Which kind of knife would be the best to improvise a spear in the wild?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “spear knife“
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Written by: Liliana
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Which kind of knife would be the best to improvise a spear in the wild?
You can check the answer of the people under the question at Quora “spear knife“
About Liliana
Which kind of knife would be the best to improvise a spear in the wild?
A machete.
You take you machete, cut down a sapling of appropriate size, sharpen the end, and fire harden the end if wanted.
You can now mount this in a game trap or similar, and make more.
And keep hold of you knife.
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A fixed blade with removable scales, or handle.
Or, a knife made specifically for that purpose. Cold Steel makes one, I think. Comes with a round hollow handle. You shave a stout pole down to for into the handle, and it has a spot to pin it even. Its made to become a spear.
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A hollow handle survival knife, similar to this one (courtesy of Amazon):
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You see that lid on the bottom of the handle? It can be unscrewed. Inside the handle there’s an empty space where you can hide some small (very small) survival pack – a few matches, may be a fishing line and a hook.
But if you can take that stuff out, your knife basically turns into a primitive spear tip. You can actually fix it to a wooden shaft, and get a primitive spear – not fancy, but better than nothing.
I personally did that – no, not for slaying zombies in a wild. But to cut off oyster mushrooms that were growing ten feet over my head on a dead tree. What can I say? It works. The biggest drawback is that the knife holds to the shaft purely by a friction; the hold is surprisingly good, but not something I’d trust my life to. So in a survival situation, I think you need to reinforce your “spear tip” to the shaft by something – by a string of nylon rope from the survival kit in your backpack (you carry it along with a medkit, right?), or may be even that fishing line you carry in a handle. You have that fishing line in your survival knife, aren’t you?
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First, this is tagged with “Kitchen Utensils and Accessories”. Obviously most survival knives—let alone a purpose-built option like a Renegade Tactical Steel Warrior or bayonet—would be vastly superior to any kitchen knife, but that’s hardly in keeping with the spirit of the question.
Size-wise, I’d want to go with a 6″ blade utility knife or something in that range: wide enough to be durable, narrow enough to pierce well.
Construction-wise, the handle and bolster are going to be critical to being able to mount it easily and securely. An easily removable handle on a long-tanged knife is ideal, allowing you to really build it securely into the shaft. If you can’t find a removable handle, something that’s mostly straight (although a protruding pommel may be helpful depending on construction) is ideal.
The bolster is the part of the knife at the heel of the blade, opposite the point, where it runs up to the handle.
A decent-size flat bolster like this:
can be butted up against your shaft (or ideally, inset slightly) before lashing, and will help drive the point straight forward. The handle there is also straight and fairly amenable to lashing. Notch out the end of your shaft so it buts against the handle and against the bolster and you can at least semi-securely lash the two together. It’s not nearly as good an option as removing the handle entirely and sinking the tang into a shaft, but in an emergency it’s an option.
A small bolster like this:
would be pretty useless, and the curved handle there will make lashing more difficult.
An angled bolster like this:
would work to drive the point off of the shaft laterally when under force.
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I’m not an expert at this but I did once have to kill an injured deer by using my hunting knife (a Mora) lashed to a long pole with a bootlace. I walked up to the buck, put the tip against its thorax where I thought the heart was, and pushed it in. I killed another injured deer with the staple-pulling, claw end, of a rancher’s fencing hammer. I would not have been able to achieve this against healthy deer.
I do hunt a lot with throwing spear, but only for trash fish (carp). To kill a mammal like a deer or a hog I think most people could only be successful using a drop-throw from an elevated place like a tree. You’d have to entice the animal to come to a position below you, or position yourself above a game trail. There are YouTube videos. My name isn’t Tim Wells.
It is my opinion that you could make a very effective spear point from a piece of stiff wire—-barbed fencing wire, for example. Simple putting a sharpened point on the tip would not make it quickly effective UNLESS you were able to penetrate the lungs or heart; anywhere else might be a mortal injury but an animal that ran off might be impossible for you to find. To be more effective the tip should be flattened into a spear point and sharpened as best you can.
In a survival situation I don’t believe you have the time or energy to get fancier than ‘simple’. Stick with a hand-held, throwing / stabbing spear rather than an atlatl. I also think that the multi-pronged wooden spear tip (shown in another answer) and heated to hardness, would be effective. I think I would spread the points further apart, though.
If knife it is, with no substitutions, I think that something like a narrow, 4-inch blade would be the closest to ideal. My opinion.
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A bayonet. It’s specifically designed to be stuck on the end of a boom stick. A non-boom stick will work almost as well.
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The best knives I know of for this application are the Cold Steel Bushman and Bushman Bowie.
These are made from one piece of carbon steel and the handle is made like the neck of the head of a shovel, specifically so it can be mounted onto a stick for a spear.
A spear made from a Bushman can not only be thrown or used for thrusting, but can also be used for cutting things out of reach, such as cutting fruit from a tree.
These two knives will be far more durable than the so-called “survival knives” commonly sold.
There is also no reason to only have one knife with you.
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A knife should be used as a knife and not as a spear. Your survival knife is a valuable tool with many uses. You can use the knife to shape different kinds of spears; perhaps even make an Atlatl, to enhance the throwing power of the spear.
I was watching a WWII documentary the other day, and one of the Japanese bayonets is darn near a spear/sword in its own right.
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