mewolf1 said:
Splitting wood means that it is to large in diameter and I wonder how you get it into short chunks in the first place.
With the knife. On local woods, if you don't split it, then it won't burn if it is fresh, well it burns, but you don't get any heat, the water just boils out of it and much of the fuel is wasted, the combustion efficiency is poor. Wood needs to be cut and seasoned here about 1-2 years.
http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/swamp rat/ratweiler/ratweiler_fire_logs.jpg
That is a shot of a recent test burn, decent wind, the flame was burning hot, and there was a solid bed of coals under those sticks, however they were frozen, full of ice, as was all the deadfall and they strongly resisted burning. There is no size to them either (not wrist sized) and they are all well seasoned, they are the remains of a fence, probably 20+ years old which had rotted apart and fallen down.
The fire was started using green boughs which burn almost like gasoline, lots of heat, no sustainability, it was then fueled with limbs on standing trees which were dead (don't always have these, but lots of ever greens here). These hard ends however also tend to flash burn on local woods and you can't sustain a fire with them either, armfulls don't last an hour, especially in a wind.
It also takes a long time for even small woods, 4 inches or so, to dry out , even if next to a stove indoors with it running 24 hours unless you split the wood, but if you do split it, then it happens in days. You both increase the surface area/volume ratio massively (easily get 10:1), and open up the wettest part of the freshly cut wood.
In general there is little need to actually do this (split large wood for a fire to stay alive when outside) but this holds true in general as well. How often do you actually "need" any survival skills while just fishing, hiking, camping, etc. . Millions of people do both every year with no such knowledge and come out fine. Most locals for example rely on gasoline to start fires when outside, forget bow and drill, there is not even any tinder preperation.
Fire in general is usually over played in regards to its abilities, the fire in the above for example was fairly large, feet across, but could not even generate enough heat to melt the surrounding snow. I have been experimenting lately with seeing what it more effective at keeping me warm, fire, shelter or clothing, and it takes a massive fire to fight off even moderate cold, and even cheap clothing easily outperforms it because your body is much better at warming itself than trying to soak up heat unless you build multiple fires and stand in the middle of them which can be hard to maintain safely..
The real use of fire comes when you no longer have the ability to generate your own body heat and need an external source, fall through the ice and climb out of a river for example. Shelters and clothes don't help there enough though, you actually need something to provide heat. This is a pretty extreme senario of course, but it is the extreme senarios that tend to kill people. Plus of course signaling, cooking, water purification, protection, etc. .
pict said:
So far I haven't run into a situation that these two won't handle.
Those types of machetes don't work well on local woods, the really heavy Barteaux's do ok, but even then they are far behind knives with actual primary grinds like parangs / bolos / khukuris. The machetes have too much vibration when chopping, especially on the dense hardwoods and bind excessively on the soft woods.
I showed a bunch to a native maker who forged parangs and he was actually disgusted, but I guess if you spend hours forging a distal taper and dual convex bevels you are not going to have much use for a stamped blade with a small single bevel grind. They used their large blades for heavy chopping as well as light brush, no axes.
Just like axes, long blades are enviroment specific, there is a massive difference in a heavy khukuri and a slim bolo, but both of them evolved for similar purposes. I had a nice Hults which was supposed to be competition grade for chopping competitions but was useless on local woods, even with its heavy five pound head I would rather use a small GB hatchet, the efficiency was horrible and it was dangerous to use because the really low penetration made glances really likely.
-Cliff
