Here's a guy that broke a RAT-7 as posted on BF

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=486375&page=2

sicily02
Hi all I have had a rat-7 fail me while I was battoning through some seasoned mulberry. This is a pretty tough wood the round I was battoning through was about 3.5" and about a foot long. I got the knife I week before last Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving night is when the knife had a 3" piece break out of the knife and stayed in the round. I sat there with a shocked look on my face and then went into my 5th Wheel camper and told my wife and that I just broke my new knife get your camera and take some pics. Later that knight we drove into town and I e-mailed Mike perin and Rat knives. Now this is Thanksgiving week end so I did not think I would here any thing back until at least the nest week. The next day Mike called me and we talked about it and what happened Mike said he would get a new knife out to me. Mike told me that D-2 is a bit more brittle and say the 1095 modle that they have to. I asked Mike if he would send out a new knife in 1095 steel instead of a new D-2 steel. Mike said he would but that I would loose money on it because the D-2 cost more I said thats ok. So to wrap up here I am glad I was not in a real sitution. I did get the new Rat & in 1095 steel and I went out and battoned with this one and had know problems. I own a few rats and believe this was just a one in a millon mishap. The morale of this story is carry more than one blade. Which I do anyway. Here are the pics.

Wow. Good service though.

I'll probably think twice about batoning now, especially since my new outdoors knife is an unlaminated mora so its also a bit more on the brittle side. Yet another point in favor of carrying a light axe. I know, I know lots of people have had no problems of any sort batoning with their knives, but why risk it if you don't absolutely have to? Yours might end up being that one-in-a-million that fails catastrophicly.

see my "ax saves fork" post..
i had never heard of "battoning" untill i saw it on this site
and i assume it's from one of the TV survival programs..
as a last ditch way to get dry wood i can see it but is not
what a knife is made for..it's good to see that the maker
stood behind his product..

When I bought my first Rat I had a choice between 1095 and D2. After thinking it over I figured the harder D2 would be too brittle in a large knife, while 1095 has been used in large knives and machetes for years with no problems. I guess I was right.

This is why I don't baton. I'll wittle down to the dry wood rather than risk this. I've said it was a bad practice ever since I learned of it, and it sucks to have a knife this nice killed proving it.

I think he's also a member here; he's been innactive for a couple of months.

Please note the wood is SEASONED MULBERRY. I don't know about you, but seasoned wood of that hardness and size is the FINAL addition to my fire. I can also state axes are just as prone to catastrophic failure with the wrong set of conditions. The idea of knife batoning is an expedient method when axe carry is not possible. As an expediency, it takes a little thought to do a tougher job safely for both tool and user. No knife; Swamp Rat, Mora and everything else in between is immune.

Thank you for sharing this experience. I know which steel to prefer now in my next knife.

Just a side note from my experience.
"Battoning" is also no good for a liner lock folder knifes. The lock spring is prone to crushing at the blade end, no matter how careful you are. So, at some point, the blade will start to play when locked.

Is the Lock Back or Axis Lock locking mechanisms will do any better in such a situation?

Not sure about repeated use, but I've batonned the heck out of my ritter mini folder a couple of times. Still seems super-solid to me. Just sort of testing things, so I really pushed it and split a log that was about 2/3 the length of the blade. Really worked it. No problems so far!

J

WOW, that's an insane break to me. I have the same knife, it's one of my favorites and it sure doesn't seem like something that would break like that. Then again that is some seriously hard wood... (Keep comments to yourself!!)

This makes sense to me. D2 has a natural tendency toward latticing anyways, and so likely your hard batoning found a lattice point and the clean break occured. This is much the same as how diamonds are cleaved.

This is also why most service swords aren't made out of real hard/inflexible alloy. A certain amount of hardness balanced with tensile strength is what's desired in a bigger blade. You don't need a lot of flexion in small blades like what folders are made out of, typically, so it makes sense that they would be from harder, more rigid material. Tool steel is made for precision, not for manipulation. D2 is a tool steel. This is another reason why mower blades are made pretty soft. If you had a lawnmower with a D2 blade, it would explode on impact with the curb, the sidewalk etc, rather than just burr up the edge some.

I think metallurgically we are at perhaps the limits physically of what can be done with metal. We now have such things as dendritic cobalt blades, crucibled composite blades, differential heat treating, cryogenic hardening, nitrogenation, and every possible alloying formula across the periodic table. Short of hiring a group of elves or dwarves to start putting +1 attack features onto our stuff, it is about as good as it is ever going to get. Besides, I haven't seen any vorpal bunnies or short ugly hairy footed dudes with mithril armor running around lately. I'd say that the next big improvement will be in educating people how to use and maintain the blades they have, which to me means opening the history books and re-educating people about how guys with standard issue carbon steel blades conquered the frontier countless times past. Yeah, maybe they didn't have to stab through car doors or chop through 10p nails and such, but they did carve up an awful lot of wilderness. The best $300 blade out there won't be worth a tinker's darn if you don't know how to use it right. Now that you know how D2 fails, you've learned that sometimes the best uber-metal on the market isn't the best choice, and so we go back to what we know works, having learned an important and somewhat expensive lesson perhaps. Kudos to the Falcon for stepping up and sharing his experiences here with us so we don't have to repeat the lesson ourselves.

It makes you wonder sometimes how not-so-ancient man got by with glass and stone blades. Can you imagine chopping down an oak with a copper headed axe?

I don't think battoning is necessarily wrong. I do think that it should be restricted to green wood. Seasoned wood of the size that broke the blade can also pinch the blade so tight that it's putting huge lateral (perpendicular)loads on the blade. The whack of the baton 90 degrees from the lateral loading pushed it to the breaking point. A smaller stick driven in at the split would have kept the blade from pinching/binding and (probably) prevented the blade from breaking.

