A. G. Russell :
Why has no one explained that baring the light sword from starwars there is NO such thing as he is asking about. He wants a 6z" blade that will chop like an axe, cut nails like a bolt cutter, skin like a properly shaped 4", oh, yes and can be used as a hammer.
This is true, the best you can expect from a 6-7" blade is 50-75% of the chopping ability of a quality hatchet, you are not going to come near a full size axe. However this does give you enough chopping power to handle small and/or soft woods. Unless you want to actually fell trees, you can get enough chopping power in a decent sized knife for most outdoors work. Easily enough for shelter building, kindling and the like.
In regards to the nail cutting, it does make fine cutting impossible on the same area, as nails do require a decently thick edge to avoid rippling, as well as a fairly abtuse edge to avoid impaction. However if you do zone the knife in two different sections, which he did ask about, you can do both on the same knife. Leave the edge near the choil very thick and obtuse and make it fine out towards the tip. Sharpening is going to be difficult though with edge angle and thickness changing along the blade.
If you have to cut nails and your knife edge is rather fine, the best way is to use a mallet and score the nail, turn it, score it again, repeat until you have cut a notch all the way around the nail. Now try to break it in your hands. If you can't, go back to the scoring again. Use very light hits and a lot of strikes. This is far easier on the blade. If your knife is *really* fine edged like an opinel, then you can't score it much at all as the edge will ripple, so use a rock to mash it [against another rock] and then break it, and reshape the point on the rock.
A vice grip big enough to cut the nails he envisons (or a fencing tool) an axe large enough to chop the things he wants to chop and the original 5-6" knife to do all of the knife things that need doing.
This would be a much better combination than trying to get all of the same things in one knife. You always lose functionality and performance when you trim down the tool box. The more tools you can carry, in general the higher the performance, the more optomized you can make a knife (or a tool in general), the better it will be at that task.
A decent combination for the above would be say the TAC-11 from Johanning and the small forest axe from Gransfors Bruks. Leave the tanto point on the TAC-11 as it is NIB and it will handle any nail cutting, adjust the primary straight edge down to 15 or so degrees per side and it will cut very fine. The butt is very wide and flat and makes a decent hammer as does the poll of the axe. This isn't less than 100$ however.
-Cliff
