How good is the USAF survival knife? I've always wanted one becuase of the looks but, never had a chance to play with one. I also see a lot of talk about "real" ones V a "knock off" version. Sorry to take this in a different direction but, I'm guessing this subject will get a lot of USAF survival knife fans looking at it.
Thanks for any help
Most of the ones you'll find are either made by Camillus or Ontario. Camillus made the better knife of the two. Brand new they average only about $30 to $40, and they can often be had military surplus in new condition for about $20. One of the very first things I did with it was to replace the carborundum hone in the front hone pocket with an identically sized EZE-Lap diamond hone which fit perfectly in the hone pocket.
Myself, I've always liked this knife, and I liked the knife a even better after I used a sander to reprofile the blade to a convex edge and narrow out the profile some. It now cuts like a good Marbles hunting knife.
The knife was designed by Marbles for the US military in the 1950's and the initial design was patterned off of a highly modified version of their 'Ideal Hunting Knife', which was a very popular knife with US aircrews in WWII. The ones made in the 1950's had a 6" blade and the ones made from about 1960 on had a 5" blade.
While everyone calls it the USAF Survival Knife, it's available through the supply system to all of the armed services, though it was designed by the USAF. The formal US military designation for the USAF survival knife is - Knife, Hunting, Sheathed, Survival, Pilot's - though many people originally dubbed it the 'Jet Pilot's Knife". Ontario got a new military contract a couple of years ago for a 'new' replacement called the ASEK - Aircrew Survival Egress Knife, which is just a fancy, modernized version of the older 1960 vintage 5" knife.
IMHO, this knife is pure function and not a participant in a beauty contest. To keep water and rust off of the steel handguard and out of the small area where the handguard and blade meet, I taped up the blade and handle, and used black automotive spray paint on the handguard, filling in the small crevices between the handguard and the blade with paint.
I buffed off the parkerizing. Parkerizing taints food that you cut and it was coming off anyway with the radical re-profiling. I used lemon juice to initially get a good patina going, and now through use, the patina has been getting better.
The 5" blade of 1095 carbon steel takes and holds a good edge with a hardness somewhere around Rc 57 - 58. It's size and shape are good for a variety of tasks from fieldcraft to dressing out and butchering a deer. It's also a wicked fighting weapon, especially if you sharpen the false edge.
Unlike what some pundits proclaim, the saw on the back of the military issue Pilot's Survival Knife (PSK) is NOT useless, far from it, and there are many vital tasks it excels at.
It was originally designed for sawing through an aluminum aircraft fuselage. However, for rapidly making notches and grooves, an important wilderness survival task, the saw on the spine of this knife blade is awesome.
While the saw is optimized for cutting through an aluminum aircraft fuselage, and it can notch wood very well, it also works great on things like antler and bone, often better than many regular saws due to the shape of the PSK's saw and the hardness of the material being sawed.
If you notch a section of antler around it's circumference, you can break it relatively cleanly, and bone is much the same. You can often break things like antler and bone simply by scoring them with the edge of the saw. The PSK saw also makes an excellent wood rasp for shaping and scraping wood.
The notches the saw makes, interestingly enough, tend to be sized just right for paracord. It can still saw through wood, such as smaller branches, etc, but you occasionally might have to knock the teeth clear of sawdust, as they are not self-cleaning with wood. The saw also acts like a really good wood rasp, with wood filing and shaping qualities reminiscent of a Nicholson '4 in Hand' file.
The saw being shaped the way it does, it really doesn't interfere that much with batoning, and the teeth are not really effected by batoning unless you commit the horror upon your knife of batoning with a rock (which I witnessed on TV some time ago by a 'survival expert' - the individual used a rock to baton upon the serrated edge of a double edged boot knife).
The hammer pommel, in addition to being a hammer, allows the knife to be baton-ed straight into wood, in addition to standard batoning, but you do have to excersize some common sense about that particular task. But, the ability to do that does come in handy.
You can hammer with the handle clenched in your fist, or for precise hammering of things like small tacks and stuff, you can grasp the blade with the saw edge towards your palm, and hammer with the flat side of the hexagon head pommel.
The sharpened false edge on the front amongst other things also makes a good scraper, like for vegetables, plants, and bones, and can function as a kind of draw knife.
The flat profile of the tip allows for a very sharp point for such tasks as initial cuts on game. The sharpened false edge adds to it's qualities for drilling holes in wood and other things, like stabbing an opponent as it was also expected to serve as a fighting weapon if need be.
