Batoning is when you take a fixed knife or a folding knife and use it as a chopper the way that works is you place your knife on a thing that you wish to cut and you strike it at the back of the knife.
One of the rumors I wanna dispel, you may see some so-called experts on their television shows and what they will do when they are batoning is they`ll take a rock and place the knife on whatever they wish to cut and they start smashing the back of the knife with the rock.
Never, ever do this! For two reasons:
- You can snap the blade of your knife
- Even the back of the knife blade isn’t sharpened, if I come down with a rock and I happened to miss I can still cut my fingers on the back edge of this knife.
We can cut a tree using the batoning technique as the same as we would do if we were using an ax, so we will use the same angle to remove the material to cut of a tree.
When you will strike the back edge of the knife with the stick, you must strike in the center of the blade so you will not snap it or break the blade.
Once you get the blade in you will gonna pull it straight out, you`re not gonna wiggle it back and forth, pull it straight out.
You made your first cut just as an ax, you removed the material. Now you will move to a different spot and remove material, continue doing that all the way around until the branch is ready to come off.
And again, remember to make angle cuts, hit the center of the blade and cut, when you pull the knife, pull it straight out, do not bend it or twist it.
A lot of the people are using batoning to split wood, it`s one of the things that we do not recommend to do. You will rarely have a real survival situation need to split wood with a knife. Either way is your choice.
Just remember: batoning is a very valuable technique if you do not have the proper tools available
Dave Canterbury from the pathfinder school shows you how to properly use a knife batoning technique out in the field.