Batoning?

[ferider]

Isn't it cheating to use a circular saw to cut out a baton?

Like I said before, unless you have really small stuff, batoning only works together with a saw for me (not talking about the mallet). I hear some Nordic country has stacks of cut wood logs distributed all across the wilderness, for campers and such, but in any other country, finding branches, etc., is probably easier to get and keep a fire going.

Saw is one thing that a "bushcrafter" needs, and that's rarely talked about on the tubes. The other one is a BIC lighter (or a 5 pack) - why waste your time with a flint or similar ?

 

[bikerector]

There are plenty of people who carry huge knives and go out of there way to split nasty wood by batoning, lots of the Gossman fan boys to mention a few. Nothing wrong with this but I prefer to carefully select what wood I am going to batton and go about it with a little thought like instead of trying to split through a knot spilt next to the knot.

I'm guilty of this, at least when I was testing big knives early on. It was more just to see what I could beat them through and see for myself what knives could handle. Gave me a new appreciation for stick tang knives like kukri's and leukus, they can handle a lot more than people give them credit for. Even folders are surprisingly durable. They don't explode to bits from being hit a little bit like the internet would need you to believe.

I dom't beat through crazy sruff much anymore as it's more work than needed. I do have a lot of confidence in the tools I use now because of that testing, even the cheaper tools like mora's or Chinese schrades held up better than I would've expected.

 

[Seedy Lot]

I made this video right after my first Magnacut knife. It was a very wet late winter and wood was wet so really needed to get to dry wood to be able to easily make a fire.

I did have to 45° degree cross grain baton, like an axe bucking cut, so I could break off a peice of the tree.

 

[DocJD]

Never did any battening ( "batoning" is not a real word ) until fairly recently .

Worked pretty good with a 3V Cold Steel Master Hunter , 4.5" fixed blade .

Tried it just for a test . Mostly as a survival technique . For medium / short fixed blades and sturdy folders , especially .

If that's all you have available in some emergency .

I do recognize that it can be of value as a survival skill .

Otherwise , I think there are better ways and tools for the job . Just IMO .

 

[Maroco]

Never did any battening ( "batoning" is not a real word ) until fairly recently .

Worked pretty good with a 3V Cold Steel Master Hunter , 4.5" fixed blade .

Tried it just for a test . Mostly as a survival technique . For medium / short fixed blades and sturdy folders , especially .

If that's all you have available in some emergency .

I do recognize that it can be of value as a survival skill .

Otherwise , I think there are better ways and tools for the job . Just IMO .

To play devils advocate, Cambridge dictionary disagrees about it not being a word

baton

1. a stick used by a conductor (= person who controls the performance of a…

dictionary.cambridge.org

 

[Contender Machine]

It seems to me, batoning is a kind of fidget activity.
I’ve sat around fires 70 yrs. and never needed to process firewood. (in the woods)
I think most fires end up too big anyway. (in the woods)
Yours truly, The Curmudgeon

This.

If you're cutting wood for a fire place in a house get a chainsaw and build a hydraulic log splitter.

If you're camping there is absolutely no need to split wood in any kind of volume. Batoning in a survival situation would be a huge waste of energy.

Seems that people do it because it's fun and that's fine.

 

[Pirate63]

Do I want a knife to have with me in the woods that could easily baton wood....yes, that said do I typically baton with my knife when I process wood in the wild, no. And I can easily build and start a fire without tool processing wood anyway under almost any condition I have encountered..

 

[fitzo]

ferider That is a beautiful beast of a knife. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Thescrawnylumberjack]

I baton regularly. I use it for small rounds of wood, or once the large round it broken down and I need to process kindling I’ll baton. I’m by no means pushing the knife to its limits.

I did have a backpacking trip one time where I was the only person to bring a cutting tool which was a knife and we needed to process everything using that knife for a camp fire.

 

[DocJD]

To play devils advocate, Cambridge dictionary disagrees about it not being a word

baton

1. a stick used by a conductor (= person who controls the performance of a…

dictionary.cambridge.org

My spell check disagrees ! Most other sources agree with spell check .

"Baton" as noun is OK . The proper verb is "to batten / battening " .

As in: "we need to batten down the hatches , a storm is coming . "

 

[SwissHeritageCo]

Couldn't have said it better. And the knife needs to be large enough.

No point in batoning for me unless the wood that I baton has been sawed before. I have an axe but no hatchet.

