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.