As for sticking to green wood, I've mostly considered battoning to be for the construction of shelter. Once you have a fire going you don't really have to chop and split big pieces, you feed them into the fire. The caveat is a true life-or-death emergency situation. If I think battoning through a steel girder will just maybe save me or a loved one, then I'm going to baton right through that girder.

+1 on that. Until we find Unobtainum, I think we might have found the max of what we can do with blade steel without improving some feature at significant cost to another.



OK, I know I get that reference, and probably Blast does when he reads it, but how many others do....

BTW, Mithril is a titanium alloy in all likely hood.

I would've never guessed that benjammin was into RPG's.

Yep, I caught it and I'm still stunned!

-Blast

I don't know if this would work in this particular situation, but one thing you can do to split a log is to cut a long wedge from the side of the log, sharpen it and then barely baton a slot with your knife, then use the wooden wedge and baton on it to finish splitting the log.

I thought they would have had better service but maybe battoning a knife is considered outside normal usage.
cheers

Hi all, When that knife broke on Thanksgiving day while my wife and I were camping it was a shock. When I talked to Mike from RAT, he told me that at the time we were talking only one other knife had broke and it was run over by a tank. Mike also told me that he prefers the 1095 steel for being in the field over the D-2 just incase he has to sharpen it on a river stone. When that new knife arrived a week later I took it out and battoned with it and had no problems. I take it as just a bad mishap.
Well take care all,
Bryan

P.S. I bought a MK-3 in January of this year and have battoned with it and had the handle scale come apart and well I called the place you order them from and the guy I talked to did not understand that the little screws that hold the handle on srew into a treaded part and that I needed to get that part. he sent out 4 srews and not the right part I just took off the scales and wrapped green para cord around the handle. I really like it that way now.
Take care every one,

Look on the bright side. Now you have a new RAT-7 in 1095 and a new KLINGON-7 in D2. The broken one looks like a knife a Klingon might carry.

I guess that is one way to look at it aloha.
Bryan

Except maybe the Bears Grylls $700 knife.

It does. That is part of why I flinch when I see people batoning straight through- take your time and think. If you try to rush, you waste time, potentially damaging you or your gear, and start to spook the paranoid little chimp in the back of your mind.

Actually not a horrible idea... Put a chopping edge on the arc, and it might be better than decent for vines and the like.

Not to mention looking very hardcore.

Speaking of him, the few times I have watched his show the knife he had did not look at all like the one he is selling. And one time he was batoning with a ROCK. On the back of a blade with "saw teeth"...

Hmm, methinks Mithril be some sort of silver alloy, but mayhap there be some titanium in the mix as well?

I did vintage RPG back in the 70s and 80s, back when Gygax was all there was. I find that such activities tend to stimulate the thought processes that lead to real world problem solving, even if it is based on fantasy. The closest I've come to RPG since then is Chess, or maybe Super Mario Brothers on SNES to entertain my daughters. I got tired of poor DMGs Monty Halling 3rd level fighters into 20th level Paladins and insensible traps that inflicted the equivalent of a tactical nuke in damage in a low level game. It ends up with the DMG dueling with his best friend while everyone else in the campaign calls it a day. We did have some real marathon games back in the day.

I also got a little more intrepid and started having my own adventures rather than living vicariously through the characters I'd created. At the time it was a good way to while away the monotony, but once I had the freedom to go do myself, I discovered that shooting a 44 magnum or hiking a mountainside was much more satisfying. My earlier youth was based more on outdoors activities, so it seemed natural to turn back to that when the opportunity presented itself. Doing circles in the Indian Ocean or being stuck on base was far removed from anything I'd call adventure.

Interesting thing is: The steel has broken away in a arc. I would have expected the blade to snap. That rather tends to suggest a flaw in the steel. Either as a result of a poor casting or tempering. It might even have been as a result of two different pours of metal into the same mould.

Most likely it was a bit of differential temper along the blade, with the critically weak transition being where the break occured. Again, it is the way the latticing forms in the cast, then how the tempering process is applied that accentuates that temper line just enough to where something like this will happen in a highly structured alloy like D2. Softer steels have to really be temper processed to form such a break line, but it can be done. I've had chisel tips and punches snap at the temper line like that as well.

Back in shop, we were always told to keep the tool moving around in the liquid when we were tempering it so that you didn't create such a breakline, the idea being that the liquid would move up and down along the hot metal and this would shed the temper differential across a greater area. I'm cetainly no metallurgist, but it seems sensible to conclude that was at least a contributing factor.

Or maybe the dang thing just broke...

"...Or maybe the dang thing just broke..."

Now your're talking language I understand

Personally I have never planned to baton through any wood. When I did so, it was more a question of had to because there wasn't any other way to get the job done.

Such as: http://www.gardenerstoolshed.com/hudson_bay_ax.html

Which is what I would take with me if I knew in advance I had some cutting/splitting to do. Very few knives are designed to be heavy duty cutting/splitting tools, while most axes are.


Frank2135

My theory to. If there was any sideways motion when it was wacked (doesn't have to be enough to notice), the center of the arc might well have been where the force was at it's greatest.

IMHO, as you can see on the second image, the log is almost split. The knife just stuck on the bough knot. It looks small on the image, but it creates a curve in the wood structure which the knife's edge started to follow. The log parts are held together by another knot, which you can see on the second image. So, the back of the blade was still forced to stay vertical. (Well, I'm not sure if I'm explaining this clear enough? But that had happen to me zillions of times).

It's not that big a log for this knife. So if you feel it's too hard to split for its size - something is wrong. Just start at another angle, or better yet drive in a thick wood wedge instead, especially if the log has many knots.