Batoning vs Feathersticks?

Here is a link to a knife of that size that I just acquired doing both pretty well.
http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/1105450-Spyderco-Bushcraft-Who-knew

Also, I make a point of going out into the woods a few times a year and gathering everything I need to start and maintain a fire without tools. I live in a heavily forested region of extreme upstate New York. So it may be easier for me than some others.

Between down trees, standing dead trees, pine needles, birch bark, poplar, lower hemlock branches, and usually many smaller branches hanging in other trees waiting to be used as kindling,

Bigger, longer lengths of tree are snapped either by levering between two close trees, to snap, or swinging baseball style into another tree, preferably a dead one. To be fair, I usually use a fire steel to get things going.
 
A small toolless fire on a drizzly, wet snowy spring day,




A better shot of the moisture content that day. Flipped a rock over for a base. Added pine needles, leaves from under trees, and other small twigs. Along with a small amount of birch bark scavenged from the forest floor.
 
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Smithhammer said:
I can easily do both with a 3.5" - 5" knife. It's interesting that this is considered a "small" knife. I don't own a single knife with more than a 5" blade, and have never found a need for one.
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When you consider a lot of guys think nothing of carrying a 10" bowie knife or an even larger kuk, 3.5" is small. ;)
 
Shotgun said:
When you consider a lot of guys think nothing of carrying a 10" bowie knife or an even larger kuk, 3.5" is small. ;)
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Depends on what I'm doing but, yeah. It's not uncommon to see me with a BK9 plus a Mora. The "big knife" has almost become my trademark on camping trips but I find it very handy.
 
Really depends entirely on the location and recent conditions.

Both are valuable techniques to know. I also see them as being important at different parts of the phase of the fire.

Luckily I live in New England and in many places, birch bark is common. This reduces the "need" for feather sticks often, as does dead pine branches. This is for the initial light up.

But if it's been a day or two of steady rain.... Then splitting becomes more important in terms of both establishment, and in awful cases, the maintenance of the fire.

Note, having done enough hikes in the low 30s and steady rain, I rely on clothing, stoves and shelter to stay warm, not fires.
 
Camped two nights this past weekend and built a fire twice. No need to do either, I used the lower/smaller limbs of standing dead pine trees and had no problem getting a fire using a fero-rod and dryer lint.
 
Well I think the object or this post isn't what do we do as if we do it all the time, because neither aren't needed to do all the time. They are both good skills for when you are dealing with wet wood. And I think they both work well but you have to look at in this particular situation what you're working with. If you have large pieces of wood and a tool good for batoning then you would baton to process the wood in order to get to the dry parts and create smaller/easily burned pieces. If you don't have a good batoning tool and only a smaller knife or don't have larger logs to process then you would probably want to feather stick. But skills work good when you need them. But hopefully all of us have dry wood, nice pieces of wood, and an axe!
 
Shotgun said:
When you consider a lot of guys think nothing of carrying a 10" bowie knife or an even larger kuk, 3.5" is small. ;)
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Reckon so. Just never found the need for a 10" knife blade.

Not saying a machete or kuk isn't also useful, and sometimes I'll carry a machete as well. But I don't consider the latter to be a knife.
 
Smithhammer said:
Reckon so. Just never found the need for a 10" knife blade.

Not saying a machete or kuk isn't also useful, and sometimes I'll carry a machete as well. But I don't consider the latter to be a knife.
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The second knife I ever bought was a Bowie. Everyone loved it except me, I hated having a knife that large, it looked really cool but I a smaller knife would of been much better. Now I have my mora and bk2 and it's a great combo because the bk2 isn't too big but it can handle all the jobs of a big knife or hatchet. And the mora actually sees the most use.
 
Shotgun said:
Just wondering what you guys do to start a fire when you only have a small knife on you of say 3.5-5" blade. For the sake of argument let's say that there's no risk of breakage and just stick to what's more efficient.

