My TOP 5 Survival Knives and Why I Chose Them: Knives & Tools for Wilderness Survival

hey what's up everyone Tim here from everyday tactical vids as you saw from the title of this video we're gonna be talking about my top 5 survival knives or survival tools depending on how you define a knife some people say a knife is up to a certain size and beyond that becomes a different type of cutting tool bottom line these are my top 5 survival knives or survival choppers or machetes however you wanted to find it number 5 for me is the SE 6 great knife lots of different options as far as the colorations I do have this one with the black and the gray handles I also have the one in venom green with the orange handles just a great overall knife one thing I found is that I want a knife that's probably 6 inches or bigger I don't want something that is 5 inches a lot of people that's kind of a cut off for survival knives but I tend to want something a little bit larger so 1095 for your steel it's easy it's a good steel because it's easy to sharpen out in the woods but it's gonna hold the edge quite well 11.75 inches from end to end your blade length is 6.5 inches and your actual cutting edge is 5.75 inches we do have a drop-point blade here pull the flat grind as far as your grind and then linen micarta is the material for the handles the rockwell hardness is between 55 and 57 and it does have a powder coating on the blade your weight is 12 ounces and your thickness is 0.18 eight inches the thing I love about this is that it gives me enough length to baton through something it gives me enough weight and length also to chop like this but also if I want to choke my chop my fingers back and run my wrist through this lanyard like so now I can chop like this as well the jimping is just right for this so I can rest my thumb on that and it's not gonna beat my thumb up too much but also it does give me some additional grip with the with the knife another thing for me about this knife is the handle it's relatively neutral not all kinds of grooves and cut outs it's also the right thickness sometimes for me with a knife when I grab a hold of it if it's thick I'm gripping it really hard to make sure that I've got good control and it's just beating up my hand this one as soon as I grab it just feels really comfortable in my hand then se6 comes with a pretty nice sheath from se but I had a custom one made by black bear custom Kydex so you can see that there it's got that very cool pattern and then I've got a fire steel on the side this is from pine fire a company that used to exist back in the day but they since closed down and then you have your loop on the back with your very cool black bear custom Kydex logo there so the se6 great knife you know if I had none of these other knives and this was the one that I had to use for a survival scenario I'd be really happy with it so yeah number five out of my top five it's the SE six my next life is this which is the Bravo four now if you go online you can find this over at red beard blades that's his newer website his former website and name for his company was Jay wolf cutlery now the story behind this is I originally saw this knife reviewed by air and over again Ian's tactical and I was intrigued by it so I reached out to them and they made one for me these are custom knives really beautifully built the story is that the gentlemen who built them he was in the military served overseas was a sniper and just saw a lot of knives being broken on a regular basis so he said I'm gonna make a knife that my buddies and I can't break it's gonna be a really strong knife for real use in you know wartime scenarios so he built this one at CPM 3v and this thing is super sout stout and super strong in my review which I'll put a link to that down below as well I really beat on this thing I mean that really tried to hurt this knife and I had no issues whatsoever this thing is very comfortable to use and it's gotten a thickness of like a BK to but feels much more sleek and manageable some details on the knife ten inches from end to end five inches for the blade five inches for the handle a lot of different options for your steels and your handle types the thickness you can go a quarter inch or 5/16 this is a quarter-inch thick thick ive CPM 3v you can get it in s35vn as well one of the cool things about this is that he tapers the handle you can probably see it's thicker here like wider here and there tapers back and that's how it naturally Falls like in your hand you have basically more kind of meat on this portion of your hand as opposed to back at the end and so really comfortable to uh to hold on to this thing no jimping but because it's wide up there you know quarter inch thick you can place your hand on that and really do some nice push cuts as well I did put a lanyard on this I took it off for now but if you choke back with a lanyard it has enough weight that you can you can chop with it and really you can get some work done so my first survival knife ever was a BK to which I liked for a while but I just found it too clunky and so when I heard about this knife and heard it's a quarter-inch thick I was like yeah I'm a little full it feels a little shady to me but like I said it's it's just super manageable this one has a saber grind they give you a bunch of different options as far as the grind just a really strong knife like I said I really aggressively use this thing and I wasn't able I mean I scratched it up throwing sparks up the fire stealing stuff but um but you know no issues whatsoever I had a couple different sheaths for this knife I have a leather one and I also have this kayaks one this one was built by a country prepper and you can see I've got the fire steel there Kydex and then on the back I've got like a little tin there so you can put you know firestarter or other items that you want and then we have your your leather loop there to attach it to your belt now price point from the knife not including the sheath so you're gonna be looking at between 250 and up from there depending on you know what different types of Steel's to use and different things like that he doesn't have a ton of different knives but the ones that he's made everybody I know who's used them has been very very impressed once again that's the B 4 or Bravo 4 from red beard blades now we're getting into some of the bigger options that I have here number three is this which is the LT right Overland machete couple different options here you can get a leather sheath or you can get a Kydex sheath and you can also get something similar to like