Choosing Fixed Survival Knife.

[Natlek]

You can be all tooled up too; just add "survival" to everything you own (you may even be wearing "survival pants" at this very moment! ).

My back sucks too, mostly due to muscle spasms resulting from genetic condition (yay!); have some spine arthritis starting too, but I didn't even notice it till they pointed it out from a scan...the muscle spasms blot it right out.

It doesn't matter if I carry extra weight or no weight at all; my back just decides on its own what will occur; I'm just along for the ride.
Unless I carry a 70 pound pack; did that once, and it was shear hell. That's what happens when you listen to someone else about you need with you though.

My "survival walking stick" keeps me moving along though, till I can make it to the "survival bus," or the "survival car" (if I'm out there with someone else).

I don't even get a cool story to tell as to why my back sucks either...unless I make it up...yeah, let's do that.
My back is wrecked from all the extra gymnastic sex I had to endure when caught by an uncontacted Amazonian tribe while out on a survivaling expedition.
Yeah, that sounds better; going with that. :thumbup:

I see you carry "survival briks" too ..............

 

[22-rimfire]

Tell you how it works..... your list is just fine. Buy one and get on with it. Do some using and learning. Then in 6 months you'll be looking for another survival knife. That is the way it is on Blade Forums. We're never really satisfied. But this thread probably gave you a lot of ideas and questions you probably never considered.

Wearing my tactical survival pajami bottoms at the moment. I'm ready. Got my SAK in my pocket.

I still want to get a survival cane. It doesn't have to be tactical.

 

[GREENJACKET]

Those Amazonian's take it out of one.

Half the knives I've broken over the years were junk; but I thought looked great. Which is why for all the best intentions some knives have more luck built in. The best are those you have used for a good while and so trust.
I once thought I had bought a Cold Steel Master Tanto when they first came out. Carried it in Africa for three months with confidence. A week after getting home to the UK it snapped in two. I then sourced the real deal which I still have today, 25 years on. (I'm in no hurry to buy another Tanto, as they aren't that great utility wise).

 

[Pointshoot777]

If you want the ultimate useless knife ('survival' type or otherwise), buy one and don't get around to actually using it in the field. Then find that it's no longer made, so the price has gone way up and now it's 'collectible'. Now you damn well aren't gonna use it because you don't want to ruin its resale value. - - - Been there done that, more than once.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

 

[stabman]

I see you carry "survival briks" too ..............

First time out, we found a few "survival bricks" that were native to the area. That happens when you're in an area that has seen human human settlement for centuries though, and many land use changes along the way.

On subsequent trips, we brought more "survival bricks," far more than still survive out there (many returned to the earth from which they came, crumbling into dirt and pebbles).
Those were uncomfortable trips in, all of us lugging cinderblocks and bags of bricks.

I hope to replace them with "survival rocks" this year, as they will look much nicer. :thumbup:

 

[abbydaddy]

First time out, we found a few "survival bricks" that were native to the area. That happens when you're in an area that has seen human human settlement for centuries though, and many land use changes along the way.

On subsequent trips, we brought more "survival bricks," far more than still survive out there (many retuned to the earth from which they came, crumbling into dirt and pebbles).
Those were uncomfortable trips in, all of us lugging cinderblocks and bags of bricks.

I hope to replace them with "survival rocks" this year, as they will look much nicer. :thumbup:

I don't know what part of Canada you are living in, but when I was living in Quebec I went for a hike near my house (which was actually out in the woods itself) and I came across a fireplace and chimney out in the woods. It was the only obvious sign that the spot had been a house once upon a time. I thought it was pretty neat. I grew up in Alaska, and since people using masonry were a pretty new addition to my part of the world that was just not the kind of thing you came across. It really does change things when people have been building masonry objects in your area for a few centuries. You can just come across those bricks and such in woods that look totally natural.

