Cliff Stamp
BANNED
- Joined
- Oct 5, 1998
- Messages
- 17,562
mwelch8404 said:
I tried direct prying on a SUV with a jammed door, it is fairly easy to break the window away and work down to the latch and then cut it off. I was using a 22 oz framing hammer as a baton and swinging hard enough to drive a 3.5" nail into a 4x4" piece of pressure treated spruce in less than two hits, one side of the latch was cut off in less than fifty hits. I left the other side intact to see how easy it would be to crack.
You also need to lean really heavy on the handle to keep the knife in the cut, if you don't it just bounces around and does nothing. Most knives as well have a sweet spot (or two) in which they take impacts better so work along the spine until you get to a place of maximum comfort, if you try batoning on the wrong spot the vibrations can be painful. I would still want a pair of heavy gloves.
Based on what I have seen, I would want a solid tool steel blade, something like S7 ideally, at 58-60 HRC, and have the edge at about 0.050" thick and ground at 25 degrees per side. Thom if you get bored try this with out of yours and let me know how it turns out.
Anyway, I then cut a small pole about four feet long and roughly cut an edge on one side so it had a taper which allowed me to smash it down right next to the hinge, I then worked this back and forth until the other side of the hinge cracked off. It doesn't actually take very long but even with the pole it wasn't easy, you would need to be well above average in strength to do it with a 10" blade, it would be far faster to just cut the other side of the hinge off.
It might also be faster to just cut the actual door frame free of the hinge, as Lynn Thompson has shown, they are realtively easy to penetrate. I also tried cutting the latch free of the frame however it was impossible to get the knife in there. I even tried this after the door was open and it was very difficult. I also tried some initial prying with a GH khukuri which took a U shape with no effect on the door, no surprise there.
I talked to a friend of mine who runs a garage and he noted that a demolition saw would have cut through the latch easily once the metal was pryed away, or just cut the door directly (get rid of the glass). You can get these with battery packs so it might be an option for "urban" survival, they will go through anything and the saw + knife would have the door off very quickly, so would a small knife if you had something to cut into a prybar. Ref :
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y2...edneck/door_opened_with_extreme_prejudice.jpg
The khukuri is just wedged in there to keep the door open, it was mangled shut before the cutting started, it could not be opened by the latch from either side. As my brother showed a few weeks ago, you can also cut the hinges off the other side, this was actually easier than cutting off the latch which is a much harder and stronger metal.
[don't press on the handle]
V_Shrake said:
Yes, and wood gets tighter grained, or the grain twists or gets knotty the impacts need to be heavier to drive the blade into the wood, and if you don't press down on the handle heavily during the impact the knife will just rotate clear of the wood instead of going down into it.
There was a thread on the Swamp Rat forum awhile back where batoning was illustrated on wood which would be very hard with a maul and wedges as some of it was v'd, but it was batoned through readily and required a lot of force on the handle.
It is also a case of time or efficiency. If you press down on the handle you can split wood much faster because you direct the force into the wood rather than rotating the blade. Thus having a knife which can do it reduces the time you have to spend without a fire or shelter or whatever.
This is of course no different than considerations about cutting ability, but yet using the above logic this arguement doesn't hold because all the same cutting can also be done by the worse cutting knife made, it just takes you longer with more effort.
You can't argue for time efficiency in one case and then turn around and argue it has no value in another. Well you can, it is just contradictory. And yes, my opinions on folders for heavy use has changed as noted because the locks and blades have changed.
There are now lots of locks which have break points in the 1000 in.lbs class, this is actually more force than an average man can apply. They also have very thick blades and boast about massive pivot stability and strength of the handles. It makes no sense to restrict these to the same scope of work as a light FRN folder with a 1/8" blade.
Does anyone live where bali's are legal, how do they respond to impacts. As a side note, P.J. Turners knives are perfectly fine for heavy batoning, but they are not folders in the traditional sense.
I stated in the above clearly that you don't need such a knife, you don't even need a knife at all. You also don't need fire, or even modern synthetic clothing. It is just easier with them.
-Cliff
