Stories of knife breaks=dead

Y

Yorkshire Boy

Joined
Sep 27, 2008
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OK Dr Bill got me thinking about stuff from this thread http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=756302

It didn't seem fair to clutter up his questioner thread.

The logic of I wouldn't trust my life to ..... because it's not a full tang.
I've read this many tens of times over the last few years.

"People die when their knife breaks"

Can anybody come up with any historical wilderness stories where somebody died because their knife broke?
 
I dont understand the whole one knife and only one knife being carried. Right now I've got three on my person my spyderco tenacious a leatherman core that had two blades and a gerber eab so if one breaks I got spares in a wilderness situation I would also be carrying a saw maybe and ax or machete and a fixed blade in addition to the normal edc blades and may swap the tenacious for a sak oht but I'm well covered in the blade department in case of emergency. You can make a workable blade with a rock and a stick and some cordage if it comes to that and it doesnt have to be fancy. People in other countrys survive with blades that people here would laugh at jungles of peru there are people using cheap machetes and kitchen knives and thier lives are what we would consider a survival situation same in africa where sometime a knife is whatever metal they can find and sharpen and whatever wood they can find to make a handle. Besides anything that is man made can fail and fail epically dont matter if it's a 10.00 mora or a 5000.00 custom.
 
Skills trump tools. Tools only make skills easier to implement. If you know what you're doing, you can adapt.
 
I think you are looking at this all wrong, I've never heard of anyone dying because their blade failed.
I have however heard of people surviving because their blade didn't fail !!!

There was the guy who cut through his arm using his SAK after it was pinned by the boulder.
The guy who used his Cold steel SRK as a piton to climb out of a canyon.
Many stories of people who fell through frozen ice and used their knife to pull themselves back out.
Tales of people who have capsized their canoes in frozen waters and once on land used their knives to batton and chop wood to get a fire going before they froze.

The list goes on but I'm sure ya get the idea. You can always make a knife sharper but you can't make them stroger so choose wisely !
 
Yorkshire Boy.. You seem to have an inquisitive and I dare say arbitrary nature...instead of trying to out semantic everything folks on here say how bout gettin out making it happen for yourself and reporting back to us... we can all state our opinions here till we're blue in the face but academics is just words on a screen,, we all only really know what works for us as individuals when we get out and own the skills we talk about...Just my 2 cents fwiw
 
RescueRiley said:
Yorkshire Boy.. You seem to have an inquisitive and I dare say arbitrary nature...instead of trying to out semantic everything folks on here say how bout gettin out making it happen for yourself and reporting back to us... we can all state our opinions here till we're blue in the face but academics is just words on a screen,, we all only really know what works for us as individuals when we get out and own the skills we talk about...Just my 2 cents fwiw
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John pretty much nailed it: go out and do.
 
Has anyone done a broken knife challenge? I have an old gen one Leatherman with a broken main blade, it still gets plenty of use. Its not like the knife ceases to exist when the blade snaps. I wonder, how much of a pain would it be to perform survival tasks with a broken fixed blade knife?

It might be worth sacrificing a dollar store cheapie (or even a Mora) to find out.
 
I've built a shelter and fire using a broke hatchet. Used that a bic, jute twine and duct tape. Problably could have skiped the jute twine now that I'm a little smarter with fire making.
 
John G said:
Has anyone done a broken knife challenge? I have an old gen one Leatherman with a broken main blade, it still gets plenty of use. Its not like the knife ceases to exist when the blade snaps. I wonder, how much of a pain would it be to perform survival tasks with a broken fixed blade knife?

It might be worth sacrificing a dollar store cheapie (or even a Mora) to find out.
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If you were using ya knife as a piton to climb outta a canyon and it snapped things might be different !:eek:
 
RescueRiley said:
Yorkshire Boy.. You seem to have an inquisitive and I dare say arbitrary nature...instead of trying to out semantic everything folks on here say how bout gettin out making it happen for yourself and reporting back to us... we can all state our opinions here till we're blue in the face but academics is just words on a screen,, we all only really know what works for us as individuals when we get out and own the skills we talk about...Just my 2 cents fwiw
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John, you are my bud, but...
I think this is downright unfair.

Yorkshire boy asks a FAIR question. WHo in history has died, because of failed equipment?

If you think about the question for a minute, I think he makes one hell of a point. Usually as soon as we get news of an untimely death in the wilds...we always attack the dead persons knowledge right????
Atleast thats what I see happen. I cant remember when we all as a group said.."well, he would have lived if he had a BUSSE"
I dont see this as an inflamitory post at all? Infact, I see it as the natural thought process, of someone thinking about the "what ifs"
 
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Fair enough, Gene..I don;t mean to offend Just got to call it like I see it...I'm sure I know I hold you in high regard..
 
