Those knives are typically real soft and very low wear resistance and thus they wear really fast. According to Mission their Beta-Ti is supposed to work really well exactly for that application. There was a review done awhile back where a guy compared one to a bunch of stainless knives in regards to cutting open bags of sand, through the middle, not the top, and it did really well. I have a M2 blade at 65 HRC that would make an excellent sod cutter, I should do a comparison, I could use honing time to gauge wear though that correlates to machinability as well, but in any case would be interesting.
Outdoors said:
Yes, that is a more typical soil profile, though it appears relatively uncemented. A fairly loose soil.
Yes, it gets rocky in some places but never gets overly dense. The biggest problem is often there is no actual soil just rock, some front yards are just a big rock, nothing digs in that. I helped a friend set a fence a few years back and about one out of every five spots actually worked first go. Otherwise it was take the post digger to create a pilot hole and hit a layer of rock immediately which would just break the post under the sledge if you tried to drive it through.
But, since the rocks are covered with soil, you can't dig them out til yiou find them ... with the knife.
Yes, poke around with the knife, use it to loosen the soil, not stabbing more pushing. You also lead with the spine of the knife not the edge. I often do it in the worse way as an extreme case senario just to see, cutting wind holes for fire pits for example.
But it all get's back to the same point - why not use an appropriate digging tool?
Don't have one usually. Many of the survival knives are multi-purpose in task, and are made from steels which are of the same time used for digging tools, designed to take impacts.
Again it is more of an occasional use, something the knife can do if it has to, not one of the principle designs for most knives anyway, some of the survival ones are so slanted with large board tips for digging.
A digging stick is easily constructed and using one presnets no danger to the edge or point of the knife.
In the majority of cases a digging stick is of benefit, it is rare that a hole has to be done *NOW*. Often you can just crack a dried branch and dig up local soil, you don't even need to shape it. I have been playing with a few designs lately and rediscovered how hard it is to cut a hollow without a chisel or hooked knife.
Knives can however be a better choice than wood in rooty soil which is common here and for cutting away sod, hense the japanese root and garden knives which also work well for cutting up vegetation for food as you can cut at the soil near the base and go right through the stalk.
In the winter digging sticks also don't work well as the ground freezes solid and you get a lot of ice and wood doesn't handle ice well. You can then use rocks to make a pick, similar to a stone axe. Bone, might work as well.
-Cliff
