V_Shrake said:
In fact, I've batoned a lot more often with 1/16" thick Moras than anything else.
Those knives are *way* thicker than the knife I referenced in the above, I'll repeat :
If you are just cutting, I have blades which are ~0.05" thick through the spine (similar to the edge thickness on tacticals) and hollow ground and they will do any wood cutting and general work outside that needs to be done, what they lack are utility uses, mainly prying and batoning, But if you just want a cutting tool, this is how you go :
http://www.physics.mun.ca/~sstamp/images/aj_utility.jpg
In general I would prefer a more robust design for general work outdoors, however have used that to do everything necessary, but it is inefficient for tasks which require prying or impacts, but for that I generally would want a longer blade anyway for that, about 7" at minimum, and 14" ideally especially for brush work and frozen woods.
Even the thinner mora's, are *TEN* times thicker at the edge than that knife, and the edge on the mora's is *FIVE* time more obtuse than that knife. To put this in perspective, compared to that blade a Mora is much of a sharpened pry bar than a heavy tactical is to a mora. The guy who made that knife does sharpen some blades similar to the typical single bevel grinds but doesn't use those for cutting as they don't get "sharp" enough, they are just for scraping gaskets and similar.
Back to splitting, the reason that thicker blades are used is for many reasons. If large enough it gives them enough impact ability to split on their own which is much faster and more efficient for batoning, a large wood craft bowie cleaves/chops wood far faster than batoning with a Mora. The thickness also makes them more rigid so if the wood is twisted, knotty or just really dense, you can twist/pry the wood open which can also be more efficient for easy to split woods.
Mears demonstrates this all the time in his bushcraft video's, starting a split and twisting the blade to work the wood apart, it is a common technique with hacking blades in general. Some of the very rough work he does, twisting and prying you could not do with the above blade because it is just made to cut well. The maker is moving into utility patterns which are less knives and more utility tools using L6, I have one of his more robust grinds, is is similar thickness but has a convex grind (m2, 65 HRC), the above one is full hollow.
Back to splitting, primarily splitting tools are thick to both prevent excessive binding and induce a splitting action because obviously you want them to split as otherwise you actually have to cut which is vastly less efficient. It is also problematic on any knotty wood such as :
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/swamp rat/ratweiler/ratweiler_knotty.jpg
Those two pieces were just the first two out of the pile, there are worse ones. They were all bucked to length with knives/hatchets. It only takes 10-15 minutes to cut enough wood to burn for two days with a decent blade, so every weekend now I spend about an hour bucking wood for the upcoming week, wastes a lot of chips, but I rake them up and burn as well and it is more entertaining than using a swede saw plus it gives lots of information on blade/axe comparisons.
In any case, the knots in those pieces are all cross hatched meaning that if you went down in a staight line you would have to chisel cut at least one, possibly more. If you tried to do this with a thin blade this is likely what would happen because it would not force a split in the wood but would just keep cutting through the grains, there is also the possibility to bend to a set a thinner blade in that wood as it is so dense, an ontario RTAK will for example just warp in the wood, it isn't rigid enough to stay straight, the edge can also ripple on the knots.
However the Ratweiler splits it easily, and is thick enough at the spine to force the wood to crack ahead of the edge which allows the grain to naturally split around the knots instead of having to try to cut through them, and with a heavy baton it cracks the wood in under a dozen impacts :
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/swamp rat/ratweiler/ratweiler_knotty_split.jpg
It is also stiff enough so that if the tree was just cracked and not bucked to length, it could be split by just prying it apart with the blade, which is also useful for breaking frozen wood off of the ground. The coating on the new line seems to have improved a lot over the Basics, I have done a lot of wood working with that one and have only produced a small amount of wear.
And yes you could split it all with the knife I showed in the link, it would just be very inefficient at it,and few people would pick that knife for that work compared to a Ratweiler, the maker of the knife certainly would not.
-Cliff
