Batoning Wood with your Knife

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and what I wanted to do this morning was discuss a little bit about but awning wood in general and I think that there are lots and lots of misconceptions out there when it comes to batani wood and I see discussions a lot on especially the boards that I run on the Pathfinder school Learning Center and things like that about why - or why not - bataan wood should you baton with your knife should you not baton with your knife so let's start off with the fact that baton wood with a knife or splitting wood using your knife blade is nothing new it's not something that was invented by bush crackers in the 1920s marbles advertised several of their knives in a magazine or catalog describing them as having the capability to be a general-purpose knife capable of processing firewood now brass tacks to me that says this knifes capable of splitting firewood so what we have to think about is a do we need certain knives to baton wood yes and no we need to understand that if we have a knife that's not full tang it's going to have weaknesses inherent to the design that we need to work around if we choose to baton that knife does that mean we can't baton with it absolutely not I have a more bushcraft Block in my bag that I have a ton a hundred or more times probably and I've never broken that knife but you have to understand the inherent weaknesses behind a non full tang knife and you should only baton with your knife in an emergency situation if you have an axe or you have a saw you have no need to baton anything and even if you have neither one and you just have your knife for some reason you still can get away without batoning in a lot of instances and use other methods to process fire materials so in an emergency scenario the only reason I can see two baton would would be to try to get into the dry centers of a piece of wood to try to create kindling or be possible

get out an area inside a piece of pine that had fat wood you may also need to baton your knife if you're trying to cut down saplings because you can't find deadwood to build a shelter and all of those things need to be understood as to why you would baton or why you would use a baton on your knife and I think what we should start off with with this video is a baton to begin with because I see that as a failure mode in a lot of my classes people don't understand a proper baton a proper baton should be made out of hardwood and it should be fairly heavy because you want that forward momentum you don't want to have to strike more times than you need to on that blade if you can get the for momentum one time to get the job done so I like something about rabbit stick lengths or axe handle lengths I like it to be at least two inches in diameter and I like it to be a green hardwood if I can get it now if you have to baton that piece of wood out you may have to do that and there are ways to do that but you can use a marginal baton to get that done until you can make yourself a good baton then carry that with you and again it becomes a multifunctional tool it's one of the five wooden tools that we discuss in the Pathfinder 5x5 system because it can be abitt on a rabbit stick and a digging stick all in one tool so having a proper baton is the first and foremost thing to understand the next thing to understand is what type of wood are we batani if we're batana hardwood we're going to put a lot more stress on our knife than if we are batani a softer wood if we're trying to baton across the grain instead of at an angle to the grain or split the wood we're going to put a lot more stress on the blade itself if we're using a green wood versus a dead wood we're going to put more stress on the blade so understanding the qualities and properties of the wood that we're batoning can also deter us from damaging a knife that was really not meant for that type of work and every piece of equipment that you have will need to operate outside its comfort zone at some point in time if you are in an emergency situation and learning to baton wood properly and learning to do it in the like fashion with the correct materials is just as important to me as making a bow-drill fire it's not something I would choose to do every day it's not something I'm going to do just to have fun doing it less I'm practicing the skill I'm going to use a lighter every time all the time as my first choice of ignition but in an emergency if I had to have it I'd better understand it and it's the same thing with the timing would you can carry an on full-tang knife that will do lots and lots of things for you the bushcraft Black is my opinion is bar none one of the best knives for the money on the market even though it's not full tang because it does so many other things so well and so much more beyond a lot of price point knives that are on the market today at the same level at 40 bucks so I've got a bunch of down wood here behind me let's discuss a little bit about batani and we'll talk a little bit about the toning limbs we'll talk a little bit about splitting wood and we'll talk a little bit about what do's and don'ts with batani

and things that we can do to avoid batani to begin with stay with ok so I would consider this rule number one when it comes to processing firewood if I have a piece of wood that I want to use as firewood and it's a long piece of wood I'm not going to try to baton through this even if I would have a ton at an angle which would be less stress on my knife it's still a resource that I'm taking a chance on if I choose to baton this wood if I can find a fork in a tree I can snap this piece of wood off much safer than trying to baton through it alright so we can take this large limb to put it in the fork of this tree and bend it backwards like this just split it down that will allow us to make pieces of wood smaller if we're going to burn them hole you can see that this one is quite wet I just grabbed it off the ground but it's a good demonstration piece because it's pretty good

