Is this 'batoning' and firewood chopping with a knife a passing trend?

Shotgun said:
Not to pick on you but I've heard it said often that "you risk breaking your most important tool" when batoning comes up. Can someone clarify that for me? My problem with that statement is 3 fold.

1) I don't believe that a knife is your most important tool. Backpackers all over the world including people who make money doing it don't carry anything but a keychain knife so how important is it really? I like knives and see there value but even I don't place it in my top 5 of must haves when I go for a hike.
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You won't know how important any tool is until the need arises. Those carrying a razor blade - or "Classic" SAK - are running the risk that they will need more. The classic answer -- the historic majority opinion - is that one should have stout knife when in the wilderness because, on average, it is the most useful woods tool. Ignore centuries of received wisdom if you will and at your peril. Perhaps all will go as planned. It usually does. But . . . .

2) If a knife did break...so what? I've yet to find a picture of a knife that has disintegrated from batoning. Every pic of a broken knife I've seen has IMO still been useful. Not as easy to use maybe as it once was but a sharp edge is a sharp edge.
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Every "broken" knife I have seen surpasses in utility the best knives man has had for 99.9% of our existence.

3) And the one that really doesn't make sense to me. If it WERE so important, why on earth would you only have one? I mean let's put aside for a moment the fact that this is BLADEforums where you would be hard pressed to find anyone here who only carries one knife in the woods, regardless of need... If this was your A number one most important tool, where's the backup?
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You prioritize your load. Opinions differ. In truth, I have a SAK "Farmer" in addition to a 4" sheath knife when backpacking. Others say, "One is none." (Not that they really mean it. If 1 = 0 and 2 = 1, then 2 = 0 :p) Choices.
 
Baton threads for some odd reason seem to always devolve into 9mm-vs-.45, AK-vs-AR15, Chevy-vs-Ford. But since I've been quoted I'll continue to play.

Debate is fun, but debating whether or not to baton is like debating changing a tire. Everyone should know how to do it, but most people rarely if ever have to do so. No one seriously argues that you shouldn't know how, or that changing a tire has no value.

Splitting wood is useful, everyone should know how to do it, but/and in many locations it's just no more necessary than churning your own butter. Here in Florida (and most of the Southeast) there is always abundant pine and oak deadwood and other flammables for pickup, an almost endless supply, in all seasons and in all weather. Splitting rarely necessary, even if you just wanted to demonstrate the technique. Dead palm fronds make fantastic kindling and burns amazingly well. That's me, and my usual SE locale. Out West and up North there is wood that is both more scarce and more in need of 'processing', so there it is. Baton away as needed.

Hi @ThomasLinton, I always enjoy your posts. We are of an age (I like your illustration), and of course splitting wood with a knife is an ancient technique, my point was that I never heard the term 'baton' until recently and I think its popularity is newfound. Baton-ing with a knife requires more care and caution than splitting with an axe. I'm thinking of some popularly over the top youTube videos with people supposedly baton-ing through insane knife-breakers like hardwood fence rails and railroad ties. And baton-ing seems to have assumed a cult-like importance in some online forums, including sometimes BF. Stress seems to be placed on pounding very thick hardwood Yule logs with increasingly tiny knives, and in my experience that's putting your knife at risk. And yes, that's probably a harmless passing fad.
 
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Tallahassee,
Baton-ing with a knife requires more care and caution than splitting with an axe.
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I have taught tenderfoots how to baton with all the safety precautions, including the limitations of the knife being used in a short 1/2 hour lesson
Then an hour of supervised practice and they are good to go
They use Mora Companions to baton 2" rounds, and then feather sticks the slivers
Once the round is sercurely placed on a base, and they are holding the knife and tapping the blade to go thru the round, the blade is nowhere near the user.

Axe use!
Even a small hatchet
A glancing blow that spins off
a one pound sharpened edge not in control

Tired, wet, cold numb hands, or darkness
That is when I personally stop using an axe
Then what?
I can retreat to the safety of resonable battoning
 
neeman said:
Tallahassee,


I have taught tenderfoots how to baton with all the safety precautions, including the limitations of the knife being used in a short 1/2 hour lesson
Then an hour of supervised practice and they are good to go
They use Mora Companions to baton 2" rounds, and then feather sticks the slivers
Once the round is sercurely placed on a base, and they are holding the knife and tapping the blade to go thru the round, the blade is nowhere near the user.

Axe use!
Even a small hatchet
A glancing blow that spins off
a one pound sharpened edge not in control

Tired, wet, cold numb hands, or darkness
That is when I personally stop using an axe
Then what?
I can retreat to the safety of resonable battoning
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Don't forget you can baton with an axe (within reasonable size and single bit), hatchet or hawk as well. I do sometimes. On a side note does anyone know if the correct spelling is batoning or battoning. Both show up wrong on the browser spell check.
 
Woods Walker said:
Don't forget you can baton with an axe (within reasonable size and single bit), hatchet or hawk as well. I do sometimes. On a side note does anyone know if the correct spelling is batoning or battoning. Both show up wrong on the browser spell check.
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The correct spelling is "batoning."

baton -- third-person singular simple present batons, present participle batoning, simple past and past participle batoned

To strike with a baton.
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2 of the 3 serious axe accidents I've been around were operator error due to a combo of fatigue/cold/twilight. #3 was somebody obsessed with splitting wood that was too big for the tool and the time, and not needed besides.