 

[stabman]

I don't know what part of Canada you are living in, but when I was living in Quebec I went for a hike near my house (which was actually out in the woods itself) and I came across a fireplace and chimney out in the woods. It was the only obvious sign that the spot had been a house once upon a time. I thought it was pretty neat. I grew up in Alaska, and since people using masonry were a pretty new addition to my part of the world that was just not the kind of thing you came across. It really does change things when people have been building masonry objects in your area for a few centuries. You can just come across those bricks and such in woods that look totally natural.

It's really cool when you come across things like that.
I've been exploring around Windsor itself over the last couple of years, and it's amazing how even in a city changes in how land is used happen all the time. You think you've found an unused piece of land that somehow survived, and then you run across some ruins of a structure from long ago.

Quebec has been inhabited for quite some time, so you can certainly make neat finds like you did.

And southern Ontario has likewise had enough humans running around it for long enough to allow for cool finds in the woods.

 

[22-rimfire]

Metal detecting at old homesteads is big sport for some. The usual clues are daffodils, iris, and of course an apple tree. Anyone watch Oak Island on History Channel?

I spent a lot of time as a kid digging in the foundation of an old burnt out farm house. There was supposed to be guns, gold and silver. I did find a couple German Lugers all rusted up.

 

[Gaston444]

I'd be very interested in a technical writeup on the testing methods you use to arrive at many of the "facts" that you constantly expound. Of special interest to me would be the method by which you inspect the edge for damage while it's still embedded in the wood you're chopping so that you know with certainty what damage occurred when the blade was entering the wood and what occurred on retrieval. I suspect that many of the "so called experts" that we aren't supposed to listen to would also be interested in such useful information so that they can be more informed than their current unfortunate lack of knowledge..

It merely requires careful attention... You involuntarily twist the knife slightly to help its removal whenever it "sticks". When you feel the "cracking" during that minuscule twist, before you start to pull it out, then you know it's the twisting that got it... Simple.

Another clue that this is what happened is also very simple to figure out: The chipping in those particular cases immediately occurs in pairs: This is because the "pinched" area of the blade naturally becomes the "center" of your involuntary "twisting", so the area in the middle of that twist has less sideways motion, but as you go outward from this center axis, in both directions, the amount of sideways motion increases, and causes apex chipping at both "outer" ends of the most tightly "pinched" area...: This is a logical explanation for the chips to consistently occur in pairs when you were not careful about avoiding the twisting motion: Here you can see the effect on one knife in 5160 and one in D-2, both occurring the same day on different steels:

Yes one pair of chips is closer together than the other, but it is the same basic principle in both cases: The difference is because the bigger knife buried itself much deeper in the same log, creating a "broader" area of severe pinching, its "shearing" edges thus being further apart... This effect is accentuated by slightly rotting ground logs that are softer on the outside but with harder cores...

Both set of chips occurred simultaneously in one "unstick"...

And yes, Full Flat Grinds are more vulnerable to pull-out twist than Sabre Hollow Grinds, because a low-saber hollow grind binds more in the wood, so lateral twisting motion is less "free": Lateral motion either forces the wood apart, or, if the wood is too rigid, then lateral motion pinches the hollow grind, causing the concave curvature of the hollow grind to convert lateral motion into vertical motion, "unsticking" the apex before major lateral forces are applied to it.

It is not complicated to visualize.

A lot of apex chipping assumed to be ingress chipping is actually pull-out chipping.

Not even Cliff Stamp seemed to have considered this as a common occurrence, which goes to show even the more technical-minded among us have their blind spots...

I actually have a couple of knives with rotten leather handles. How they got that way, I have no idea. They came in a group that I bought at an antique shop because I wanted a couple of old Westerns in the lot. I paid little to nothing for them. Incidentally, both of the knives with rotten leather handles also still have perfectly serviceable carbon steel blades, so whatever the poor things went through that left the leather in such a sorry state wasn't enough to rust non-stainless steel to the point of uselessness. My point wasn't that leather is a bad handle material (in fact I like it a lot), it was that if you insist on nothing but stainless because you aren't willing to do the minimal maintenance required to keep carbon steel in acceptable condition, I hardly think that leather handles with the maintenance that they need is a good fit for you.

I'd be curious to see a picture of any SOG leather handle from the 90s upward that is badly rotted. And what the rest of the knife looks like...

