Discuss: Ebay Mistakes vs Quality Budget Knives, Batoning

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SmoothLikePowerSteering

Joined
Sep 18, 2022
Messages
15
Hey Y'all,
Firstly, post #1 for me so thank you for letting me join your community. My name is Ian and I've loved knives all my live, currently I'm exploring bushcraft and so that kind of emvironment is what my sharpies need to handle.

I bought some knives off ebay... The seller makes the knives and has 100% seller rating with long history, I believed them to be good knives until I used one to split a round of oak in a technique called batoning. It broke so quick I was shocked. Three waps and it was done, blade beoke right in half. It's D2 steel, did I buy the wrong knife for the job or is this knife a lemon? My technique may have been off as well, I struck the blade on the inside of the cut instead of the side where the blade protuded past the round, due to the shape of the blade (chamfered on top for the last 3", thinner surface). Blade is 2" wide, ~8" long full tang with 5" handle. I can't seem to post a picture from my camera roll- tia
 
Hey Ian! Welcome to Bladeforums! I'm new as well. Great community, and lots of helpful advice located here! I can't offer much as i'm learning as well, what seems to be the common consensus, at least on youtube, for something like batoning you'd want 1095 or something more suited to the task. From what I understand some stainless/supersteel is more brittle than others and cannot necessarily be beat on as hard. I'm going to assume you're using a stick to hit your knife, and not a hammer or some such thing.
 
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Your assumption is correct, It was a 2" dia round. I have used a tom brown tracker knife in a similar fashion and it took everything I gave it. In comparison, I barely gave it any power this time. And it's 3/16" d2. :/
 
Welcome to Bladeforums SLPS.

Ebay is a notoriously unreliable place to buy knives. There are a lot of people selling cheap junk and calling it "custom". And they can call the steel anything they want, it's not like Ebay is going to test it. And I wouldn't accept a seller rating at face value.

I believe a quality D2 blade should be able to handle some light battoning.

In order to post pictures you either need to be a Gold member or higher, or you need to use a photo hosting site like Imgur.com.

I'm sure we'd all like to see the knife if you can post some pictures.

Looks like I just repeated what Arathol said :) .
 
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SmoothLikePowerSteering said:
Your assumption is correct, It was a 2" dia round. I have used a tom brown tracker knife in a similar fashion and it took everything I gave it. In comparison, I barely gave it any power this time. And it's 3/16" d2. :/
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1095 RC 56-58 for the Tom Brown, and professionally manufactured/constructed by a good company. Does the blade you bought have any indicative markings?
 
Alone said:
I live in South Texas, and we're up to our ears in REALLY relentless wood. (*Oak, Mesquite, Ligustrum, etc.)

In my humble opinion, D2 is the wrong steel for hard use.
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Good to know, I'll sell these knives if I can get a replacement. The round was a piece of dry oak, no knots, dry but so old it was almost rotting. About 6" dia and I tried to split off a third
 
SmoothLikePowerSteering said:
I'm downloading imgur, pics to come. The company is IPAK also CFK and blades have their logo
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I noticed one of IPAK's D2 blades comes out to 2.00$. I'm not sure i'd trust a 2 dollar blade with batoning regardless of the steel type. If you're going to be hard-using the knife, (some companies even consider batoning wood "abuse") the more you spend, the more mileage and pride you will get/take from your blade.

Edit : My mistake, those are bids lol
Edit #2 : Not reading great things about their knives, though.
 
SmoothLikePowerSteering said:
Howso?
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I've only skimmed, really, but the blades that have been sold in the past on amazon have some similar instances of the blade snapping, and one guy claiming they may make it domestically, but import very cheap parts or something. If you're into bushcraft may I suggest Esee knives? They are extremely reasonably priced and the warranty is rock solid as long as you don't throw it against a tree or a wall. They've got a good lineup from little'uns to big choppers. All in very well heat treated 1095.
 
SmoothLikePowerSteering said:
Good to know, I'll sell these knives if I can get a replacement. The round was a piece of dry oak, no knots, dry but so old it was almost rotting. About 6" dia and I tried to split off a third
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"Rotting" is one thing. However, for the most part, aged Oak is a booger.

I spend a lot of time at remote Farms and Ranches, and usually grab from established wood piles. Aged Oak may as well be like batoning rock, only without the brittleness. It is very tough and very relentless. The only other wood that I have seen wreak as much havoc on steel is Mesquite.

Oak, Mesquite, and aged Ligustrum are hell on blades.



*Why would you go to a D2 blade when you had a TBT? I've beaten my TOPS TBT-1s, 107Es, and SXBs like I hated 'em, and have NEVER had an issue.
 
D2 isn’t known for high toughness but has decent edge retention. That is , with good D2 from reputable manufacturers.

I think you’d be better off with something like 3V or 420hc which is much tougher. There’s several other steels with high toughness ranging from carbon steel to low and high alloy steels.
 
I took a look at the seller's page. Some of the knives look nice but most of these auctions start at a buck. There are plenty of Pakistani sellers on Instagram with similar visual quality and style. I could be wrong but I think it's a pretty safe bet that these are effectively props. They probably aren't made from the claimed steels and probably don't have much of a heat treatment.
 
I've been religiously scouring the dark crevasses of Ebay and Etsy for good knives. If the seller has a ton of good looking knives available and it's made of D2 then that's a red flag that they are most likely importing from Pakistan. They crank out an immense volume of blades, for which quality definitely takes a backseat to quantity, in order to flood these sites and it becomes incredibly difficult to find the buried gems. Many of them resort to flat out lying about their names, locations, and where they are made.
 
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