Should you baton with your knife?

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This video is a short discussion about whether we should or should not baton or knife to split down small pieces of fire wood or carving material for use in bush craft and wilderness living situations.

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Tags: Bushcraft,Bushcraft Skills,Wilderness Skills,Outdooors,Hiking,Camping,Survival,Survival Skills,woodcraft,wood craft,Knife,Rant,walking,tutorial

Video Transcription

hello everybody and welcome to another video out here today on a bit of a walk Lana local state of woodland and I thought what I would tackle a question that I've seen come up to time and time and time again which is should I baton wood with my knife when you wanted unfamiliar with this term what that means is should I use my life to split down firewood so really common questions so I thought that it might be one worth discussing discussing so I'm going to talk a little bit about this and I'm going to talk about it from the perspective of my own experiences with this skill and the reason I want to do this is because I send this question come up a lot and most the time it just it just ends up being you know descending into like a slanging match where people are arguing with each other and just it turns nasty so I thought to help everybody out I would discuss it in terms of my own experience something all arguing and sort of mudslinging it just doesn't really help anyone out so what is my experience with this skill well it's a skill i use a lot i use it when i'm out on my own and just practicing my wood craft skills and doing stuff in the outdoors it's a skill that you will have seen me use in an awful lot of my videos and it's also a skill that I employ almost daily in my workplace where I teach these skills to young people and older people as well ok not only it is still I employ on an almost daily basis and teach others to do it's a skill that I have been lucky enough to apply using a wide variety of different tools different knives different types of life different feels

and even different tools which are appropriate for the same kind of task so things such as axes and throw you can put on with both of them but this is specifically about whether or not we should do it with a knife so whilst this skill is one which is widely used it's also a skill set that people really like to complain about and really like to have a bigger other people for using and I want to address why I think that is so this is just my opinion on why I think people like to kind of bad mouth this particular skill okay the first one of the main ways people just like to argue especially online everyone's braver behind the keyboard they're people just like argue with others another one is possibly down to inexperience so people who you know do an overnight trip every once in a while and don't necessarily have that wide-ranging experience now that isn't necessarily a direct criticism people who just you know can only get out every now and then it's not a criticism of other people's experiences it's just a general observation that I think a lot of people who badmouth this skill in particular and sort of just like a little bit of experience and refuse to listen to people who are out there doing this stuff all of the time furthermore to that point you will say all in a survival situation you wouldn't want to do this because you might risk breaking your your knife so you should just use the accent you've got with you what kind of survival situation I going to be in where I'm likely to have an active am in a survival situation and I've got an axe and all of my outdoor gear with me let's turn into a survival situation probably shouldn't be out there in the first place or something really really bad must have happened so just to reiterate this point I'm not talking about this skill in terms of with being a survival skill and talking about it in terms with being a general outdoor bushcraft wilderness skill designed to make your life

