What would you be doing?

Brad "the butcher";7952755 said:
old axe books recommend warming the head with body heat, I wonder if doing the same, putting blade sheathed in your coat for 20 minutes would make a difference?
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In the coldest months I keep one knife inside my coat or in my pants pocket.
 
Great thread Rick, now if Google had a translate feature to convert High Medilurgical to Plain ELU I would probably get more from it. It was fun reading anyway. :)
 
Twenty something years ago I dropped a knife while camping and broke the tip off... from what I remember it was a Buck 110 . It was my fault... and it was also the last time I broke a knife.

While I was in the Army I killed a few multi tools...

Ski
 
Prying arrows out of tree stumps can be very hard on tips, as can splitting wood. I've snapped tips doing both.
 
I seldom do anything that would likely break a knife in the woods. At work, I have been know to chip edges, break tips, and loose good knives.

You have to be very careful prying with a knife especially with something like a SAK. I don't treat my SAKs very well and keep spares ready for use.
 
Rick's list is pretty good. I could add digging but I usualy cut a digging stick for that.

Chopping and batonning in frozen materials in extreme cold would be the most likely.

However I generaly keep my blades inside my shelter with me for that reason (ever since I saw a hatchet explode that was used after being left out overnight and then hit the next day in splitting a round of firewood).

Most of the knives I carry can easily handle prying fatwood apart and peeling bark etc. My heavy chopper (H.I. M-434 kukri) has already handled prying and all the above with ease.

I agree with Rick's mentors philosophy on knife use/abuse in an emergency....but I agree it does take one right outside the comfort zone pretty quick. Funny how we get attached to an object to such foolish degrees.
 
I broke a Case large folder (2 bladed large trapper not sure the model) batoning a piece of hardwood and I'm hesitant to baton any wood at all with any knife (once burned....)
I took that knife apart reassembled it with one blade,then heated up the busted end punched 2 holes into it and attached a small oak handle-still use that repaired end knife today.Most knives IMO are very tough and would/will take extreme abuse without failure,just goes against my grain to abuse fine equipment
Dan'l
 
Thanks for all the replies. looks like most of the issues encountered have to do with damaged edges and points. Even though some may feel these are failures, IMO they are fixable. That is why it is important to carry sharpening tools with you and know how to use them. Joezilla and harpoon41 are remembering some issues we had on the 2008 winter trip. It was very cold that weekend with morning temps around 9 degrees. Day temps I believe were in the 20's. We had three machetes, three Bark Rivers and a Grandfors Bruk axe have edge problems. They were all fixable problems. We had rock hard frozen oak and maple we were batoning, chopping and splitting.
What I consider a failure is something that can't be repaired. That being a broken blade, a chunk blown out of a blade and a severely bent blade.
Scott
 
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The only blade I've ever broken (not snapped in half, just a 3/4" hunk out of the middle) was trying to work through a lamb's sternum.
 
Sometimes, trees have bits of metal inside them, from maybe an old barbed-wire fence that the tree grew around and is now gone. You could be chopping it, or chopping some root and hit a rock or piece of rusty steel someone dumped, etc.

That's about all I can think of.
 
The two things I use my blades the most are batoning and light prying apart punkwood, and twisting the blade when splitting.

Batoning is the big thing. I really hit my blades hard, and when dropping 150-200 on a custom, it better damn well hold up if my 40 dollar ontario can.

fortunately, they've all help up better :)

For me, tang-blade transition and tip are the two most important parts strength-wise. Most of my knives are 3/16" or thicker, so usually the blade is quite strong.
 
In the middle of a blizzard when I was a kid, using my Schrade Cave Bear to cut hay bale twine. No, the twine didn't break the tip off, I did, by driving it deep into a fence post top nearby. Learned my lesson, fold your knife when you're done with it, you can open it again later ;).

I guess that would be classified as stupidity or abuse.
 
I guess I use my knives pretty normally 99.9 percent of the time. The biggest issue is breaking it using it to pry something. I haven't damaged one batoning yet.

Where and when its possible I would hope most people use the appropriate tools like a spud or prybar. But there are times when the knife is what you got. Sometimes you have to use it to pry. I tend to buy my knives that are rugged enough to take some abuse. Even if I don't dish it out often.
 
I have chipped / folded / dinged edges while trying to chop down saplings. I often make my cut low to the ground (so as to have more of a finished product to work with), and a deflection from a bad swing can redirect the knife into the dirt - and into whatever rocks or pebbles may be lurking there. Other than that, I can't think of any outdoors activities that I do that really threaten my knives. Batoning, perhaps, but I would have to be in a pretty rough situation to keep hammering once I realized that my knife was stuck in knotted cordwood.

All the best,

- Mike
 
My hubby broke 2 Buck knives cutting poly twine on roll bales of hay and one axe that had an air pocket in the head.
 
Falling off a horse, landing on a rock.


That's the only way I've ever broken a knife blade. About 2 inches broke off the end of a 6 inch blade. Sharpened it back up and now I carry a 4 inch blade or smaller when I'm riding. I also carry with the tip of the sheath stuck in my back pocket instead of on my side. I don't know if you would call it abuse or not but it definately taught me a thing or two.

David
 
I started a very similar thread a few years ago, it is a topic that interests me. After having been around this forum for a few years I think a broken knife is very rare. I can remember a thread about one, a RAT knife that someone broke a big chunk out of batoning firewood, RAT made good on it IIRC.

I see a whole lot of broken knives in the Army, Soldiers as a general rule horribly abuse their steel. Besides my own, I don't ever think I have seen a Soldier's multitool without at least one tool broken. With that said, I have seen them throw their knives for fun, try to cut through rusted bolts, pry, dig and about anything else you can imagine and most of the knives used are 40 dollars or less.

It seems to me if breaking knives by routine use happened with any frequency at all we would hear more about it on the forum. Chris
 
all these probs could be overcome by using a CHAINSAW!

chainsaw_closeup_large.jpg
 
I always thought a good Sthil was part of a survival kit! Save the blades! Buy a Sthil... course the sheath will be a killer to make...lol

Scott, broken tips and lost knives were always my problem....
 
I never had a catastrofic failure with any of my knives, a couple of bent tips here and there (usually due to improper use), perhaps a little rolling or chipping on the edge.

I had a Mora (Eriksson #22) get stuck while battoning, the handle came off while I was trying to pull it out but nothing broke. It seemed that it was held without any sort of glue, I just poured some epoxy into the handle and set the blade in. Never had another issue with it.
 
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