Battle of the Blades: Fixed Blade Knife vs. Hatchet

We’re finally here. This is probably going to be the most anticipated blog of all of the blogs we’ve posted up in the last few months. This series of blogs will encompass the final C, the cutting tool. Bushcraft should almost be synonymous with knife stuff. Whenever you see someone talking about Bushcraft, there’s a knife involved. There’s a knife either on their belt, around their neck, or in their pocket or hand. I won’t even lie, even I am holding a knife in my cover picture for the website. Now why would that be? Because everything that we do requires that piece of metal. Think about something as simple as starting a fire. More than likely you’re going to use your knife to process the fine material and to baton wood for fuel. It can be used for carving feather sticks for your fire lay. You can strike a ferro rod or flint against it to create sparks. You could possibly even use the handle as part of your socket for a primitive bow drill set. That’s 5 uses for your knife in making fire alone.

What are you going to do with that fire? Cook with it? If that’s the case you may need to carve yourself a bowl and a spoon. Maybe a fork. Maybe make a plank of wood to soak and grill fish on. You may even want to carve a stake to roast your fish on. If you’re cooking something bigger, you may even need a spit to roast your meat on. But let’s say you’re making soup in a pot. You’ll probably have to carve a pot hook and lash that together in conjunction with your tripod. You may want to carve notches into the pot holder so you can adjust the level which you are cooking on. A good rule of thumb that I have come up with is whatever you don’t plan to bring with you, have a plan on how to make it. Nine times out of ten, you’ll need your knife to achieve that. 

Now before you go run off and grab a big steak knife or cleaver from your kitchen, not all knives are created equal and trying to talk about all the different knives and their individual uses would take all of this blog as well as the next few. So instead of carrying a bunch of knives, we want to find that great multitasker in the drawer. Now our forefathers found that the best knife to use was a butcher knife. Now they didn’t read Ye Ole Blog to find that out. They did exactly what I’m telling you to do now, which is to think “what is it that I’m going to be doing?” and find a knife that accomplishes all those tasks. For the woodsmen back then, they would mostly go out to hunt and possibly collect materials from the outdoors, so they would need a knife that could perform tasks such as skinning, cutting meat, working well with wood, and maybe even chopping up herbs. These men did not have disposable incomes. In fact most of the time these trips were used to increase the coiffeurs of the household. So often they would just grab a knife from out of the drawer. Most of the time that knife was just a 6” butcher knife. You can find them still today, mostly still the same way for a reasonable price. They have features such as a full tang so you can baton with it, a long blade that is good for skinning with, and because it is good for skinning it is good for fine carving tasks. It has a wooden handle with pins in it, meaning that if you lost the handle you could repair the knife or maybe even craft a handle on the fly.  And as dictated by free market, the success of this knife would have been passed on from friend to friend and throughout their generations.

Now I promised you last week a battle and I couldn’t do that if I have another competitor. There are a lot of cutting tools out there that can be companions to a good belt knife. A saw, an axe, a pocket knife, or a specialty knife. In modern days we could even use a multitool. However, there is one tool that I do believe can replace a knife if you want it to. And that tool would be the hatchet. A small one-handed axe with a 4” cutting edge. Similar to the Native American tomahawk except for the fact that the blade could not be taken off, it could be used to process game, cast sparks if made from the correct metal, could be choked up on to get finer carving tasks that you could get out of a knife, and of course could be used like an axe to process fire wood or chop down saplings. There is even a famous book called Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, in which a young boy is stranded in the Canadian wilderness with only a hatchet to survive with. Side note: this was one of the first books of my childhood that got me into the outdoors.

And with all that, let’s give my childhood a little closure and figure out which is better, the knife, or the hatchet? For this series of tests I will be using a Camillus Drop Point fix blade with a 4 ¾” blade (purchased at Walmart) and a Truper boy’s camping axe (purchased at Tractor Supply). The goal of my test was to see how well they could each chop, carve, split wood, and also cast a spark to make a fire.

For the first one, I had a green branch of a tulip popular tree. I started with the hatchet first and attempted to cut off a 9” section of branch to carve with. After about one minute of work, the hatchet had went through more than half and I was able to snap it off. If I had chosen to, I could have continued working with the hatchet because it wasn’t taxing. Then when we switched to the Camillus to do the same job, I found that it only took out a quarter of the material in one minute, and that it was a taxing process. Also, unlike the hatchet, I had to use a piece of wood to baton strike my blade to get it to cut into the wood, and I had to perform the technique known as “beaver chewing” which is where you would cut the wood in the way a beaver would chew through a branch. For the first round, I am giving it to the hatchet; not surprising seeing that this task is the hatchet’s primary job.

