick is the better choice, but which of the above layouts is more authentic? After all, one appears in licensed, canon reference materials! It is out of character for me, but I would argue against the VD pattern and lean towards the lower style as the better choice, as it more accurately matches the top of the handle sticking out of Fett’s pocket on-screen, but is also a functional piece of gear. Clearly the propmakers of the VD were doing their best to follow the on-screen prop, but by not doing quite enough research, their final product wound up being less accurate. By using the correct size and spacing of the Paterson mixer, but retaining the extrapolated shape of the blade, I can get the best of both worlds – accuracy AND authenticity.

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