In an effort to be able to live out of my personal survival kit if necessary I will be practicing essential skills with the items contained within. Many people have PSK's put together and carry them often but how many have truly tried to use the items as if it were a survival situation? Well I haven't thus the motivation for this exercise.
The knife is a Turley Silver Creek PSK. This one is 3/16 wide but the standard is 1/8 and I'd probably recommend that smaller size. You can use the knife as is but I much prefer the method demonstrated to me by Terry Barney that involves wrapping 2 slabs of wood to create a working handle.
Silver Creek next to a Soldier River for size comparison
Handle wrapped in 2 slabs of Hickory with paracord outer sheath. This is supposed to be in a survival kit so the intention was to remove the inner strands for cordage, lashings, etc. and use the outer sheath for the knife.
I decided to use cottonwood since it would be easier to work with. The hardest part is batoning with the knife due to the short length. So it required a lot of hand splitting when possible and using the method where you score a a line in the middle of the wood and wedge it between 2 trees, this gives you the leverage to split the wood slowly and develop a crack lengthwise. Beating with a hickory baton did not affect the knife even though much of the force was directed straight into the tip.
Now for the fun part, the prep. this was more difficult than I thought. This wood was difficult to create pencil and pencil lead sized. Feathers and scrapings were not a problem so ultimately I did supplement with dry twigs. I think this would work if it wasn't raining, things were wet today but not soaked. The scenario was to create a situation where I could not find dry tinder and my kit tinder was either lost or already used up requiring me to create my own. My ignition source was a firesteel reclaimed from one of those magnesium bars (pictured under the knife). It worked very well just like a LMF type firesteel.
The fire started after only a few strikes with the steel and the feathers were able to sustain long enough to dry the twigs. I didn't get any pics from the early fire because I was busy working! Eventually things got going well with easily found dead wood scavenged from the area.
Here is some bush art with the Silver Creek and a skull I found today. :4:
Last but not least I tried some power cuts to see how much force I could put on the knife. Surprisingly I was able to do some serious whittling on fairly hard wood and also did some chest lever grip cuts.
Overall, it is an excellent PSK knife and does what I think a knife should do especially with the extended handle. It stands up to abuse that would shatter some other PSK knives. If I learned one thing today it's that survival sucks. I would never want to be in a situation where all I had was this type of knife. Everything is harder and takes much longer than you're used to with proper tools. If you learn anything from this post it's that you really should go out and practice with what you plan on carrying.
For more info on wrapping the handle watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/user/iawoodsman?blend=1&ob=video-mustangbase#p/u/40/hu-w7iA7CYA
The knife is a Turley Silver Creek PSK. This one is 3/16 wide but the standard is 1/8 and I'd probably recommend that smaller size. You can use the knife as is but I much prefer the method demonstrated to me by Terry Barney that involves wrapping 2 slabs of wood to create a working handle.
Silver Creek next to a Soldier River for size comparison
Handle wrapped in 2 slabs of Hickory with paracord outer sheath. This is supposed to be in a survival kit so the intention was to remove the inner strands for cordage, lashings, etc. and use the outer sheath for the knife.
I decided to use cottonwood since it would be easier to work with. The hardest part is batoning with the knife due to the short length. So it required a lot of hand splitting when possible and using the method where you score a a line in the middle of the wood and wedge it between 2 trees, this gives you the leverage to split the wood slowly and develop a crack lengthwise. Beating with a hickory baton did not affect the knife even though much of the force was directed straight into the tip.
Now for the fun part, the prep. this was more difficult than I thought. This wood was difficult to create pencil and pencil lead sized. Feathers and scrapings were not a problem so ultimately I did supplement with dry twigs. I think this would work if it wasn't raining, things were wet today but not soaked. The scenario was to create a situation where I could not find dry tinder and my kit tinder was either lost or already used up requiring me to create my own. My ignition source was a firesteel reclaimed from one of those magnesium bars (pictured under the knife). It worked very well just like a LMF type firesteel.
The fire started after only a few strikes with the steel and the feathers were able to sustain long enough to dry the twigs. I didn't get any pics from the early fire because I was busy working! Eventually things got going well with easily found dead wood scavenged from the area.
Here is some bush art with the Silver Creek and a skull I found today. :4:
Last but not least I tried some power cuts to see how much force I could put on the knife. Surprisingly I was able to do some serious whittling on fairly hard wood and also did some chest lever grip cuts.
Overall, it is an excellent PSK knife and does what I think a knife should do especially with the extended handle. It stands up to abuse that would shatter some other PSK knives. If I learned one thing today it's that survival sucks. I would never want to be in a situation where all I had was this type of knife. Everything is harder and takes much longer than you're used to with proper tools. If you learn anything from this post it's that you really should go out and practice with what you plan on carrying.
For more info on wrapping the handle watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/user/iawoodsman?blend=1&ob=video-mustangbase#p/u/40/hu-w7iA7CYA