Gaston

 

[hunter55]

Those Amazonian's take it out of one.

Half the knives I've broken over the years were junk; but I thought looked great. Which is why for all the best intentions some knives have more luck built in. The best are those you have used for a good while and so trust.
I once thought I had bought a Cold Steel Master Tanto when they first came out. Carried it in Africa for three months with confidence. A week after getting home to the UK it snapped in two. I then sourced the real deal which I still have today, 25 years on. (I'm in no hurry to buy another Tanto, as they aren't that great utility wise).

Very interesting views, thanks for sharing. QUESTION: which is the "real deal which you still have today, 25 years on" ?

 

[Standard78]

It merely requires careful attention... You involuntarily twist the knife slightly to help its removal whenever it "sticks". When you feel the "cracking" during that minuscule twist, before you start to pull it out, then you know it's the twisting that got it... Simple.

Another clue that this is what happened is also very simple to figure out: The chipping in those particular cases immediately occurs in pairs: This is because the "pinched" area of the blade naturally becomes the "center" of your involuntary "twisting", so the area in the middle of that twist has less sideways motion, but as you go outward from this center axis, in both directions, the amount of sideways motion increases, and causes apex chipping at both "outer" ends of the most tightly "pinched" area...: This is a logical explanation for the chips to consistently occur in pairs when you were not careful about avoiding the twisting motion: Here you can see the effect on one knife in 5160 and one in D-2, both occurring the same day on different steels:

Yes one pair of chips is closer together than the other, but it is the same basic principle in both cases: The difference is because the bigger knife buried itself much deeper in the same log, creating a "broader" area of severe pinching, its "shearing" edges thus being further apart... This effect is accentuated by slightly rotting ground logs that are softer on the outside but with harder cores...

Both set of chips occurred simultaneously in one "unstick"...

And yes, Full Flat Grinds are more vulnerable to pull-out twist than Sabre Hollow Grinds, because a low-saber hollow grind binds more in the wood, so lateral twisting motion is less "free": Lateral motion either forces the wood apart, or, if the wood is too rigid, then lateral motion pinches the hollow grind, causing the concave curvature of the hollow grind to convert lateral motion into vertical motion, "unsticking" the apex before major lateral forces are applied to it.

It is not complicated to visualize.

A lot of apex chipping assumed to be ingress chipping is actually pull-out chipping.

Not even Cliff Stamp seemed to have considered this as a common occurrence, which goes to show even the more technical-minded among us have their blind spots...





I'd be curious to see a picture of any SOG leather handle from the 90s upward that is badly rotted. And what the rest of the knife looks like...

Gaston

No.
Most people don't "involuntarily" twist knives when they remove them from wood. You're purposefully trying to damage the edge by torquing it.

Also... that chipping wouldn't be so significant if you didn't put ridiculously high angles on them. You turned perfectly good knives into straight razors.

Here's a simple chart that you should use from now on.

 

[BladeScout]

I actually have a couple of knives with rotten leather handles. How they got that way, I have no idea. They came in a group that I bought at an antique shop because I wanted a couple of old Westerns in the lot. I paid little to nothing for them. Incidentally, both of the knives with rotten leather handles also still have perfectly serviceable carbon steel blades, so whatever the poor things went through that left the leather in such a sorry state wasn't enough to rust non-stainless steel to the point of uselessness. My point wasn't that leather is a bad handle material (in fact I like it a lot), it was that if you insist on nothing but stainless because you aren't willing to do the minimal maintenance required to keep carbon steel in acceptable condition, I hardly think that leather handles with the maintenance that they need is a good fit for you.

Yep, carbon steel knives with leather washers for a handle can hold up just fine over the years. As with any other blade/handle material, they just have to be cleaned/maintained.

I have a bunch (10-15, I forget) of Cattaraugus 225Q knives. Out of the bunch, two knives has several crumbled leather washers (these two knives are currently having the washers replaced). Two handles out of a bunch - not bad for old knives made during BigII, then brought home and used for decades after the War. What can I say, they are quality knives.