For the second round, I wanted to carve both a spiked end and a blunt end. Starting with the hatchet again, I was able to debark very easily and make a crude spear point. Next, working at my stump and anvil, I had to go about the task of trying to give it the round top, which was not easy and the hatchet was difficult to work with in performing this task. When I test the stake to be put into the ground, the top mushroomed out, and the spear was not good enough to go deep into the ground and therefore wouldn’t make an adequate tent stake. Moving on to the fixed blade, it debarked easier, made a much better spear point, and rounded edge, and it was very easy and controlled while being worked with. When testing the second stake in the same manner as the first, the top did mushroom, however, the stake actually went deeper into the ground and would have made a decent tent stake. The winner of this round goes to the fixed blade for its control and better shaping of the wood.

 Following this test, I wanted to carve feather sticks, something every woodsman needs to know when making a fire (something we’ll probably talk about in a later blog). During this test, the hatchet was not sharp enough to give enough control to round the curve without taking everything off at the top. The few curls I got were not good and deep. However, when using the knife, I did have that sharpness and control. I was able to get very big elaborate curls. Again, the winner is the fixed blade. The hatchet just could not perform the task that it was given.

For the fourth task, I wanted to baton wood. I am prepared to go ahead and give this to the hatchet because I already know that between the two of them, the hatchet could split larger pieces of wood if needed. However, with that being said, while batoning both with the hatchet and the fixed blade, I got very good results, with possibly better out of the hatchet. However, the quality of the product is just as important as the quality of the work. Both knives got the job done and did fairly well at getting the job done, but the each performed in different ways. With the hatchet, if the wood would have stood by itself, I could have split it. However, since it couldn’t, I had to baton the axe the way I would a knife. It still did its job fine, gave me a very clean cut, and I was not worried at any moment that I could possibly break the hatchet. When I split with the knife, it split the wood well, was not any more tasking than using the hatchet, however, with every strike, I had to worry if I could possibly break my blade because of how thin it was compared to the hatchet.

                                    

For the final test, I wanted to throw sparks off of my ferro rod. I knew I was going to be in trouble when starting with the hatchet because I could not find a 90 degree edge. After look it over two or three times, I knew what I was going to have to do. I struck the ferro rod against the cutting edge to produce sparks. It didn’t seem to hurt the hatchet too bad, however I would never, ever, advise that unless you absolutely had to. I did it in this experiment because I was testing a scenario in which I had to do that. The sparks provided were pretty good and I do believe I could have built a fire. Following that performance I switched to the fixed blade where I used my 90 degree spine to cast sparks easily, and consistently. For the final test and the tie breaker, I have to go with the fixed blade.

In closing, I believe that both of these tools are great in their own right, however, when it comes to multitasking, I find that a good fixed blade can often outperform or at least keep pace with a hatchet, but not the other way around. Due to the hatchet’s design, it does not allow for the smooth, even carving that you can get from a fixed blade, which is why it fails in the carving task it was given. However, where the fixed blade is full tang, it provides it with some durability to accomplish those tasks that I would give to the hatchet such as batoning and beaver chewing. It doesn’t accomplish it as well as the hatchet, but it does get the job done. Finally I believe that the fixed blade wins overall because it can be used to strike that ferro rod which is something THIS hatchet couldn’t do, which brings me to my final point. My hatchet could not strike a ferro rod, however if I took some time and put in a 90 degree edge somewhere on my hatchet, worked my profile to accomplish those carving tasks better, this could be a new ballgame.

Overall, I think that I prefer fixed blades over hatchets. Tell me what you prefer down in the comments. I hope you enjoyed this little contest. In the end if you don’t know which one to take, go nuts and take both. Next week I will be going over another cutting tool that in some ways can put both of these to shame. Comment below what you think it is by 11:30 pm EST Sunday July 30^th, 2017. The first commenter that gets it right will get a shoutout in the next blog. As always feel free to comment, share this blog, and check back next week for a new one. Follow me on Facebook: @BPackBushcraft and on Twitter @BPackBushCraft. Until next time, keep those fires burning and put another log on for me.