- Joined
- Nov 25, 2006
- Messages
- 7,038
I believe that some techniques\skills that this site has taught me are a bit more important than others. And much of the fire starting techniques are right up there. I don't have a lot of practice making these things other than crude efforts, which were functional actually, for fires last winter and this summer. I wanted to see what knives that I owned were better performers for this task. I did not take any machetes, axes, hawks, multitools ,folders etc. I just took what I would primarily consider a reasonable outdoor carry. I also had a Buck Path Finder 102 ? in this but it got deleted accidentaly. My impressions after using these knives on some dead evergreen branches were: 1. It isn't all that hard to make crude feathersticks. 2. I'm not that skilled at making them and I need more practice. 3. Knife angle and amount of downward pressure is an aquired skill\judgement improved with practice. 4. A thin sharp blade performs better for me. 5. I can use a larger blade and push down from above with my left thumb, and anything beyond aprox. three-four inches is redundant. 6. My heavier\bigger blades were less effective with feathering but still had splitting value. Although my ESEE 6 worked wonderfully............. So, it seems that I can compromise with one heavier chopper that doubles as a kindling splitter and is weaker at feathering, or bring a smaller thinner blade and a dedicated wood splitter like a small axe or hatchet. From what I saw today pretty much any reasonably sharp knife can be used for medium level feathersticks, the kind that don't look all that pretty but are effective for fire making, which is all I care about actually. I think that my tendencies now are to bring a thinner smaller blade and a hatchet. My experiences today show me that this is an important fire making skill that needs practice (for myself) to create an effective result. But on the other hand this isn't all that hard to do really. So it is not discouraging. All knives were just grabbed and tossed in the bag as is with no touch ups other than the last sharpening. I really noticed this when I used the stainless Companion that had been kicking around in a wet metal detecting pouch and slightly corroding in the car trunk for weeks. The carbon Heavy Duty performed much better than the thinner stainless Companion today.