I took one of them out for a spin this weekend as I do on a regular basis and it worked just fine for the tasks at hand for several days. It did food prep, whittling and a bit of chopping - just as the utility knife was designed to do (no, its NOT a quartermaster knife meant for opening boxes).

In spite of being old, in spite of not being of a wonder steel, in spite of having leather washers for a handle and in spite of not having a razor thin edge, it did well. One wonders how on Earth it didnt snap, crumble and/or rust in my hands during use the moment it was exposed to the woods.

Will it outperform my modern 'bushcraft' knives? Most likely not. It will how ever perform most of the same tasks (it just takes longer).

This particular knife has been sharpened and its being oiled after use. I gave the near perfect condition washers some leather oil and a dab of Sno-seal.

I fully expect it to last another 70 yrs.

 

[leghog]

Half the knives I've broken over the years were junk; but I thought looked great.

Which I take to mean the other half you broke weren't junk. Which reinforces what I've suspected for quite some time --- broken knives are as often the fault of the user as much as the fault of the maker or materials.

 

[leghog]

These stacked leather washers are about 70 years old now and haven't been treated. Kinfolks 395 and Case 325-6"

These are of the same vintage, (just a few years earlier)and have been treated. PAL RH35 USN Mk1. PAL RH36, and PAL USN Mk2 in top pic, Another Cattaraugus 225Q in lower pic. The RH36 is closet to its stacked leather retaining the original character.

 

[GREENJACKET]

Which I take to mean the other half you broke weren't junk. Which reinforces what I've suspected for quite some time --- broken knives are as often the fault of the user as much as the fault of the maker or materials.

Of the knives I've broken they seem to fall into two classes.
They were not of a very good quality to start with being budget knives.
They were heat treated too high so couldn't handle the lateral stresses.
Prying and hammering/beating are the two main actions that snap the metal.

Edge damage seems to come in two ways:
Rolling over, often until it breaks off, switching burr. Tends to happen on more pliable soft edges.
Or cracking out where a fault line runs for a piece to fall out. Shards shattering like glass. Tends to happen to hard edges.

Impact into a plastic hard material like wood and the impact causes the hair line break to start. The material grabs and on pulling out the final run of the fault line finds its escape so the chip is left imbedded in the material. I've had both tiny and huge crescent chip outs when this has happened.
Impact into harder than the steel material and then the steel has to give. If the steel rings then energy is passing through the steel and if there are fault lines to be found then these will align up until full failure. Softer steels are more able to transfer these energies and harmonics. But if the steel is just poor, full of faults, then faults lines will grow faster.
Big subject but quality and property of steels do matter. And how they have been heat treated to compliment the task the blade is intended for. That is the job of the blade maker. The consumer hopes that the knife has the luck that it was built right.

I don't go out of my way to break knives and I don't break one often, but I have broken a few. I do try and keep to the perceived limitations of the blade design and intended use.

Since I've taken up knife throwing I've abused a few knives for the fun of it. Its a highly destructive occupation as the sport put pressures and stresses on a blade at the level that is so punishing. The process of hundreds of throws will find any fault. Only blades designed and heat treated for the sport have any real chance of surviving. What is interesting is how normal knives succumb to the onslaught. Some chip and bend, Others break clean across like glass; snap.
Throwing knives into wood is a quick way to destroy them. Studying the damage is interesting though not that interesting! It means a perfectly ok knife has been turned into junk.

As I've broken most thicknesses of blade I've come to the conclusion that Thickness has little to do with how strong a blade is. Heat treat a thick piece of steel too hard and it will be brittle. Heat too soft and it will bend rather than snap, but won't hold an edge that long, well not a keen one.
I know its obvious, but manufacturers can't decide which way to go. They heat treat a small knife the same as their large blades, or the other way around. Many manufacturers use their standard method of heat treatment for any known steel. Fine but it doesn't accommodate the different uses different size and styles of blades have to contend with. Some try to do better and heat treat to compliment the intended use. Some do it better than others. Some just get it wrong or find the consumer uses the blade completely differently to that first envisaged. Reputation for getting it right sells knives and good marketing helps.
One way to get over breaking is to build stout. Build it thick. Generally that doesn't make a good knife, well not for cutting.

