Sawbacked knives are found wanting because we need that rigid spine for splitting, blade strength and they seldom work well anyway. Why? If you could examine a fine crosscut saw, the design is extremely sophisticated. The thickness is actually greater in the teeth than the blade body,or, the teeth are "set" or bent outward in opposite staggered angles. This chisels a "kerf" of material physically removed. A knife is actually splitting material along fibers. The kerf is therefore actually wider than the saw, preventing binding ( until the material actually folds onto the saw from simple structural fatique. There is a channel for the chiseled material to flow out of. If you look at the finer SAKs, Opinel or various swedish folding saws; they actually have this sophisticated geometry. Now look at sawbacked survival knives. The spine is still the thickest part of the blade. there is no real kerf. Thin knives slice better than thick because you are pushing less mass into the cutting medium. The full thickness sawback is working under this additional disadvantage.

To be fair, though...<br><br>The first saw-back knife that I was aware of on the market was the Randall model 18. There may have been others, but it was also the first hollow-handled "survival" knife, and I think it's pretty clear that it started the genre.<br><br>However, Randall made it clear from the start that the dramatic-looking sawback was not for wood, but for cutting through the aluminum skin of downed aircraft... and it reportedly worked well for that. Most of the subsequent imitators seemed to have missed that point.

Sawbacks go back even further. Germany isued a sawbacked bayonet in WW1. To expand on crosscut saws, they actually have cutting teeth and rakers. the teeth cut the wood fiber much as a knife. The rakers then actually chisel and remove wood shavings. A close examination of SAK,Opinel and similar accessory saws will show an ingenious tooth that combines both in one direction. My old AF Camillus worked well on rendering aluminum also.

I stand to be corrected on this! Saw back knives have been around for hundreds of years. They were originally used to cut grooves and notches in bones, antlers and other hard substances that the cutting edge of the knife could not cut.<br><br>The purpose; grooves allow you to secure sinew or rope to an improvised implement so that the sinew or rope doesn't slip off.<br><br>Antler and bone makes the best improvised snow goggles, fish lures and hooks, harpoons, spear heads and kakivaks( forked fish spears). All of which need to be secured and not allowed to slip. <br><br>Mariner.<br><br><br><br>

Mariner, I am typing this reply with a hand bearing a thin scar that drives gypsy fortune tellers nuts. I had the dubious honor of slicing said hand on a Clovis point in Wyoming, a tool use far from the maker's objective. I have witnessed many debates over defining recovered artifacts as knives, scrapers, awls or even pottery in California ( it was an abandoned skeet range overburdening a Chumash site.) I leave the debaters to go blind peering at microlithic marks under a microscope. 30 minutes with a road kill carcass explains a lot of tools. What we might call a sawbacked blade did indeed work well making grooves, as does the USAF survival knife ( and just right for paracord.) I am not dismissing the concept out of hand, just trying to explain the limitations.