My bk2 broke under the scales!! WTH!

I forgot to explain the reason behind the whole 'genuine survival situation'. It's been mentioned many times "if this happened (failure) when I really relied on it I'd be dead". But you aren't. You're in your back yard. Just like I am. Or have been. When I'm 530kms from ANYTHING resembling help, THEN I'm in a survival situation. THEN my knife is my best friend. THEN the last thing I'm going to do is break the singular tool that could get my festering butthole back to safety by trying to thump it through knotty friggin logs just so I can have more 'manageable' sized pieces of wood. Ok. Now the rant is over.. Until I think of something else..
 
Okay, let's try this again....

The reality of this situation is that nobody other than the OP knows just how much of a beating that knife took before it broke. From the look of that log, it certainly appears that there had been other unsuccessful attempts at batoning through it; and that comes as no surprise given the knots. I understand that the hype suggests the BK2 is indestructible - a veritable beast that will take every ounce of abuse that can be dished, and laugh at you while asking for more - but, at some point, common sense should come into play. Now, maybe the the OP was having a good time beating his BK2, and he didn't heed (or didn't recognize) that little voice that sounded....or, maybe he literally gave it a few whacks and it crumbled in his hand. All we know is what we've been told - I'll leave it at that for just a moment.
In another such instance of a Becker breaking in that manner, Ethan stated that it was a heat treat issue. I'll be honest, I don't know enough about such things to make a claim either way. Maybe the heat treat is to blame, and the knife broke before any reasonable person's common sense voice would have complained. Then again, maybe, just maybe, the OP should have considered that batoning through that particular log wasn't the best idea. Maybe not at first - nothing wrong with trying, right? - but by the time he was lining it up for the third attempt? Of course, that statement makes an assumption that those other marks were by attempts with this same knife. If I'm going to run with that assumption, I can't help but suggest the idea that the wielder of the knife is at least partially at fault. Yup - even if it was a bad heat treat. But that's just me throwing ideas out there.

FWIW (nothing) - I have a couple of knotted up logs in the back that I tried batoning with my BK9. That little voice of reason jumped in fairly quickly with a warning, and I heeded it. Just for giggles, I went in and got my MBB M8 - for those who aren't familiar, that's 5/16" thick 5160. I got that thing wedged in so tightly that I had a tough time beating it back out. I wasn't worried about breaking it; but it was not going to go through that piece of wood. (Okay, I'll admit it - I could have done it; but I wasn't willing to beat it through with a sledge hammer. Why not? Simply because I didn't want to damage the knife.)

To the OP - I'm sorry your knife broke...and don't take my comments too personally. I don't actually doubt your story; but, by the same token, I did mean it when I said trying to baton through that particular piece of wood looked like a bad idea. I wouldn't be surprised if KaBar's initial response is that your efforts constituted abuse; but I suspect that you'll be asked to send the knife in to be examined.
 
nickturbo said:
now you have two threads going, I really think that you should have given the company a chance to respond before you posted anything publicly
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Here's the deal,
I'm not slamming Ka-Bar, and I'm certainly not slamming Ethan Becker, but I think it's worth posting for a data point., especially given that it is not the first time this has happened.
I'm going through the proper channels of customer service to address any craftsmanship/production quality issues, and I've reached out to Ethan Becker.
The main reason for posting about this is that I'm craving reassurance from the Beckerhead tribe in regards to Ka-Bar/E.B. making it right, and that the usual "Trainwrecker" shouldn't break like that.
IE, some guys can disassemble a Sherman tank (old appliances, wood from Hell, and in Becker's words, "any metal softer than itself") with their BK2s, other guys (thankfully few) can't manage a 5" log with the grain.
Furthermore, Ka-Bar/BK&T has enough of a hard earned customer base, that even if I tried to be a bratty little jerk about it, it wouldn't affect them much, if at all. 😉
That, is not at all my intention of posting the threads on my broken knife.
The reason that there's two of them now is because I first posted it in the Ka-Bar forum (it is after all manufactured in Olean under E.B.'s supervision), someone strongly suggested that I post a thread in the BK&T forum because it is as much a Becker as it is a Kabar.
Bladeite told me that I got it bass ackwards, that was my bad. Live and learn. 😏
 
I wonder if the area it broke was the soft steel meeting the hard steel, temper line? Seems a rather clean break.
 
hhmoore said:
Okay, let's try this again....

