- Joined
- Feb 9, 2007
- Messages
- 1,655
This weekend my wife and I took our 5 year old daughter on her first backpacking trip. She's been car camping before, but this was her first pack trip. We hit some rainy weather but it still was a good time.
Because I have read so many threads in the past month about broken and bent knives, usually ones with some sort of stick tang, I decided to do an experiment. I brought along a 20+ year old Camillus USMC fighter -- this is identical in style to the more familiar Kabar -- in order to use it as my primary camp knife.
Normally this knife sits in what I call a TSK (trunk survival kit
) in the back of my wife's jeep and rarely is used anymore. I figured it would be informative to see if it could survive as my primary knife.
Over the course of the weekend I batoned this knife so heavily I almost beat the carbon out of it
. In fact I deliberately abused it: I batoned the spine, I batoned on the handle and guard, twisted and wiggled it loose when it got stuck, and even hammered an embedded log on a stump with the knife. Much of the wood was dense from moisture.
You guessed it -- the parkerizing got scuffed! Well, OK, the leather washer handles also got scuffed too. BUT the blade itself did not bend or break. Overall I was impressed with the toughness of this knife (which probably sold for ~ $29, when it was purchased). In my mind this settled the question on whether a decent knife, let alone an expensive survival knife, should be able to handle this kind of abuse.
Let me say, for the sake of competeness, that altough this knife handled the abuse admirably it clearly isn't the ideal knife for this type of use. Here are the drawbacks:
1. The blade doesn't have enough of a wedge shape (the spine is too narrow) to split the wood effectively in batoning. You have to drive the knife virtually all the way through a piece of wood to split it.
2. The sharpened swedge on the top detracts from its use for batoning, since the baton itself often becomes stuck on the top of the knife.
3. Batoning on the handle doesn't work ideally because of the guard. The guard can become impaled into the wood of the baton, which slows the process.
It may not be the ideal tool for the job, but it was plenty tough enough to handle it anyway.
Because I have read so many threads in the past month about broken and bent knives, usually ones with some sort of stick tang, I decided to do an experiment. I brought along a 20+ year old Camillus USMC fighter -- this is identical in style to the more familiar Kabar -- in order to use it as my primary camp knife.
Normally this knife sits in what I call a TSK (trunk survival kit
) in the back of my wife's jeep and rarely is used anymore. I figured it would be informative to see if it could survive as my primary knife.Over the course of the weekend I batoned this knife so heavily I almost beat the carbon out of it
. In fact I deliberately abused it: I batoned the spine, I batoned on the handle and guard, twisted and wiggled it loose when it got stuck, and even hammered an embedded log on a stump with the knife. Much of the wood was dense from moisture.You guessed it -- the parkerizing got scuffed! Well, OK, the leather washer handles also got scuffed too. BUT the blade itself did not bend or break. Overall I was impressed with the toughness of this knife (which probably sold for ~ $29, when it was purchased). In my mind this settled the question on whether a decent knife, let alone an expensive survival knife, should be able to handle this kind of abuse.
Let me say, for the sake of competeness, that altough this knife handled the abuse admirably it clearly isn't the ideal knife for this type of use. Here are the drawbacks:
1. The blade doesn't have enough of a wedge shape (the spine is too narrow) to split the wood effectively in batoning. You have to drive the knife virtually all the way through a piece of wood to split it.
2. The sharpened swedge on the top detracts from its use for batoning, since the baton itself often becomes stuck on the top of the knife.
3. Batoning on the handle doesn't work ideally because of the guard. The guard can become impaled into the wood of the baton, which slows the process.
It may not be the ideal tool for the job, but it was plenty tough enough to handle it anyway.
