Hell, I live in the boonies full-time and can’t do some of this stuff. Nor would I want to, especially. Bet I could improvise around it better than Survival Man here, though. Because I’ve got lots of tools, and I don’t have to carry them all.
I thought the whole idea of prepping was to … I dunno … prep? Which I interpret as gather and learn to use proper tools. Tools, and the ability to use them, are what separate us from delicious animals.
But there’s a class of prepper who only seems to get into primitivism, and I don’t understand that at all. If you find yourself bugging out from your suburban life armed only with a bugout bag and a can-do attitude, I personally consider that a prepping fail. Those of us who were here first may have to bury you when you get here. My suggestion is a survival course on politeness.
My personal pet peeve, in this particular prepping sub-genre, is “batoning.” You can’t read a knife review anywhere on the intertubz without learning about how good a knife is at batoning. “Batoning,” for you intelligent people who avoid prepping fora, is when you want to split a log but you didn’t bring a hatchet. I don’t know why you didn’t. I guess hatchets aren’t survivalisty enough. So you lay the blade of your utterly essential and one-and-only knife along the grain of the log, and you … I’m not making this up … hit it repeatedly with a big stick. Until either the log or the knife breaks. Repeat, I presume, until you’ve constructed a log shelter or you have no more knife. This is stupid. It is also, to judge from the aforementioned fora, universally practiced. Personally I’d just look for smaller sticks.
Primitive camping sounds like good dirty fun, and I can see where some people might get into it. For a weekend. For long-term survival, I prefer my cabin and circle of paranoid neighbors, whom I’ve spent years cultivating. As part of my preps.
All I need is a big knife and lots of mud. And 78 skills. And a GE minigun.
H/T to Claire.
HAHAHA!
Where is the line to be drawn?
THAT is the question.
No one person can be proficient in so many things, no matter how hard they try. That’s why people come together in communities, trade, and form tribes/families. The division of labor is what brought people out of the stone age. I, for one, have no interest in going back.
“Those of us who were here first may have to bury you when you get here.”
Amen, brother! Say AMEN! Lord Dog Almighty, say AMEN!
I have been preaching that gospel for years but the majority of preppers refuse to get it. A lot of them have the world’s best bugout bag yet have no idea where they will go. And that’s assuming they recognize the problem before it is too late leave.
“My personal pet peeve, in this particular prepping sub-genre, is “batoning.””
Thank you.
Don’t get me started….too late. I HATE THAT! Hate it. Hate. Loathe.
I have a few knives that are probably well capable to sledge through a log to make kindling and fear not the breakage. I have a small hatchet that I know will do that job and have no doubts whatever that it won’t break. I also have a lightweight saw for cutting when out in the wildness. We all know stroking your wood is far superior to beating it. Particularly when one of the skills I lack is do it yourself field vascular surgery.
I love these guys doing reviews of blades that are very adequate for outdoors knife work who then condemn them because something breaks when they are grossly misusing it. A windy youtube buffoon going by “nutnfancy” was demonstrating full retard with a cold steel pocket bushman in that manner and when it broke after 10 minutes of vigorously slamming the spine with a three pound log, wedging and wrenching from side to side into some old dry oak across the grain, a $25 knife FINALLY broke. So he declared them worthless.
Funny, I have about a dozen that I have given as gifts to Evelyn’s relatives in Philippines. As far as I can see they are all in regular use, farm use, and none have failed. Then again, Filipino farmers don’t fell trees with pocket knives.
As for “bug out bags”, I have a get home possibles type bag in my car in case we have another earthquake that eats the freeways. It weighs about 6 pounds. The most exotic things in it are a few pairs of wool socks. I get a real boot out of these pot belly gear queer clowns with a 75 pound ruck full of clueless.
Most of them lack the proper shovel to bury them with.
Guess I’d better go out and learn how to “lose a tail” if I want to survive.