To the OP - I'm sorry your knife broke...and don't take my comments too personally. I don't actually doubt your story; but, by the same token, I did mean it when I said trying to baton through that particular piece of wood looked like a bad idea. I wouldn't be surprised if KaBar's initial response is that your efforts constituted abuse; but I suspect that you'll be asked to send the knife in to be examined.
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Hey man, no worries. We're about honesty here. To be fully honest, the reason the log looks like a carved up pie is because I got halfway through the log to split it (unsuccessfully) with my 5160 RTAK II, and I bailed on that due to it being 3/16. I simply figured that the bk2 with the CroVan and 1/4" thickness would best it.
Do you think I'll ever try batoning anything other than knot-free lumber (or the wild equivalent)? No way, not unless I get a froe or one of the Buck chopping froes.
The stress caused by the possibility (maybe likelihood, from the way you talk) that I'll have to sit on/throw away an expensive broken knife not covered by an excellent company's warranty service, isn't worth hard using my $50+ knives... 😥
 
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Batoning in a survival situation is usually to get to the dry center of a wet log when there's no dry kindling. Once you have a fire going hot then you can burn damp, even wet wood. Some folks like to make sure their gear is capable and keep in practice. For the most part you would work your way to the center instead of going right through the middle.
 
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I have to admit I have had my bk2 for 3 maybe 4 years, and I used it as my only camp knife many a trips, I've beaten it through wood it was to small to span, I've beat the handle, I've just plain beat it lol

I under stand *proper form* but I never even heard of proper form when I was beating my bk2 in all the wrong ways... probably much harder and many more times than the OP.

I personally think there is a flaw in HIS knife, and beating the handle exposed it. Better to find out his knife is flawed this way than actually depending on it.

If there is a flaw in the steel, feather sticking won't expose it.
 
iwouldhurtafly said:
I really don't think there is some dreaded conspiracy with KA-BAR and their cutouts/heat treat, but probably a few outliers that get distilled and presented onto Bladeforums. If there was a major issue, KA-BAR would fix it.
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Which they may well have. But you have to recognize that we represent a tiny fraction of all of the knife buyers in the world. That's why, when I see an issue occur like the one that happened to the OP, I take it with a grain of salt. After all, any knife can fail. But when I see that issue repeated again and again and again, then based on the size of our community and comparing our numbers to those of the larger universe of knife buyers, we begin to approach statistical significance. Are we there yet? I don't know. But I'd say that three or more instances of exactly the same break at exactly the same place in slightly more than a year is something that Ka-Bar needs to pay attention to . . . assuming they haven't paid attention to it already.

For my money, if were looking for a BK-2, it would be one with a solid tang (i.e., no cutouts) or bust! YMMV.
 
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shinyedges said:
I have to admit I have had my bk2 for 3 maybe 4 years, and I used it as my only camp knife many a trips, I've beaten it through wood it was to small to span, I've beat the handle, I've just plain beat it lol

I under stand *proper form* but I never even heard of proper form when I was beating my bk2 in all the wrong ways... probably much harder and many more times than the OP.

I personally think there is a flaw in HIS knife, and beating the handle exposed it. Better to find out his knife is flawed this way than actually depending on it.

If there is a flaw in the steel, feather sticking won't expose it.
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Yes, thank you!

I get the idea "Don't be an idiot!" but as I said, it's too expensive, chunky, heavy, and boat-anchor-like to only do Mora-worthy tasks.
I've seen outright abuse on these beasts, and they seem to laugh it off. The breakage of my blade doesn't make the other 999+ blades any less capable.
Again, I'll not being practicing batoning on ANYTHING other than "bunny hill" wood at all with any of my knives.
 