thickness or diameter of something someone may be tempted to baton into okay so let's talk for a minute about saplings and this sapling is not much smaller than my baton but it's something that I may use for a shelter and not have to mess with a bigger larger tree like this chicory beside it this is a smaller one so the one thing that you want to always avoid is you never want to baton straight into a cross grain situation that's the strongest part of this tree you always want to go it on an angle just like you do with your axe so if you're going to baton this there's going to kind of be virtue your way around you do not want to hit the handle or right out the handle area of your knife that's going to be the weak point you want to stay out here get that knife out about a 45 degree angle give it a couple of good whacks out on the side just like that then you can come around to the other side just like this and do the same thing at an angle come around to the opposing side you're going to do this on all four sides at that point you should be able to just drop it right off just like that you've created a flower petal type cut in here and just pop the center right out of it I want to show you this cut a little more closely because it's a very important technique to understand when you have to baton a sapling I have four petals basically on this rosette that's four knife cuts each of them went into the center where the heartwood is here and all we did was split the heartwood straight off of that and push it over it came out clean right there at the fibers and split you can see that fibrous end right there it's split right off and we have a clean cut sapling without doing any damage to our knife or taking a chance on damaging our knife because if it's good and sharp we shouldn't really even have to hit it that hard to get it to make these cuts as long as we stay at an angle

oK we've got a fantastic fire resource right here we have a fallen-down dead piece of tulip poplar so we know that all of this bark material is going to make great bird nests all you have to do is peel the bark off of it all these inner strains embark that you can see hanging off of it everywhere all of that stuff is going to make fantastic bird nests so we want to strip all of that bark off and take it with us for that reason now let's talk about processing the wood because something like this may involve batani

so let's talk about first cutting it with a saw because even if you cut it with a saw you may still need a baton but you can do certain things to this wood and utilize your saw to make it easier to baton it with your knife as well stay with so when I get back to a camp setting or a camp area I can evaluate this wood and looking at this I can see that there are lots of knots on this piece of wood and that's going to make it difficult to baton because the fibers are going to be twisted where the knots are and it's going to make it much more difficult to split this with a knife but I can do myself some favors what I can do is I can look at a side of the wood here where there are no knots or that's free of knots and I can come in there and I can cut myself a straight kerf across that piece of wood I'm above this knot and I'm on the backside of that and I'm going to cut that through about halfway

just like this what that's going to do is that's going to allow that piece of wood to split off very easily by '''but awning it and it's not going to fracture down or split into these knots where it's going to get more difficult so now I can just set this thing up put it perpendicular to my soccer again staying outside here and away from the handle and now when I split this down it's going to split down right to that saw kerf unless it splits off before that which is what it did and that's okay but I know that it was going to split down to there now I can just come off to the side a little bit still again staying away from the not do the same thing again and it will split off to that kerf you can see where that kerf break is right there and I'm avoiding this not at this point so now I'm going to come over to this side and split down on this side of curve and if I go around that knot you can see it went right around that knot right there and split down so I've got kerf here a curve here I can probably come in one more time here and split off now there's where I hung up on the knob right there's that knot and right there's where your knife is going to hang up you hit something like that you stop you don't mess with that that's where you're going to take a chance on hurting your knife is when you start messing with big knots like that that are twisting the wood so what I end up with when I'm done with that is three much more manageable pieces that I can work with and I can baton safely because I know there's no knots in here so now if I have to baton these down to kindling and things like that I can do that okay I have a piece here that is relatively free of knots it's got one knot down here at the bottom and one small one here it's been broken off here where I share cut it with a saw here and split it off it's got a small piece of heartwood in it the heartwood is going to be the hardest part of the wood and it runs out too right here so that should be fairly easy to baton as well again I want to put my knife on that wood up in here and bang out here I don't want to be banging right here at the weakest point of that blade where the reduction is for the partial Tang I want to get out here on the end of it and use the leverage like that I don't have to hit it really really hard to get in there but I'm getting to the drier portions of the wood by doing that and those are the reasons that you may need to baton your knife it's not something that you need to do every day but you do need to understand how to do it and you see when I do this I'm not just taking huge giant whacks at this thing I'm not hitting it really really hard I'm letting the knife do the work I'm letting that wedge shape of the blade do that work for me to split that wood out I don't have to hit it real hard the harder I hit it the more stress I put on