a little easier so this brings me to the next point and that point is why would you want to Baton wood with your knife well first of all let's get a few things clear we're not talking about batana ng gigantic pieces of firewood to maintain the fire we're talking here about Petaling wood which is small and thin but not soon enough to establish your fire we need to break that wall down in order to get it to a workable size to take your kindling which is thin stuff like this whoops and turn it into a more efficient flame I've got some notes here slide the sand and written down to make sure I don't ramble on too much so it's a fast and efficient way of breaking down your firewood and you know ensuring that you're going to have nice dry wood from the interior of your slightly larger pieces to put onto your thinner kindling to establish that into a flame if you've got an axe with if you still might want to put on with your nice because it's quicker it's more efficient it's more precise but most importantly it's safer okay you're splitting down smallwood trying to do that with a hefty long acts like the one that I usually carry there's going to be an efficient it's gonna be messy but it's going to be dangerous it's a swinging tool yeah we can baton with it but it won't be as nice as doing it with your life the second reason is might not always have an axe of you if you want to split down with normal relax that's cool that's fine that's your choice but what if you don't have it with you you need to split down firewood I'm sat under oak trees here a lot of this stuff this is going to be not great for establishing a fire it's on the floor it's stamped does in an old woodland I'm going to need to break stuff down I'm gonna break it down to make shavings of feather sticks it's just it's just a good skill to have in your your rest wha and you know like I said a lot of the time you actually 22 stuck in Te to split is going to be too small to split with a large actual ax is going to be too big nine times out of ten to get that small file to establish that fire when you get into the big logs yeah cool go ahead and use your axe you're not going to try and split massive logs with a knife if you do and it goes wrong well that's not what this girl is designed for so it probably is going to go wrong so when when should we need to bet on with a knife when should you do it or you need to make sure that your tool is appropriate you've got a full tang knife that's well-made well tempered you're not going to have trouble with it even if you've got a sick Tang life like a moral companion or something similar you can still baton with that as long as you're not trying to do anything that's too big and too heavy as long as you're careful with it if you need to be breaking apart like big stuff that's maybe like size thickness you can you could probably do that with a full-time knife but I wouldn't want to be doing that with something like a moron I I have seen the break a few people have seen the break the bath using when they've been overused or when the woods that are going through is just it's too sick for it you need to make sure it was small enough as we've already proven and and just to reiterate a point i mentioned earlier you need to Baton word to start your fire not to maintain it we're not battalion words of feeding the fire to keep it going but Tony Awards to get the fire going this is something that comes out a lot from the people in the south baton would camp is always you don't need to put on your wood to keep feeding your fire scenes your actual that's not the point I don't think I've never seen anyone splitting wood down to maintain an already strong fire and it's the only people I ever see commenting about this other people who say no you don't need to Baton book the people that do here's a battalion skills I've never seen anyone doing it I don't know where this ideas come from it's just sort of grasping at straws to try and find an argument against using this skill very very rarely have I seen a knife break using the full tongue nice my life that I use is what is it I can't the exact dimensions but it's you know the thickness of the metal isn't far off the same thickness of my little finger Oh 12 will still retain God all the way through the handle it's well-tempered 258 on the rockwell scale I am NOT going to break that I can not break that unless I'm taking another piece of metal and smashing into a piece of concrete i am going to struggle to damage that night at a piece of wood because it's harder than the wood baton empty and another reason that you might want to put on wood it can be nothing to do with lighting fire it could be to do with doing all the tasks in the outdoors or around camp and for example say you've got a piece of wood that you want carvings will spoon you're going to need to split it if you need to make a precise split in that wood and actually it's going to be you can do it with a sport it's going to be far easier and far more efficient and far more precise if you do it with your night you've got a lot more control over it so you know you've got a nice as this long or an access this long use the tool that this long if you need the precise cook this used a knife you know I spoken to nice natives and they've almost halved if she's fine to do all of that being said the rivalry time is worth but running isn't going to be an appropriate skill to use so let's kind of break down some examples of when that might be I'm not going to do exhaustive examples because a lot of issues common sense so the first one obviously if you don't need to is this plenty of variety of dry sticks and dry firewood you know you're not gonna need to put on day like today sunshine in first properly hot day the year talking a little bit to stuff all over the floor I'm not gonna need to the Tom what I could get a fire goin I've I really really had to second time second example of when you are not going to meeting if your tools and your materials aren't appropriate I mean I've forgotten me today this little tiny neck knife I'm not going to put on with that that'd be just ridiculous there's no necessity I could do on some really really small pieces of wood but doing absolutely no need to do that the other time that you're not going to do this is when you haven't got what is the correct size to do this or whether always all the world around you is really naughty so these two things and ink that's an inappropriate tool and incorrect wards it's not going to be efficient if I've got like a big thick piece of oak which is all gnarly and all twisty all I've got this man mora life with me and I'm gonna have to really batter it through that piece of wood to split it I'm not going to do that I'm going to explore sort of a wider area and see I can find some stuff that's more appropriate in which case I might find some of it is suitable for battling with the Mora or I might define one of this stuff that I've got I've got knocking around here and the other reasons you would want to do it is we've already covered this when your fire is already established we've got an established fire you don't need to return would I've never actually seen anyone doing that lutely people I've ever heard talk about it is he the petaling police as i like to call them so hopefully this has the second sphere I've missed anything hopefully this is cleared up a lot of things hopefully it's been a helpful discussion and I've tried to put across from both sides but when it is and isn't appropriate so just to reiterate i'm not talking about a survival situation i'm not talking about keeping and already established fire maintained with firewood and i'm not talking about doing this when it's massively inappropriate we're not going to be splitting huge pieces of wood and i will be following this video with a full tutorial of sort of covering these things when it's appropriate what source use and how to do this correctly efficiently effectively and safely and so hopefully i won't get too much hate from this video and if you disagree with the things that I've said that is totally find a lot of this is personal preference I have I have no issue with people disagreeing with me and not claiming to be an expert anyone who claims to be an expert isn't was listening to I'm expecting discussion to appear in the comments of this video which I'm really happy happy to see I'd quite like to see discussion about this in the comments section below however I have control over those comments it's not like on facebook where people can just start argue about stuff if I see people who are just sort of trolling or being unnecessarily antagonistic and argumentative or just outright stupidity to try and get the sort of opinion across without backing up with a fax I'm not going to engage with that i'm not going to rise into an argument with it i'm going to hopefully hope that other people won't do that and i will just delete the comments okay i don't want to see that kind of stuff it's not helpful to anyone just pointless arguing so there's no purpose it doesn't help anyone so i will just remove the comments that hopefully we can keep things on track and keep things being objective so that's that I hope you've got something out this video and if you disagree with me that's fine do you let me know because like I said you know I may have got things wrong this is a huge learning experience than I think pretty much everybody involved I would like very much to thank the people have supporting me on patreon you are going to get a proper for shout out because most of them are also youtubers I'm going to do a special shout-out on that so thank you guys for supporting me if you do enjoy my channel and my content please consider supporting me on patreon there will be a link in the description below and please like share subscribe definitely comment on this one and I will see you in the next video for now I'm going to finish my bridge