To my uneducated eye - the breaks don't look right to me. As I said before, though, I don't know enough about that matter to make any claims.

As far as my previous statements, don't be disheartened - I said I wouldn't be surprised if Kabar's initial response was that it was abuse...I didn't say I expected it to end there. If there was a problem with the knife, I'd wager you'll be covered. And you don't need to stick to smallish, straight grained stuff; but choose your battles wisely. As other's have said - this wasn't really a big deal because the consequences of the break weren't dire.
Here's to a good outcome :thumbup:
 
I'll bet your replacement bk2 will be like mine and withstand years of batonning in just about any fashion, id think it is a VERY small chance you get two bk2's with steel issues.

So don't feel you have to baton finger sized sticks because of this, a bk2 without any flaws can take ALOT of batonning ... mine sure has.
JTmisterknifeguy said:
Yes, thank you!

I get the idea "Don't be an idiot!" but as I said, it's too expensive, chunky, heavy, and boat-anchor-like to only do Mora-worthy tasks.
I've seen outright abuse on these beasts, and they seem to laugh it off. The breakage of my blade doesn't make the other 999+ blades any less capable.
Again, I'll not being practicing batoning on ANYTHING other than "bunny hill" wood at all with any of my knives.
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Is that rust? What is the small dark inclusion that appears on the bottom of each section of tang at the break; they may be stress cracks from the original heat treatment. Can you post a close-up image of those areas.

image_zpszqeuzyoq.jpg


n2s
 
bld522 said:
Which they may well have. But you have to recognize that we represent a tiny fraction of all of the knife buyers in the world. That's why, when I see an issue occur like the one that happened to the OP, I take it with a grain of salt. After all, any knife can fail. But when I see that issue repeated again and again and again, then based on the size of our community and extrapolating our numbers to the larger universe of knife buyers, we begin to approach statistical significance. Are we there yet? I don't know. But I'd say that three or more instances of exactly the same break at exactly the same place in slightly more than a year is something that Ka-Bar needs to pay attention to . . . assuming they haven't paid attention to it already.

For my money, if were looking for a BK-2, it would be one with a solid tang (i.e., no cutouts) or bust!
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Certainly, and last night I did a bit of searching around Bladeforums and Google for instances of a busted bk2. 1 was the 2 that was thrown hundreds/thousands of times, and then the other 4 were broken similar to op's. All of which were admittedly doing heavy lifting including the guy who was bashing his 2 through a log with the back of his axe. This is what I could find, all of them laser etched. One of those breaks was slightly different than op's but similar enough. In those instances it was thought there could have been a potential heat treat problem causing breakages across the temper line, through the cutout. Does this represent a more rampant issue? Don't know, again though it would be interesting to see the data.
 
not2sharp said:
Is that rust? What is the small dark inclusion that appears on the bottom of each section of tang at the break; they may be stress cracks from the original heat treatment. Can you post a close-up image of those areas.

image_zpszqeuzyoq.jpg


n2s
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I already put her back together and put her away, but what it looked like to me was the coating slightly curling over the edge of the break on the bottom side of the break. Maybe I'll try to get another/better shot of it, buuuuut I think I can say with certainty he that it's not rust.
 
iwouldhurtafly said:
. . . it would be interesting to see the data.
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That's probably not going to happen. But it's enough for me that Ethan will eventually see this thread at which point, he'll become aware of the issue if he isn't aware of it already. I trust Ethan's integrity!
 
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bld522 said:
That's probably not going to happen. But it's enough for me that Ethan will eventually see this thread at which point, he'll become aware of the issue if he isn't aware of it already. I trust Ethan's integrity!
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Oh probably wont, but it still be interesting none the less!

Yes, and the guy has gone out of his before, time and again for users of his knives! Good man.
 
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