I'm a consumer. I don't make the knives I use. So I look out for the blades that have got a reputation for doing their job well. A good thin blade for cutting. A stouter one for bushcraft. Different styles for different tasks. There are knives that stand out from the crowd, which I tend to go for. Best in class, with a proven track record.
Sometimes I just take a punt and hope the blade is up to it. Feels right, looks right, give it a go. The maker has a good reputation.

I've had several KarBars over the years. They are not all the same. Build quality has varied over the years. Some have more luck in them than others. There are no absolutes in this game, but you might just be lucky.

 

[pinnah]

No.
Most people don't "involuntarily" twist knives when they remove them from wood. You're purposefully trying to damage the edge by torquing it.

Also... that chipping wouldn't be so significant if you didn't put ridiculously high angles on them. You turned perfectly good knives into straight razors.

Here's a simple chart that you should use from now on.

These are per side, not inclusive, correct?

 

[hexenjager]

It merely requires careful attention... You involuntarily twist the knife slightly to help its removal whenever it "sticks". When you feel the "cracking" during that minuscule twist, before you start to pull it out, then you know it's the twisting that got it... Simple.

Another clue that this is what happened is also very simple to figure out: The chipping in those particular cases immediately occurs in pairs: This is because the "pinched" area of the blade naturally becomes the "center" of your involuntary "twisting", so the area in the middle of that twist has less sideways motion, but as you go outward from this center axis, in both directions, the amount of sideways motion increases, and causes apex chipping at both "outer" ends of the most tightly "pinched" area...: This is a logical explanation for the chips to consistently occur in pairs when you were not careful about avoiding the twisting motion: Here you can see the effect on one knife in 5160 and one in D-2, both occurring the same day on different steels:

Yes one pair of chips is closer together than the other, but it is the same basic principle in both cases: The difference is because the bigger knife buried itself much deeper in the same log, creating a "broader" area of severe pinching, its "shearing" edges thus being further apart... This effect is accentuated by slightly rotting ground logs that are softer on the outside but with harder cores...

Both set of chips occurred simultaneously in one "unstick"...

And yes, Full Flat Grinds are more vulnerable to pull-out twist than Sabre Hollow Grinds, because a low-saber hollow grind binds more in the wood, so lateral twisting motion is less "free": Lateral motion either forces the wood apart, or, if the wood is too rigid, then lateral motion pinches the hollow grind, causing the concave curvature of the hollow grind to convert lateral motion into vertical motion, "unsticking" the apex before major lateral forces are applied to it.

It is not complicated to visualize.

A lot of apex chipping assumed to be ingress chipping is actually pull-out chipping.

Not even Cliff Stamp seemed to have considered this as a common occurrence, which goes to show even the more technical-minded among us have their blind spots...





I'd be curious to see a picture of any SOG leather handle from the 90s upward that is badly rotted. And what the rest of the knife looks like...

Gaston

Isn't it also possible that the "cracking" you feel twisting a blade embedded in wood is coming from the wood itself and not absolute proof that all of that damage is being done during removal? Or, as GREENJACKET talked about, the impact causing cracking (the actual chip causing damage) and the damage caused on removal that you say you observe is just the already failed area coming off of the blade? I hardly think that a picture of a couple of chipped edges that we don't have any real way of knowing how the damage occurred is proof of the theories you push. In fact, other than being on the straight part of the edge instead of the transition to the curve of the blade, the chips in the top knife in the picture look almost exactly like a pair that I sharpened out of the edge of a d2 folder blade a couple of months ago. Those were most certainly not caused by chopping as that knife has never chopped. Ever. They were caused by cutting twine and net wrap off of hay bales but still looked exactly like the ones we're supposed to take as proof of your theories.