when it comes to processing firewood everything is about evaluating the piece and understanding what the safest way to process it is that's going to do the least amount of damage or wear to the kit we have this piece of wood is a little bit bigger in diameter it used to be a piece of hardened wood it's a little bit rotten now it's been laying on the ground but there's probably dry wood on the inside it does have a split in it already right here so why not take advantage of that instead of going this way

if we take a wooden wedge that we can make with our knife and our saw we can come down on top of that very easily just like this and we can't split the difference right off the bat now instead of having something this big divot on we have something this big and we can come across here and here and here and split planks off of this thing instead of trying to split it in pieces if we want to split it in half we could do that too and it won't be that difficult now that we have taken down the initial diameter if we can find a place like this that already has a crack that's exactly where I'm going first that's the first place I'm going to take advantage of is something that's already cracked just like that

and yes it's dry on the inside it's even a little bit punky on the inside and to me that's a huge advantage when it comes to starting fire because I can use that punky material to help catch flame very easy okay this is that piece of poplar we drug it back to camp and now I've stripped some of the bark off of it to use for bird nests of things like that and I'm going to hang it right back up in a tree just like I found it except I'm going to hang it up at a tree by my camp so I know where it's at what I needed

it'll stay drier this way it will be in the wind all the time it'll be up off the ground and I can get to it when I need

okay guys so what I want you to realize from this video really is that batani is something that is a necessary evil at times especially in an emergency scenario where you may have lost some of your gear you may not have had your gear let's face it not every one of us goes on a wilderness hike or a weekend hike with our kids in the near state Parker National Forest and carries the kitchen sink if we have a knife in our backpack and a saw we're looking most of us are not packing an accident round with our kids walking through the woods on a 2 or 3 mile hike but if we wander off the trail and get lost it gets too dark one of us twist an ankle something like that we get stuck there at night we're going to need the ability to make a fire and that ability to make a fire may involve having to baton your knife does that mean you're going to need to take 10-inch logs and baton your knife through them no it does not but it means that you may have to take things that are 2 3 inches in diameter that you can cut with your saw and then baton them down smaller or baton into drier woods or baton down into a piece of pine so that you can get to the fat wood so that you have a good solid ignition source so I'm not saying that every knife you carry has to meet those bulletproof criteria of knives that Dave says makes a great survival and bushcraft knife what I'm saying is that you need to understand the limitations of the resource that you are carrying and work around those limitations and understand how to do that that's what's really important a $40 more a bushcraft Black is probably one of the best knives on the market today Bar None and I have almost every model that more sells in the US of more knives and I've used every one of them a lot of times I've used them for everything from fine carving to processing firewood and for the money out of the box I believe the bushcraft Black has features and things that it will do that other knives will not do if you need them in an emergency without modifying the blade it has a good type of process that keeps it protected from rust on the blade that makes it it has a good hard solid 90-degree spine it's high carbon steel so it will throw sparks both with flint as well as being used on a ferrocerium rod it is good for spoke shaving type tasks for processing tinder and the blade stays razor sharp for a long time without a lot of attention it comes in a plastic sheath that is pretty much indestructible so for something that you're going to throw in the bottom of your pack with like a bahco laplander saw to give you a couple of emergency tools and maybe you've got a Leatherman on your belt because you're not walking around the state park with your kids with a giant bowie knife I think it's important for us to understand these things because we are bush crafters for the recreation in the enjoyment of bushcraft not to get into pissing contests with every other bushcrafter out there and say it has to be this way it has to be that way if this you're not doing this way it's wrong if you're not carrying that it's wrong everyone has their own way of doing things everyone has things that work best for them and in the end the best knife or tool that you can have is the one you have when you need it I'm Dave Canterbury with Pathfinder school I thank you for joining me for this video I thank you for everything you do for our school for our family for our business for all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends and I'll be back to another video as I can thanks guys