@WoodsWalker, sounds like an excellent class. If you can't make a fire by splitting two inch rounds, you can't make a fire.
It's these pound-athons with guys tackling huge tree trunks with a belt knife that I see as the fad.
 
I hope it's not a "passing trend" As it is a great test for a knife in review just to prove it's splitting ability, durability, etc. I've done it a few times myself to split some wood that was too large for my liking.
 
Tallahassee said:
It's these pound-athons with guys tackling huge tree trunks with a belt knife that I see as the fad.
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I think some of that is born of a Sunday morning need to get out with their knives for dirt time. Nothing wrong with practicing skills but betting if staying out for a few days most of those people would probably transition over to twig fire methodologies or anything else that is energy saving including using the fire to break up longer logs/sticks.
 
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Talk about timing. Re: breaking a blade while batoning. Happened to my neighbor today, using a brand new mTech Trailmaster knockoff from Amazon, a Christmas present from his wife (they are not knife people). He called me over to help him with his brand-new, out of the box mTech that was wedged in the first small log he had tried to split with it. It was stuck just at spine level, 3 inches deep into a dry, well seasoned piece of Florida oak, 4 inches thick and 18 inches long. Not bent, just wedged, and aligned/centered straight and correctly. I started carefully tapping it GENTLY out for him and it snapped clean right in front of the hilt.
Knife was brand new. Neighbor's a bright, handy guy and says he did nothing excessive in the first few blows before it wedged. I'll believe him. We can armchair QB endlessly but that long thick blade should not have snapped off in that particular wood. It does happen.
I did a little post mortem on the mTech and I'll post something on it, hopefully with pics.
 
Tallahassee said:
Talk about timing. Re: breaking a blade while batoning. Happened to my neighbor today, using a brand new mTech Trailmaster knockoff from Amazon, a Christmas present from his wife (they are not knife people). He called me over to help him with his brand-new, out of the box mTech that was wedged in the first small log he had tried to split with it. It was stuck just at spine level, 3 inches deep into a dry, well seasoned piece of Florida oak, 4 inches thick and 18 inches long. Not bent, just wedged, and aligned/centered straight and correctly. I started carefully tapping it GENTLY out for him and it snapped clean right in front of the hilt.
Knife was brand new. Neighbor's a bright, handy guy and says he did nothing excessive in the first few blows before it wedged. I'll believe him. We can armchair QB endlessly but that long thick blade should not have snapped off in that particular wood. It does happen.
I did a little post mortem on the mTech and I'll post something on it, hopefully with pics.
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If youre doing post mortem on the blade , youll already know this but Im going to say it anyway .

different metal has different properties ... stainless steels , especially the mystery metals used in knock off knives at times , has to be brittle as glass almost in order to have any hope of holding something like a cutting edge . The blades have to be thick to give them some chance of not breaking under regular use .

thicker blades dont always mean more impact resistance and elasticity in a blade , its got a lot to do with how its heat treated , and what its made from in the beginning .
 
Brittle steel. Mystery metal. Supposedly 440, but who knows.
I posted a review of the MT 151 in the Knife Reviews section.

I have a couple of mTechs for yard work. They've withstood a lot of hard use & abuse. But my neighbor's failed completely right out of the box.
 
Myal said:
different metal has different properties ... stainless steels , especially the mystery metals used in knock off knives at times , has to be brittle as glass almost in order to have any hope of holding something like a cutting edge . The blades have to be thick to give them some chance of not breaking under regular use .

thicker blades dont always mean more impact resistance and elasticity in a blade , its got a lot to do with how its heat treated , and what its made from in the beginning .
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I won't disagree about cheap China SS being total trash or improperly heat treated. I have found that SS, even thin stock from cheap knives which are shaving sharp can baton. Showed my friend how to baton with the .079 Mora clipper I gifted to him. I think he got the hang of it rather well.







A .098 SS knife. Batoning wood for the small tent stove.



Another SS.098 knife. This one batoning during very cold weather through hard wood.



It got stuck on a knot or something and the beating, which was very hard actually started to pull the blade out of the handle but the knife didn't break.



So thin SS can baton just fine within reason IMHO.
 
I've battened with knives ever since I started using knives when out camping, maybe 20 years ago. Never had one snap on me but I don't usually push the limits of my knives. An exception would be some of the Bussekin and BRKT knives I have, I feel confident enough to hammer them through tougher/bigger stuff. In that time I've seen a few axe injuries, most caused by fatigue, not concentrating 100% or trying too hard to split something.

For me there's room for batoning with a knife and splitting with an axe. If I'm only carrying one tool then it's a sturdy knife, as such batoning will be a skill/activity I continue with.
 
An old fiskars hatchet , handle wrapped in 550 lives in my pack , along with a cold steel srk. The pelican 1020 case kit I built has a leatherman new wave in it. My point? I've got a hatchet , a baton able fixed blade and a multi tool , that are in my pack if there's even a chance I'm going anywhere near the bush. I carry this pack everyday. Nice to have options
 
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