OUTDOOR BOOKCLUB - Mors Kochanski's Bushcraft

I didn't know exactly where to post this vid. I'm a little afraid of real knifemakers seeing this and flaming. I'm certainly not a knife maker or blade smith. I'm putting it in this thread because I saw a video where Mors Kochanski described making knives for the survival class back in the day. This is a design I've been working on for 2 years.

[video=youtube;gUXYw9TiZVw]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUXYw9TiZVw[/video]
 
Well done, sir! I love the soundtrack especially. Your videos are always very well produced, and have great content. Thanks for taking the time to do them!
 
Ulfhedinn said:
Nice video series, and that looks like a hell of a job on your first knife.
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Thanks man! I'm going to resume the video series now that I have my knife finished. The knife feels pretty good in the hand. I have forged 2 parangs from a lawnmower blade. I kept the first one and gave one to a friend. I'm learning. I'm satisfied with my designs, they work, but I would never sell what I'm currently capable of making. The craftsmanship needs to be WAY better.
 
Good for you AIG! It's fun making your own knife from start to finish. Well done!
 
Good plan on getting a piece of 1095 so you know what you have. I have annealed and ground out a couple of file knives for the experience but I need to look at it from a non Fred Sanford perspective. Still I have some old lawn mower blades that I would like to fire up and bang out into brush choppers. You do good showing that you don't need an advanced degree to give something a try and learn more when you are done.
 
Here is a little bit on knife safety.

[video=youtube;k2aVjrINxoo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2aVjrINxoo[/video]
 
Let me first say that I have watched every minute of each of your videos. Congratulations on your work. Great job!

As to Mr K and his knife criteria, as you may know there is a video floating around in which he talks about "all" the knives he has used over the forty-two years of his career as a bushcraft and wilderness survival instructor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BXKHRzn_yE There are eleven knives. Six are folding knives, of which three have blade locks. Three are MORA's, one with the blade deliberately ground down to a wisp. Two are customs. One is by, or designed in cooperation with, "Tom," who might well be his mentor, Tom Roycraft. He gives little detail on that knife and I cannot find any info. The other is the Skookum Bush Tool, the only one with a full-width tang, which he says he helped design. The Skookum site says "The SBT MK1 was inspired by Mors Kochanski . . . ."

Now comparing these knives to the "criteria" you discuss, only the newcomer, the Skookum, comes close - if you order it in O-1 instead of A-2 or S3V. All it lacks to meet the criteria are: 1) a hammer pommel (You could use your hand to drive the knife due to the broad metal pommel plate, but it's not something with which to chip rock or endue "heavy pounding."); 2) a spear point (one of his criteria, not a "drop point" [that "jargon again]); and 3) a blade that curves continuously from the handle to the tip (although it curves more than any other knife that he says he has used). And this is a knife he helped design.

I find it interesting that he managed decades of teaching using knives that are mostly folders or otherwise miss so many of his criteria. And I note that you like the knives that you showed us, although none of them seem to meet his book's selection criteria.

I also note that one iconic bushcraft knife, the puukko, also falls well outside his criteria, even if Mr K means by "full tang" what most mean - a tang that runs the full length of the handle, full width or not. The classic puukko is only about 18mm high (or wide), has a spine that lacks any drop (or may even slightly rise), curves not at all for over 75% of it's length, and lacks a strong pommel. As the tang is usually left dead soft, it would not support your weight as a step driven into a tree (Many MORA's have given their lives trying to prove that they meet the tree step test.) It is often made of high-carbon stainless steel. (I suspect that all stainless steel used for knives is high-carbon steel.)

So while Mr K's "criteria" lead to consideration and discussion, I wonder how real these criteria actually are -- even to him.

Thank you for the time and effort you have put in to such good effect.
 
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Very well done. I wish I had started reading this thread sooner. I am now waiting for the next installment. Thank you.
 
Thomas Linton said:
So while Mr K's "criteria" lead to consideration and discussion, I wonder how real these criteria actually are -- even to him.

Thank you for the time and effort you have put in to such good effect.
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Kudos. You just wrote the point I was making in the video without actually saying it. I've seen the video where he talked about all the knives he's used and also many of the other videos he has put out. I never saw him with a knife that met all of the criteria or even most of them. I've never met Mors Kochanski, but I would doubt that he ever meant any of the book to be taken as 'The Bible' and to present the 'only way to do things.'

One of the reasons I like Carbon1's Bushmocking series is because there has been a strong trend towards dogmatism in the bushcrafting segment of the outdoors community. A lot of the dogmatism seems to stem from people who had very little if any outdoors experience in the outdoors prior to discovering the bushcrafting community. As novices, they latch on to rules and trends that the community has adopted and fiercely defend and promote them.

Adopting a set of rules and skills does two things for a novice. First, the novice acquires some skills, which is better than the no skills with which he started. Second, by adopting and promoting the rules of the tribe, the novice becomes a member and gets 'status.' There is even a site where you can earn 'badges' if you demonstrate 'the right way to do things.' The teaching at that particular site is probably the best I've seen and I've seen some of it in person. Much of the teaching seems to originate from Mors Kochanski's book.

All of that is well and fine. I don't give a crap what people want to do with their own time in the woods. But there is a real world danger in becoming too dogmatic about the teachings in a book that is centered around a small microenvironment - the boreal forest. A lot of the skills transfer to other environments but I'm going to have a real hard time presenting the portions of the book that deal with specific trees and plants that don't grow where I live and the part about killing moose.

Visit the Amazon jungle and see if you can find any natives using the methods in Mors Kochanski's book. The entire time I've been down there I saw exactly one axe. It was so novel that I took video of it. The danger to the novice bushcrafter is that they go to an environment like that and they don't act like the natives. History is littered with the corpses of explorers who dogmatically stuck to what worked in their home environment, even though it was clearly not working.
 
averageiowaguy said:
Kudos. You just wrote the point I was making in the video without actually saying it. I've seen the video where he talked about all the knives he's used and also many of the other videos he has put out. I never saw him with a knife that met all of the criteria or even most of them. I've never met Mors Kochanski, but I would doubt that he ever meant any of the book to be taken as 'The Bible' and to present the 'only way to do things.'

.......The danger to the novice bushcrafter is that they go to an environment like that and they don't act like the natives. History is littered with the corpses of explorers who dogmatically stuck to what worked in their home environment, even though it was clearly not working.
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Lots of good points made, AIG.
 
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