the Rocky Mountain shred it's very textured for the handle I got the smooth one and that's in a canvas micarta 19 inches from end to end you have a 12-inch blade 3/32 for your thickness 1075 is your steel doesn't have a convex edge on it they do a two step patina you can see that this thing is definitely it's seen some use I do have the leather sheath here I'll show you that in a minute the cool thing about the Kydex sheath is that it slides in like this and then the top of the Kydex sheath is open so you can actually use this 90 degree spine to do some scraping you know with a cover here basically so you're not going to cut yourself as you're scraping on like a branch or a tree or something like that now I said earlier that one of the things that's important to me is to be able to chop so if I'm chopping branch say hemlock branches because that's gonna be something I'm gonna lay on at night using a little dinky knife it's it's possible it's just hard to do so being able to slice you know and really swing and slice through a branch is nice to have something like this the other thing about this is that because it's a machete it's gonna have a little bit of flex as well so it's less likely that you're gonna snap it because you know it's made to have a little bit of Bend the other thing is that while this isn't gonna function exactly like an ax or a hatchet or something like that certainly you're gonna have more power coming in with that hatchet or that axe but the cool thing about this is you know with a with an axe as far as your blade let's say you've got about this much of a cutting edge whereas with this you got a little bit more freedom to you know when you're swinging out a piece of wood if you miss it with an axe you only get this much because you didn't accurately hit the wood that's it's just gonna take more work whereas with this you know you're swinging and chopping on a tree you've got a lot of blade that can cut into that wood it does have a bungee here on the end you can run that a bunch of different ways or use it a bunch of different ways it also functions to lock it into the Kydex and also into the leather sheath as well one trick that they showed me at blade show which is that you can actually slide the bungee up on your arm and now you've got control here if you're doing some finer cutting or like this with the wood the machete I've not used the other style of handle what I can tell you for this is that it is very comfortable in hand and you can do a lot of chopping without you know having your hand get beat up at all here's a look at your leather sheath I believe it's JRE Industries is the name of the of the company that builds these sheets really nice you got the double loop here on the back and then you can see the bungee goes around this little hook so that when you're carrying it it doesn't come sliding out now for most people when they think of a machete they think of being in the jungle and I get that you know living in the northeast of the United States where there's a mix of soft woods like birch and pine and then hardwoods with like things like oak and maple a machete is not going to cut through those hardwoods as effectively but particularly for where I'm located and in this real survival scenario I'm probably not gonna be cutting a lot of hardwoods I'm like let me chop some branches of hemlock pine things like that in order to make a shelter whatever it might be so yeah I love this thing just a really really solid product price point for this is like 115 and there with a sheath I think that's 1:55 a little bit more if you get the leather sheath but very reasonably priced for an LT right product like this and the Overland machetes definitely winner in my book choosing my favorite survival knife out of all these items was really challenging to do these top two were in close competition all the way to the end this one comes in number two but it could have been number one it's a great product it's the Topps bushcraft kukri 7.0 now I want to give a shout out to I believe his name is funky prepper where he was talking about this knife and in particular the idea of the angle of the blade now you may know that a kukri is has to be made in a particular area I'm not a member if it's in Nepal or India but this is why they call this a kukri knife it's not exactly a kukri because it's not made in that particular location but this is topspin on a kukri style knife now what funky prepper said was that when you when you're chopping and you hit the piece of wood because you love you the angle of your hand if this was a straight edge your hand would be more straight out like this as opposed to with the kuku your hand can be at a comfortable at a comfortable angle and the blade is going to hit the wood and chop effectively so that makes a difference when you think about just how you're gonna feel after a bunch of chopping and this thing definitely definitely does the job so you get that black coating for the blade then you've got the gray handles you've got some nice red liners there I did put a lanyard on this one it's 14 inches from end to end 7.25 inches for your blade you really think this is 0.25 inches and it is in 1095 high carbon steel now it's a little bit heftier 22.2 ounces and for me that's a win because again I need something that's going to chop and I can use you know I don't use a ton of energy to be chopping with a tiny little knife that has no weight and therefore putting a lot of muscle into it with a little more heft in a and a cutting tool now I can swing this thing with less force and it's still gonna get the job done now they call this black linen micarta handles I would call it more gray linen micarta but we'd also have the bow drill divot on both sides as well and I put a video together awhile ago with this and the ballistic nylon sheath that it came with and I built a survival kit and kind of went through a survival scenario of you got a couple hours before the Sun comes down can you get a fire and a shelter put together and this thing was great and I've used it since obviously as you can tell and this is an awesome item now the twenty two point two ounces is gonna be a bit much for some people to bring it into the woods on a regular basis but I I don't mind having some extra weight with me in a pack you know if I'm going out backpacking or even just day hiking I want to make sure I got the gear that I really want with me and so I'll I tend to put a little bit more emphasis on the weight of the knife I don't mind and then maybe I'll have lighter items for some of the other items that I'm