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/a-human-being-should-be-able-to-change-a-diaper/1377016.html
This is the most relevant prepper statement I’ve seen. Probably the first I saw too.
Concur with the comments about batoning and breaking knives for youtube videos. In addition to batoning, they also like to smash the knife into sticks cross-grain to make them shorter. I think they call it “truncating.” If my Dad saw me do that I would of lost my knife and several pieces of hide. I did bread a serious chunk out of a hatchet once. It just wasn’t up to splitting a piece of dry oak. I am sure that oak would of eaten up any knife.
I guess I am a bad woodsman. I have used my bowie knife for “batoning” for years because it works better and faster than any other method I have ever tried. Although I don’t whack the knife, I just stick the knife in the end of the log and then lift the whole thing up and bring it down fast a couple of times. I also make the logs shorter by using the bowie to chop around the log, then break it over a rock or between two trees.
Oh, and starting a fire without matches or a lighter is so simple a child can do it.
Three things:
1) As a hobby blacksmith (read as “I do not have to work cost-effective” instead of “I don’t know what I am doing but I enjoy it”), I see no trouble with batoning. As long as one remembers basic mechanics (like: Twisting is risky). With the right spine width, grind, material choice and hardness, it is very effective. In my smithy, I have a knife for that purpose to split logs to start my forge fire. I do not even use a soft log, but one of my hammers. But that blade has a 5mm spine, a saber grind, is selectively tempered, made from spring steel and is at most 55HRC. If you use less, you can expect it to work less well. Note: An axe would probably work similarly well and weight the same – but I hate making axe eyelets.
2) This technique gets overused. German survival genius Rüdiger Nehberg tells an anecdote where he got dropped into some rainforest, only taking his heart medication (he was a over 60 at that point, I think) and a knife. He said “if I lose the knife, I’ll be damned”. So, of course, he lost his knife. And stated it was the best thing that could have happened, because he did not bother to cut down trees to make a raft but just used smaller sticks that proved to be much easier to collect. Adapt and overcome an’ all that.
3) Tool use vs. purposefully primitive: There are those people that believe in owning fewer than 100 or even fewer than 10 things. They actually believe that is a good thing because it helps gaining focus on important things while ignoring just how heavily they are relying on others (and in essence troubling them). Even my little workshop at home contains more than 100 necessary tools!
There are those people that believe in owning fewer than 100 or even fewer than 10 things.
Seriously?
I’ve never heard of that, but okay. Personally I’m inclined to dismiss it as Vegan-class foolishness, but as long as nobody’s trying to impose it on me I’d defend their right to do it. Maybe not to the death, but you get the idea. I’d certainly never try to prevent it.
“I have used my bowie knife for “batoning” for years because it works better and faster than any other method I have ever tried. ”
That’s because your “hawk” is dull, Kent….lol……get it…Dullhawk……… ehem…….sorry.
Yep. I get it. And that is actually how/why I got the name. But it had nothing to do with chopping with the ‘hawk- it was that I was an expert tomahawk thrower but as soon as the competition started my ‘hawk wouldn’t stay in the target for anything. So, I got the name Dull ‘Hawk.
Has no one else done a web search for “froe?” The classic Western version and the Japanese bamboo froe are *intended* to be hammered into a billet of wood. The Western kind even has a handle for twisting — and any decent blacksmith could hammer one out after seeing a picture.
There a middle ground between having every dang tool there is and trying to do everything with a jackknife, but it I had to slit kindling or shingles/shakes, I’d invest in a froe.
“Primitive,” as the old-timers did it is pretty sophisticated, consisting of a very large bag of tricks and a collection of the right tools for the job at hand. They mostly managed to keep dry and not freeze in the dark, and modern preppers might find they still have a few things to teach us.
Whacking a knife with a log in a survival situation seems as smart as that Bear guy jumping down waterfalls. I carry a small hatchet and a small knife, both built by me. Seems to work really well. Never had occasion to split logs, except at home, but I suppose I will someday.