Survival Tool from Chris Caine

The Chris Caine Survival Tool was designed by Chris Caine a student of the well known John "Lofty" Wiseman. Wiseman also has a similar knife with a similar name and currently Scorpion and TruWays have versions of Lofty's Survival Tool. There is a decent amount of information on Chris Caine's Survival Tool on the internet, Chris himself has described history of the design and development of his blade and has also sponsered a pass around on the Bushcraft UK forum. Further information can also be seen on Chris Caine's Channel on YouTube and of course more information can be seen on his page on the Survival Tool at his website.

This review consists of :

• specifications
• stock evaluations
• general : food, comparisons, miscellaneous
• overview
• comments and references

Specifications

The knife is 5 mm thick and made from 1075 carbon steel which is hardened to 52-54 HRC. This one weighs 880 grams, the edge thickness is 0.015" in the carving area, 0.025" in the chopping area, 0.035" in the tip. This is a very fine edge thickness, for reference, the edge thickness on the ABS cutting competition knives is only slightly less than 0.025" thick in the chopping area. The edge angle on the Survival Tool is v-ground and consistent at 18.8 (5) degrees per side. The primary grind is flat at 6.5 (5) degree per side. They describe the primary as convex, but it is extremely close to flat.

Initial impressions :

• the handle is fairly rectangular
• would prefer a tapered tang,
• the primary grind should be higher or have top hollow chopping relief like an axe
• sheath is standard cordura, snaps are annoying, like the dangler
• sharpness could be improved, slices paper on a draw, will not shave

Stock testing : main

New in box, the Survival Tool could slice heavy paper on a draw but not push cut. The edge however was not damaged, just likely a little over buffed and it could easily be fully sharpened with just a little time on a very fine hone.

The chopping ability was compared to a Fiskars small hatchet, shown at the right with a Bruks Wildlife hatchet. The 14" Sport Model Fiskars previously had the secondary bevel removed which improved the chopping ability by about 15-20% putting it in the same class as the Bruks Wildlife hatchet. The wood cut was mainly pine, spruce and fir, with a couple sticks of birch. Most of it was seasoned at least 1-2 years, some more than 5 years and very little of it was cut this year. Both of these tools have enough weight and heft to benefit from a heavy swing and are not readily efficient using just light wrist snaps.

The Caine was always significantly ahead of the small axe, and this advantage was not significantly effected through the various types of wood or sizes cut. There was no need to hold far back on the grip due to the forward weight design and thus the precision and accuracy was far ahead of lighter blades. From the first few chops it was obvious the Caine was significantly ahead of the Fiskars and the distinction was made obvious as more wood was cut. Sometime later, though 85 sections of wood cut, the average relative chopping ability of the Caine was found to be 41 (6) % greater than the hatchet.

On to some splitting; as the wood was seasoned it did not in general split easily and would require between five to ten impacts to hammer the blade through the wood. By the time all of the piled of choppg wood was split (170 sections), eight batons had been cut, carved and then broken. However there was no issue with the knife, no excessive binding or vibration during the splitting and the handle was comfortable and secure. The longer blade length also makes working with even moderate sized rounds easy. The only real issue was that the downturned tip would mean impacts ould glance off when close to the tip which reduces the effective length of the blade but also makes the tip much less likely to break during a side load.

To get an understanding of the relative rough stock removal, or heavy carving ability the Survial Tool was compared to a freshly sharpened #1260 Mora with the edge at the standard 10.5 (5) degrees per side. Points were made on 1.5"x2" spruce using heavy force (30-40 lbs on a push) and through 29 points cut the Survival Tool was on average at 86 (4) % of the cutting ability of the Mora. On the softer wood the relative performance of the Caine increased by about 10% almost matching the Mora and on very hard wood it decreased by about 10% less.

