I’m so bored. Going on three weeks here at my friends’ house, and (if I correctly recall) only a few days before I can go home. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m drinking wine and burning up their wifi watching Youtube videos more or less at random because the alternative is … I forget if there’s an alternative.
Anyway. Longtime readers know that Uncle Joel has kind of a knife problem. I can watch a hundred reviews of a hundred guns without my heart going pitty-pat but I want every knife I see advertised despite already having a very nice EDC knife and a pretty damned nice backup knife and two or three perfectly serviceable backup backup knives. It’s positively silly to collect working knives – but I’d do it if I could afford to.
Which is why I’ve been privately having adulterous thoughts lately. Not long ago Ian brought home a Terävä Jääkäripuukko (Yeah, I looked that up, because I no longer have a life) which is a modernized take on the Finnish Puukko and is sold by Varusteleka. I ALREADY HAVE A PUUKKO, I KEEP IT IN THE JEEP AND NEVER USE IT AND I ABSOLUTELY DON’T NEED ANOTHER ONE but I acknowledge that I’m powerless against knife addiction and my life has become unmanageable and that’s not even the pet peeve to which I earlier alluded.
This shit is. Just stop watching after the first few seconds, because it’ll rot your brain…
See what he did there? Did you see that? I haven’t even watched past the first ten seconds of that excerpt, because I no longer have any respect for the idiot’s opinion. The very first thing he does with the knife is start beating on it with a heavy stick. Somehow “batoning” has become the most important thing any working knife can do – if a knife won’t survive severe abuse, it must be just no damned good.
Look, I won’t even try to claim I’ve never done it. Actually I did it for weeks, the first winter I lived in the Secret Lair because I didn’t own a hatchet for splitting kindling. Cold Steel UWK, and it worked fine – but I was still aware with every painful concussion that I was abusing the knife through poor planning: I never tried to fool myself into believing that’s what the knife was for. And then I got a hatchet and in eight years I’ve never done it since.
Seems like every knife review on every video, “batoning” is the very first thing the reviewer wants to show me. And it’s idiotic, is all I’m saying.
Okay, I’m done.
I did the boy scout thing and have camped, trekked etc etc since I was a kid, and it wasn’t until yooztoobz came along that I started hearing about this batoning technique. But since I’m a wilderness trekking kinda guy, I just gather smaller wood – not split stuff up using my knife. I asked some ‘toob doods who were big into knives and demonstrating the technique has this been a thing all along, and they said that the stronger steels they have nowadays make this possible.
Okay.
I’ve done it, but only because I’ve seen knife reviewers do it. When I’m in the woods I want to conserve my knife, not beat the crap out of it.
brew
It’s something I was taught in SERE training, but that’s a “your aircraft crashed and all you were able to grab is the baseline survival kit provided” type of situation, and not meant to be a “plan on doing it this way FOREVER” type of training
Huh. I always just thought it was an Eastern Hardwoods kind of thing. Living where there is plenty of Aspen and Juniper, Oak Brush I’ve always just picked up small pieces of that to start with.
This pretty well sums it up…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP3pyYgskIM
Given the title, I really thought that this post was going to be a complaint about Torso Boy.
Joel, I’m that way, only with old motorcycles, which is why I have (for the moment, God help me) six of ’em.
Count yourself lucky that with you it’s knives.
Have you resorted to “batoning” all their kitchen knives yet???
}:-]
I’ve even hit the back of a knife with a hammer, but it was one of these. https://morakniv.se/en/product/chisel/
I did not bother to watch the video. I’m here to tell you that Varusteleka (the seller of the knife in the video) makes some VERY good knives for VERY cheap. Do not hesitate to buy any of their knives. I think I have all the kinds they make. The SKRAMA is awesome. I have two of those; one for kitchen use, the other for outdoor use. Shipping is fast and cheap, but I don’t know about customs charges for orders to the US.
I may actually buy a Skrama – once in a while a chopping knife would be useful. I keep successfully talking myself out of a puukko because it really would just end up in the box’o’knives.
My Puukko has “1941” worked into the handle in cartridge brass. SISU,
I own a Skrama.
Very nice heavy-duty chopper with an area of the blade near the hilt for finer work.
And yes, I don’t need another knife and I can stop anytime I want…