I totally disagree. I think you are falling into marketting hype here. Bussekins are perhaps one of the few knives that can handle chopping through concrete blocks, but that isn't the same as batoning.
You don't need a thick knife to baton wood. In fact, when you baton with a thinner knife, you don't have to hit the spine as hard because it is easier to sink a 0.1" knife into wood (with the grain) than it is a 0.25" piece of metal. The trade off of batoning a thinner knife is that you have to baton it further into the wood before it splits, while the thickness of a thick knife forces the split faster at the consequence of requiring you to pound harder to get it past the bevel.
Knives that are flawed (e.g. hair line fractures) will break which is why it is good to test a knife under harder use conditions before applying the same type of action in the field. In the other thread somebody accused folks who baton and post it as "bragging", but really it isn't that. When I get a new knife, it is one of the first things I do with it just to see what it will do.
Here is a 1/8" thick breeden that was batonned right through some knotty pine and right through a knot. I did this within about 40 min of receiving the knife, not to brag, but to make sure it could do it. After the little test on my porch, I no longer had any reservations about using it in the field. It is one of my preferred belt knives now!
Again, see my post above - I've batoned a 1/16" steak knife through wood. Not the preferred thing to do, but I was playing and it worked fine.
You don't need a heavy duty knife to baton wood unless it is crazy difficult wood. Now here is some knarly nasty stuff that is the kind of thing I wouldn't tackle with a lesser knife and the Scrapyard SOD came to play. I should stress that I tried chopping this with a hatchet first and that didn't work. Yes, I know how to use a hatchet, but the axe just sort of bounced off the stump and would not split. If I had a wedge and a maul it would have made short work out of this. However, what I did have was one of the toughest knives in the buisness and it made short work out of this stump also!
You can see because of the knots and grain structure, that this piece just refused to split even when the full 1/4" blade was sunk into it. I just kept on beating it until I was right through the wood.
However, the above case is the exception. If you want to baton that kind of stuff than a bussekin knife is great. If you want to baton 95% of other types of wood, particularly those that are straight grained, most any knife will do.