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RescueRiley said:
Fair enough, Gene..I don;t mean to offend Just got to call it like I see it...I'm sure I know I hold you in high regard..
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I am quite sure that I hold you in "higher" regard my good man. Your love of wilderness skills have kept me motivated many times. I just like the question...its one we should really think about.
Is the knife even important in the equation, do you fail in a survival situation due to it failing..or were you doomed from the outset?
Who can show the cause and effect proof
 
I'll offer up this story in good spirit... one of my mentors.. Whom I believe is Long past (rest his soul) affectionately in the interest of anonimity lets call him Rat... He was a bushman in the truest sense, and lived alone in a hand made shelter in the bush in ALaska, and than in an abandoned mine in Arizona for several years. He lived off the land with a rifle 2 knives and several other tools sleeping by fire, and harvesting his own meat as needed to survive..
Any how his canoe flipped about 8 days (by foot) from camp in the autumn.. leaving him with a .22 rifle a basic survival kit, a poncho and a bk9..Coming out of the drink all soaked after the canoe had been swept away. he set out to make a fire. and ended up within the first few minutes of his encounter breaking the bk-9 in half...(almost unheard of but I guess it happens) So he kept both halves and made do... anything that needed carving, feather sticks and what not got done with the bottom half that still had the handle..... anything that required a point he used the broken top half of the blade..
so for 8 days he struggled through the bush utilizing 2 halves of a broken blade, but made it back alive, and believe it or Not the first thing he ordered when he eventually got to town was another BK9

It sounds like a tom brown Grand father tale I know...and it very well might be, but I did learn allot from him..and choose to believe him..but I'm a hopeless romantic

in Les strouds book as well He lashes a make shift handle onto a broken Buck 119

He also lashes a handle to a piece of glass

I made a knife once out of a jagged can lid... I wouldn't want to depend on it but it cut a fair amount of string

THere are cats out there (some on this very forum) that could pick up a rock and flake off an edge that'd put my mora to shame

It;s always about the man, the knowledge and the skill..the blade is just vehicle for the transference of skill from the theoretical to the practical...whether you drive a Porsche or a Hyundai you still get there.

I honestly feel that the most important attribute of a blade is to have one ..a resourceful survivor will make do and make it through provided his skills are up to it.
 
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I can remember a guy on the Swamprat knives forum whose car rolled and he was trapped in the wreckage. He used a Camp Tramp to dig,cut and pry his way out.
I can remember seeing some photo's he'd taken and he was pretty lucky. Would he have died if his knife had broke, maybe not but he would have been trapped till rescuers could get him out !
 
We are all different but strength is an important atribute in a knife for me. I hear people say stuff like " You could get 10 Mora's for the cost of that knife ", well if the SHTF and I'm left with a broken Mora the fact that I have the cash to buy 9 more is of little comfort when I'm in the middle of nowhere.
People also come up with smart ways of doing stuff using a flimsy knife but when the chips are down you might not have the energy or even the dexterity to make wedges and digging sticks etc, hell I did a post once where I was so cold I couldn't even hold a match when trying to light a fire, there was no way I coulda used a knife with any precision.


Edited to add : In saying the above I don't believe ya have to have a 1/4" thick sharpened prybar, a well made 1/8" full tang knife would be very unlikely to fail !
 
Break the blade off a Mora, go out and find a piece of wood in the woods and work the blade into that.

Carry on.
 
Don't knock knapped blades :D They come in real handy when you want to extend your knife's edge or just want to try something new. I think that knapping a simple edge ,plain and serrated, out of your native stones is an invaluable skill. One thing that would change many of these "one knife" or "broken knife" thread scenarios would be the ability to improvise a knife out of found materials.
I flint knap. I can make a bunch of blade shapes and edge profiles but my skill level is not high enough to make my blades even on both sides. My arrowheads are ugly (not symmetrical) but very sharp and they kill plenty of rabbits. My hafted knives are equally ugly but they are shaving sharp and can process game almost as well as a modern knife. I recently made a short video of gutting fish with a flake. It sucked. I was using a new stone that was shipped to me from a friend and I didn't know how to work it. I took a couple raw flakes to cut the fish and they didn't perform well at all. I know now that this stone takes a wicked serrated edge but the flakes I used were to thin and fragile. The reason that I used those size flakes is because that's how the native stone around here "works". I know I'm rambling but my point is that knowing the basics of working stone as well as how the stone near you likes to be worked can be a big benefit if you ever find yourself without a fully functioning knife.
 
What about the mental aspect of survival? Having a knife that you have confidence in could give you a vital mental boost that may make a difference. In a survival situation I think I would feel better if I had my BK-7 or BK-9 with me because I would trust either of those to stand up to whatever I required of them. Feeling more positive about how well equipped I was could help me to be more optimistic and think more clearly.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
Break the blade off a Mora, go out and find a piece of wood in the woods and work the blade into that.

Carry on.
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Google Mora's breaking and you will find that they very rarely break at the handle junction but usually break about 2/3rds down the blade. This doesn't leave ya with much material to set into a piece of wood, even supposing that you would then have the dexterity or even the moral to try and improvise it.
 
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