I put a lot of force with my grip hand ...
Normally so do I, but the wood was just spiking into the ground as it was pointed on both edges. That is why I placed a board under it, but it slipped readily on that. Decent hard packed ground would have been ideal.
What kind of wood is that?
The pieces that cracked apart were pine, the piece on the end was spruce.
... when using a baton, I tend to be a lot more...vicious
At the end those were fairly heavy impacts, similar in class to heavy framing hammer impacts (calibrated) but on camera, had I not done them, I would say they look medium at best.
So what do you think of that knife so far?
The steel seems solid so far, I am interested in how it will do in edge retention against the Ratweiler when both are at similar edge angles and I'll check that soon. Overall the design is clean and solid though I would prefer if the flat grind came down further so the edge was 0.035" or so and the balance points were shifted further out on the blade.
When you struck near the handle, is that the type of technique you suggest for batoning with folders?
Yes, it doesn't load the lock. The above videos don't in general illustrate proper technique, in fact there are a few times where there are things done which really are very poor form. I was mainly just checking to see the quality and lengths of the video and what they actually looked like.
I'd like to try that with an Opinel but it seems like the baton would need to be narrow to work with the space requirements.
Use a holder block over the blade.
How would you characterize the wood with respect to what you would want or be able to split with such a knife? It looked like it required a bit of an effort, but it doesn't sound like the extreme knots you have talked about.
The first few bits were very easy, I would split all of them with folders assuming they had the length. The last round was medium/hard, but the knife still made significant progress with each impact. I'll do some hard knots later and show the difference because a piece of cross knotted pine is worse than clear spruce. It can be so bad that it takes literally a dozen impacts to move an inch through a knot.
-Cliff
