Almost any knife, within reason, can be used as a bushcraft/survival knife—do you agree?

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DangerZone98

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TL;DR: If it cuts well enough and if it’s robust, it can be your survival knife.

To be honest, I’m a city slicker and know very little about bushcraft but I’d love to learn more. From what little I know though, knives aren’t super specific tools like screwdrivers or wrenches for example; you can comfortably use your folder to prep food in a pinch and your ‘outdoorsy’ Mora for house chores. I never found the scandi grind to be a hindrance. As tools, knives can be very flexible within the express purpose of cutting.

That said, I guess my point is that I find it a little amusing when knives are marketed for bushcraft or survival purposes. I’d be totally fine using my non-outdoorsy Recon Tanto as a bushcraft knife.

I guess the ‘within reason’ part of the title covers knives with more specific niches. Butcher and deboning knives for instance. For obvious reasons, they would be impractical as survival belt knives.
 
Yep, before there was bushcraft, it was just called using your knife. People overthink it. Also as you pointed out it’s mostly marketing.

Fact is whatever knife you have with you, when you are thrust into a survival situation is going to be your survival knife. Even if it’s only a piece of broken glass.
 
I remember the knives my grandfather / father used for work, fishing, hunting, camping and everything in between - Buck 110 and hatchet.. those guys never seemed to need anything more than a folder and a way to break down wood.
 
Bushcraft, survival, and camp knives tend to bleed into each other and really form the same theme of knife. Most of these words are marketing, but are also attributed to knife type --- so, Bushcraft knife, you can expect it to be thicker behind the edge and at the spine, while hunting knife will have a thinner profile for more precise cutting, that kind of thing
 
If you look at "traditional" or rather the types of knives that see a lot of use in various regions of the world, then yeah, any knife can be a survival/bushcraft knife within the skillset of the user to the environment. For example where I live there are two types of wood, stuff you cut with a light machete and stuff that kills machinery. They don't call it ironbark for no reason. So you need to know what sort of knife is going to be efficient for the most part of what you want to do. Where I grew up, stuff like buck 110 and 119, small axes, and the like work really well on the edge of the boreal shield, where you have a mix of willow, conifers, cottonwood and birch. You can get a lot done, process a lot of fallen or smaller standing dead timber for firewood. Where I am now, if you were to try that same thing, all the sanding dead timber is three feet in diameter, or so snarled that anything short of a full felling crew is just not viable to bring it down. Or you can smack down some palms and at least make some form of roof. So the skills and knowledge change, but the "quality" of the knives doesn't. While there is a small range where you can push some knives into getting harder work done at the cost of precision, that range is actually pretty small. There is some trade off of getting more work done with a high level of skill and either a highly specialized or high quality knife, but again we are trading percentage points often. There are a lot of knives that you can over-tax or wear out too fast by pushing them too hard, that isn't to say that they couldn't do the job if the knowledge is there to just back off a bit and stay inside the limits of the knife. I hope that makes sense. Often times we can apply more force than a given knife can take, just look at abuse tests, given enough time, anyone can break anything. But if we know how to just fit inside the limits, then we can get a lot of work done with "less than ideal" tools.
 
The cool thing is, you can designate anything as your bushcraft knife and 🤷‍♂️. Yep, that’s your bushcraft knife. Here’s my new Bushcrafter:



Cut a few feather sticks with it, peeled and diced some potatoes, whittled with it a bit. Seems bushcrafty enough to me.
 
AntDog said:
The cool thing is, you can designate anything as your bushcraft knife and 🤷‍♂️. Yep, that’s your bushcraft knife. Here’s my new Bushcrafter:



Cut a few feather sticks with it, peeled and diced some potatoes, whittled with it a bit. Seems bushcrafty enough to me.
Click to expand...

Comes prestained with the blood of your potatoes, eh?

Sure, most any knife can be used for bushcraft, but some are better for it. Just like kitchen knives and hunting knives.

It's fairly well understand that it's become a bit of a catchall term and is almost too broad to be useful anymore. Knife users didn't help since we have pretty strong opinions on what we like or don't like. Probably the only good defining factor, IMO, is that the ergos can't completely suck.
 
abo4ster said:
Before Bushcraft, it was called Woodcraft.

If it’s not on you, it’s camping gear. If it’s on you, it’s survival gear.
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Bushcraft: 'You picked a great place to make camp abo4ster!'

Survival: 'That river is cold! I'll get the Wood-wool going. Grap up some twigs abo4ster!'

A lot of knives would work in either scenario. Urgency matters. As does skillset. Being prepared is at the core of abo4ster's reply.

The number of times I took an unplanned dip in The Niobrara while canoeing...
 
AntDog said:
The cool thing is, you can designate anything as your bushcraft knife and 🤷‍♂️. Yep, that’s your bushcraft knife. Here’s my new Bushcrafter:



Cut a few feather sticks with it, peeled and diced some potatoes, whittled with it a bit. Seems bushcrafty enough to me.
Click to expand...
Nice knoife for bushcrafting in zombie-infested areas!
 
It depends. Seems a lot of "bushcraft/survival" involves using knives as wood splitting devices or just generally for stuff other than cutting. If you're into that, certainly not any knife will do. It will have to be something that holds up to much abuse.

My experience in spending time in the outdoors is that a good swiss army knife will do most anything for outdoors cutting tasks. I tend to carry folders (like a Sebenza) or small fixed blades now. I'm not really into prepping for "survival" scenarios so I carry what is practical and comfortable for me.

Here are a couple of my favorite outdoors knives. Neither has a blade length of over 3.25 inches.

i-kJcc7fJ-L.jpg
 
Some are more specialised than others, but yes. Over specialisation brings weakness and limitation, generalist designs never excel at anything. Its about balance, and more about how, the user will apply the the knife.
 
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