Do you find batoning small kindling to be faster and lights easier then making feathersticks or do you find the opposite to be true? Or do you do a little of both?
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all the woods I have been in have lots of little kindling for the taking. Just bend over and pick it up. Twigs, small branches and the like. I don't recall having to baton or make a feather stick to start a fire in, well I can't remember ever HAVING to do it.
 
Mannlicher said:
all the woods I have been in have lots of little kindling for the taking. Just bend over and pick it up. Twigs, small branches and the like. I don't recall having to baton or make a feather stick to start a fire in, well I can't remember ever HAVING to do it.
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I hear this a lot and every outdoorsman should have the skill to start a fire without a knife but the times in which I would NEED a fire this is generally the more difficult route where I live. Trying to find something dry and then babying the really wet fire actually takes more time and effort then processing wood down. I was out once after a week of rain in late October and I literally found NOTHING dry. Not a thing after a half an hour of looking.

This thread had some good info in it but not the kind I thought. It's more of a "how to" for each region. Kinda cool.
 
I still feel that smashing twigs between rocks to split them is useful to remember, if you don't have tools with you. Everything seems to be so much harder to do in the winter cold.
 
Shotgun... I too live in the Pacific Northwest (Just north of you, in Olympia, Washington), so I'm not going to be a jackass and say "just pick up dry twigs from the ground" Pretty much all of fall, winter, and spring in this part of the world everything is wet. There are no dry twigs ANYWHERE. What I end up doing is a combo platter like many others in this thread have suggested. I find a nice piece of standing deadwood.. usually 5" to 8" in diameter, cut a chunk out to test for dryness, then fall it, saw it into rounds, then baton and separate my wood into piles, wet outerwood, and dry heartwood. I then further split the dry wood into kindling and mediums, and then make fuzz sticks with my remaining heartwood. I will admit, one place you can find dry tinder in the PNW, is the inside bark of a dead cedar. The outside layer of bark is very water repellant, and the interior bark is generally dry, and can be scraped into extremely fine shavings easily.
 
All of the above. I baton down small kindling, and featherstick the larger sticks to get them to light faster and place on top of the kindling. This has proven to be the fastest way of getting a sustainable fire going in my experience.
 
Nullity said:
I just walk around the woods and grab the appropriate tinder, twigs, and sticks.
Especially considering efficiency, I see no reason to create things I can simply find.
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Yep, another vote for simplicity:thumbup:
 
I prefer using whatever is available and easiest. The reason to have many skills is to adapt and make a fire no matter what; not to expend extra energy when you don't want to. Just like animals play around to gain skills but bring your A game come crunch time.
 
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Shotgun said:
Just wondering what you guys do to start a fire when you only have a small knife on you of say 3.5-5" blade. For the sake of argument let's say that there's no risk of breakage and just stick to what's more efficient.

Do you find batoning small kindling to be faster and lights easier then making feathersticks or do you find the opposite to be true? Or do you do a little of both?
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For the most part I agree with others who say they walk around the woods looking for sticks and twigs. When you are really in the bush and not at some camp site, then you will have so much to work with it's hysterical.

I will say in my experience shavings are far superior than batoning has ever been. My technique with shavings is to get 2-3 decently long/thin shavings out of a large pile, and light those first, then use those shavings like a candle to light the rest. I use matches because of winter, but in the summer I just throw sparks into the pile of shavings and it works perfectly. Edit: yeah, realize lots of people will tell me they use a ferror rod in 25(f) weather and snow on the ground easily.

Batoning: In my experience batoning into very small pieces is only possible with wood that was original 5 inches wide or wider. Now I have 99% White Pine where I live, so others may have different experience. And even then I have noticed that the wood is either too dead/decayed, or too green. Better for me is to look over the dead/dry stuff, find a non-decayed section and get some solid shavings from that. Edit: And yes again, I realize that people are gonna start showing videos of how small they batoned there white pine, I speak from my experience.
 
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Diesel fuel.

Honestly, I had never heard of feather sticks or batonning before the internet and somehow managed to light fire in all kinds of weather. Split wood is always good to have when starting a fire regardless of how you split it. Fuzz sticks and shavings can be nice but I have really found them to be more "cool" than necessary.
 
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