And I have to admit, it's fun So you do you ....

Damnit man... you have some sick knives.

 

[C_Claycomb]

DocJD
You are right, batoning isn’t in dictionaries, although new words get added regularly. Words get added when a word becomes widely enough used.

You are also wrong that the right word is battening. Separate nouns. Still using a stick, but a different stick with a different purpose, and dictionaries describe this.

My spell check disagrees ! Most other sources agree with spell check .

"Baton" as noun is OK . The proper verb is "to batten / battening " .

As in: "we need to batten down the hatches , a storm is coming . "

batten
Noun
a long piece of wood, often attached to something to make that thing stronger

Verb
to fasten something by fixing pieces of wood onto it:

baton
Noun
A stick…uses vary…police weapon. Cudgel, truncheon
Verb
to hit someone or something with a baton.

Batten - Etymology, Origin & Meaning

Originating from 1590s Old Norse batna (to improve), batten means to improve or fatten; from 1650s English variant of baton, it also means a strip of wood nailed ...

www.etymonline.com

 

[Drop bear]

You can chop wood while sitting down.

 

[Maroco]

My spell check disagrees ! Most other sources agree with spell check .

"Baton" as noun is OK . The proper verb is "to batten / battening " .

As in: "we need to batten down the hatches , a storm is coming . "

So our sources disagree! The link I posted uses batoning in one of the example uses.

English is so tricky sometimes. I wonder if there is even a way to determine if it's proper usage of not

 

[No Middle Name]

HAHAA..........

 

[Seedy Lot]

By far the place we, wife included, baton the most is when making small kindling for the wood stove. Once again kneeling in front of the stove in need of smaller tinder to start the fire it is much more convient than walking outside to the woodshed, especially when the temps are -20°F. We burn the wood stove from October through March and often start 2-3 fires a day. Lots of batoning!

 

[Maroco]

By far the place we, wife included, baton the most is when making small kindling for the wood stove. Once again kneeling in front of the stove in need of smaller tinder to start the fire it is much more convient than walking outside to the woodshed, especially when the temps are -20°F. We burn the wood stove from October through March and often start 2-3 fires a day. Lots of batoning!

This. Side note: it works way better with dry pine wood. I used some ash last night and it was mich more work lol

 

[Seedy Lot]

This. Side note: it works way better with dry pine wood. I used some ash last night and it was mich more work lol

Yes, not all wood species are equally friendly to batoning. For us straight grain Douglas Fir and Western Larch are the preferred ones. Lodepole Pine often has embedded knots that do not always play nicely with thinner knife edges.

I say straight grain as I was having a heck of a time this morning trying to split a very twisted piece of Larch using an axe, a piece of wood I would never attempt to baton.

 

[daily_grind]

If I made me a rock digger knife, like in this thread, (scroll up a bit from where the link drops you - post by Mecha ) I could baton concrete.
Every time I drive down the road and see a construction vehicle parked on the weekends ... that's the first thing I think of.

 

[Michael Black]

DocJD
You are right, batoning isn’t in dictionaries, although new words get added regularly. Words get added when a word becomes widely enough used.

You are also wrong that the right word is battening. Separate nouns. Still using a stick, but a different stick with a different purpose, and dictionaries describe this.

batten
Noun
a long piece of wood, often attached to something to make that thing stronger

Verb
to fasten something by fixing pieces of wood onto it:

baton
Noun
A stick…uses vary…police weapon. Cudgel, truncheon
Verb
to hit someone or something with a baton.

Batten - Etymology, Origin & Meaning

Originating from 1590s Old Norse batna (to improve), batten means to improve or fatten; from 1650s English variant of baton, it also means a strip of wood nailed ...

www.etymonline.com

Just to add to the word side of the discussion: There are two different types of dictionaries with different philosophies. Prescriptive and descriptive. Prescriptive ones describe what the words are and how they should technically be used. Descriptive ones try to only describe the words as they're actually used by real people, so you have to be cognizant of which source you're quoting when you choose a dictionary. Languages change over time, and descriptive dictionaries try to capture that. Look up the etymology of any word and you can see how it has changed through the years. Like it or not, people will miss-use words over and over again until it changes. For example, the word "moot" has completely changed its meaning to the opposite over time. Pretty fascinating stuff! So to bring it back to "batoning", I would argue that it very much is a word as it is in common use to mean what the OP described initially.