You keep ignoring my point on the leather handle. It isn't that leather handles will instantly rot to ruin if taken outdoors. Very far from it. I have lots of stacked leather handled knives and the handles are in excellent condition or at least in the case of old knives purchased second hand, as good of shape as their condition when I acquired them would allow. My point is, being dismissive of carbon steel because of potential for deterioration but not of stacked leather because of potential for deterioration represents a logical disconnect. Without going back and rereading this thread, a couple of other examples that come to mind would be recommending nylon sheaths due to the fact that they won't scratch the blade on a knife that you'll be chopping with (an activity certain to leave its mark on a blade eventually) and saying that you don't think turning big sticks into small sticks should be part of the design of a blade when nearly everything you post has to do with chopping performance which is nothing but turning big sticks into smaller sticks unless you're stopping before you chop all the way through. Logical disconnects. They make it very difficult to take your other points seriously since all you give to back them up are your own deductions, the products of your logic and therefore subject to the same kinds of disconnects.

History is full of examples of unconventional thinkers who had ideas that defied the experts and the conventional wisdom about the field and were ultimately proven right. Could you have discovered some up until now unknown principles of knife performance that allows a blade to be made out of steels that most are unenthusiastic about, thinned to edge angles more befitting a shaving implement or premium Japanese kitchen knife and then treated like an ax? I think it's unlikely, but not impossible. What those who are remembered as revolutionary thinkers offered that you don't is unassailable proof of their concept that isn't able to be faked. Something that is testable, observable and repeatable so that even a sceptic seeking to prove them wrong but who faithfully recreates the test will get the same results and themselves be proven wrong and their ideas changed as a result. Without that, you're just some dude on the internet declaring that you're right and the experts in the field are wrong. It's tough to take that very seriously. Therefore the burdon of proof is on you if you want anyone to be convinced that your unconventional ideas have merit and the conventional wisdom should be overturned.

 

[Standard78]

These are per side, not inclusive, correct?

Definitely per side bud. These are relatively safe numbers to go by when you're working with non-super steels IMO.

 

[GREENJACKET]

I've had the odd crescent thumb sized chip out, deep into the grind. Huge, and the damage was caused by the initial impact. The fault line ran up to the softer differential steel, along and round back down and out. The force energy had to find a route out so traveled along the most brittle path. The material grip ensured the return direction was back down again. A very obvious one was on an Al Mar Pathfinder. Huge blade, huge forces, to hard a heat treatment too the blade.
All vey well having hard edges but if the blade can't take lateral, pry bar, pressures and snaps, then its not a blade with much luck. I like a hard keen blade on a small folder, but for bush whackers they need to take power punishment, and a lot of that comes from the side.

I don't get it, the comparisons of steels of small knives translated to bigger blades. Completely different game. Cant understand the need to make a thick medium sized blade just to add steel to have a hard edge. Even differential heat treatment has some disadvantages and in truth is more to do with the skill of the maker; hard to do well. Doesn't always turn out the way it should; there is some luck involved.

 

[pinnah]

Regarding chopping....

For general backpacking and hiking, I have zero need for chopping. Stove and tarp provide heat and shelter.

For XC ski trips in wooded low lands, I'll often carry an Emberlit stove. Any reasonably solid and sharp knife will de-twig small branches with a "chop" or "hack". Small branches are cut using a bend and slice type cut or are just broken out. Larger branches are sectioned using a small folding saw, which I find infinitely more efficient than cross grain chopping. A 4" to 5" blade easily batons wrist sized wood to the twig size the stove prefers.

Backpacking trips that involve an actual campfire for recreation are relatively rare. Again, the only chopping involves minor delimbing of branches by hacking off pinkie sized limbs. And again, firewood is sectioned with a folding saw and split with a knife. I'm playing around with 7" to 8" knives for this to handle thicker wood. Much more versatile and much lighter than a hatchet for this use.

Car camping trips mean precut, locally purchased firewood and no locally harvested wood. A small axe and 5" camp knife more than suffice.

For my purposes, a convexed grind of some sort is by the best, particularly for batonning. Hollow grinds are the worst in this regard. I don't at all understand getting a blade stuck in wood when chopping as I simply never have a need or desire to section wood with a knife. If the wood can't be cut in a single strike, it's time for a saw or axe.

YMMV.