In short, the Caine was between 75-95% of the ability of the Mora through hard to soft woods. This spread of performance is due to the fact that while the Mora has a more acute bevel and gains an advantage on hardwoods where the cutting is shallow, the Caine has a much thinner edge (0.015" in that forward part) and thus as the cuts go deeper it gains the advantage of its more acute primary grind. But even in worse case comparison on the hardwood it was still at more than 75% of the cutting ability of the Mora and that is a more than solid performance considering the size of this blade.

Food

With fond memories of Nemo's writeups, without sharpening, the Survival Tool was used to prepare supper. Some onions, potato and butternut squash were all peeled, chopped and sliced. Garlic was easily smashed and then diced and finally some pork was sliced and squid was diced. Of course it is a bit heavy for a kitchen knife, this was mainly to see if the sharpness was retained after the wood cutting and splitting (and it was) and as well to see how the dropped blade would work on a cutting board - it excelled. The knife also works well in a choked up grip and was easy (if you can handle the weight) to peel the squash and potatoes.

Comparisons

The Survival Tool was compared to an ESEE Junglas splitting some more wood similar to the above to see if a difference could be noted between a sabre and full flat ground blade of similar thickness. As seen in the video on the right there is no real difference between the flat ground Junglas and the sabre-ground Survival Tool. There is often a lot made about the wedging action of thicker grinds but quite frankly unless you do a LOT of splitting all you are going to see in comparisons is the difference in the wood because one piece of wood from the same tree can easily be twice as hard to split as another. In this case quite a large amount of wood was split, well over a hundred rounds and thus with a large sample then the general trend can be used to judge the performance. In short, both blades have the length and rigidity to handle the wood and neither of them bind significantly even during splitting some of the more difficult wood. There was also no difference noted in shock or vibration in the handle.

The histogram in the right shows the distribution of the number of impacts necessary to split the wood with each blade. In short there was no statistical difference. The Junglas took on average 4.9 (3) impacts to split the wood, and the Survival Tool took 4.5 (4) impacts to split the wood. The difference was very small and even splitting more than a hundred pieces of wood could not separate which one was a better splitter the performance was that close. Note of course that these numbers would change if a different type of wood was split, if the temperature changed (wood gets MUCH easier to split in the cold), if more forced was used, etc. - however the general trend, or relative performance would be expected to stay the same, i.e, both of these blades split pretty much equally well.

Unfortunately it was actually planned to continue the comparison significantly longer however the Survival Tool suffered a dramatic and complete failure as it snapped right in front of the handle. The breakage can be seen in the video at the right. This was unexpected and fairly unfortunate as up until this point the knife was performing very well and starting to fill out a very comfortable niche as a heavy machete - short parang. What was even more surprising is that the blade actually failed close to the handle when it was being impacted at the tip. This means that the blade did not fail from direct impact but from an overload of internal strain. Given the type of steel used and the cross section this had to be a heat treatment issue, however it is not obvious how such a gross weakening could be produced in a steel of this type with such a cross section.

Overview

Very basically the performance can be thought of as a modern take on a parang, the traditional tool used in many areas for woody vegetation, the counterpart of the machete which is typically used on light vegetation. The Survival Tool is fairly short for a parang and this is essentially to make a compromise between a parang and a knife.

Unfortunately the Survival Tool was not able to be used extensively enough due to the premature failure to properly gauage aspects such as edge retention, ease of sharpening, handle ergonomics/security, etc. .

Replacements

A second replacement was sent out directly from the manufacturer. It also failed almost immediately on similar work as noted in the YouTube video to the right. Curiously enough, it failed under direct impact shock when it was struck in the area in front of the handle this is a completely different mode of failure than the first failure which was from internal strain and not direct shock. This failure was also reported to the dealer, manufacturer and designer. To date there has been no reply by the designer to the second failure and the manufacturer is still "working on" a solution.

Comments and references

Comments can be emailed to Chris Caine Survival Tool

Most of the pictures in the above are in the Survival Tool album at PhotoBucket.