carrying now the sheath that comes with this is fine but I had a custom sheath made by a black bear custom Kydex and it's this one right here so you can see I've got the kukri and I've got the top spoke oh here I've got an EXO tech this is the nano striker XL and then I have this stream light micro stream there it's in this very cool kryptek with some brown on the back and then we have a loop here again with the black bear custom Kydex logo for carrying it great system for this certainly you could just throw this into a backpack as well but number two I like this one a lot it's the tops bushcraft kukri knife 7.0 alright my number one survival knife is this right here it's the SC humless I love this knife I got this a while ago and went right out into the woods to test it out in a survival scenario I took this and then a and like an Sol survival kit and I had heard good things about the SC hung this it had been out for years when I got one and I was like this is why so many people like them so much so I got it with the basically the tan handles a little bit gray but I would call it tan handles and the tan blade they do have a really cool one with an orange handle and then a OD blade looks a little bit for screens to me there's the orange handle with lime-green there's gray with black I mean there's a lot of different options out there your price point for this one is gonna run you probably 150 and up to close to $200 depending on the one you get I believe the one with the orange handles and the venom green it's g10 handles instead of micarta and that one's closer to 200 bucks your head length is 16.5 inches your actual cutting edge is 9.75 inches your blade length is 10 point three eight inches your blade width from the top all the way down to the bottom of the edge here is two inches and it's 0.18 eight inches thick 1095 high carbon steel for your for your steel again something that's easy to sharpen up out in the field compared to some other higher-end Steel's but it's going to keep an edge for a pretty long time its weight is 23 ounces your Rockwell hardness is 55 to 57 it does have that powder coating on this blade as well similar to the se6 it doesn't have micarta handles here as you can see we do have what they call a hammering pommel I rarely use a pommel in that way but you can as you can see I do have a lanyard loop on this thing so the thing I loved about this knife the first time I use it was that you could really hack with it but you can also do some of that more not really fine work I definitely find our work you could loosen this up a little bit if you wanted to run your hand through it but you can also have it a little bit smaller and then you can run your hand like so and that allowed me to basically do this kind of grip for chopping which would give me even more leverage because I got my hand choked down so far on the other handle you can see I mean I've definitely I've definitely used this they've actually even have a little bit of rust and some of the some of the bolts there but I use this thing you know once I got out in the woods and I was like whoa I really like this thing and then the more and more I used it the more and more I liked it control when I'm really hacking because of how comfortably it fits in hand but also the way it falls into my hand I'm able to I think I can do feather sticks with this I can lock this in and pull feather sticks against it you know I'm not gonna be carving bowls but again in a real life survival scenario that's not the goal it's it's to stay alive and so this gives me the ability to chop and also do some smaller tasks as well se stands behind their products you know everything they make they're gonna stand behind it and that's true for all these companies so LT right Redbeard blades tops and se they all stand behind their products when you go to like blade show or you go to shot show you'll see SE products that have been destroyed and you know they have like a display in there and they say you know we stand behind our products for the life of them and they have busted ones that they have you know hey you broke that knife we're gonna send you a new one because you found some way to break an SD knife so I love I love that about the company and they're they're solid people over there I know Shane pretty well I've gotten to know him over the years really solid dude does a great job with the with the company once again this comes with a sheet that's fine it's a very durable plastic but I got a custom sheath made again from black bear custom Kydex it's the SE hung less and this is the rb3 here which is again a great knife and then I put one of the SE 6 pouches with a survival tuner he put it together for that for me right there so I've got some survival gear there and I've got a small knife and a large knife got like in a kind of a deep green and a brown as well and then on the back there's the attachment point so I can hang that on my belt so you had number one for me the SE humless all right let me roll out some footage here as I wrap up so you can see the knives kind of displayed side by side these are all great knives if you got any of these you'd be very happy I'm convinced that especially for survival scenarios in the Northeast where I live these things just all do a great job I did have to pick a favorite that's when I picked the se homeless and I'll come back probably you know in a couple years and revisit this and see if there are new knives that I like that you know if I don't maybe I'd swap out one of these that's why I put a couple we'll see how it goes but at this point these guys are all getting double thumbs up from everyday tactical vids again as well as the companies that stand behind these knives and then make all right now I want to hear from you guys in the comments section let me know you think about these actual knives or cutting tools and then also what is your favorite survival knife that you have out there and tell me why as well don't just tell me the name of it give me some reasons why you've chosen that particular knife that you've chosen as your favorite survival knife thanks as always for checking out the videos here on YouTube please subscribe to everyday tactical vids if you haven't done so already like us on facebook follow us on twitter check us out on Instagram Tumblr and bureau as well or video is coming soon take care

Channel: EverydayTacticalVids

Views: 92,105

Rating: 4.8779869 out of 5

Keywords: ESEE 6, junglas, J. Wolfe Cutlery Bravo 4, Red Beard Blades, survival, knife, Best Survival Knife, knives, machete, L.T. Wright, TOPS Kukri 7.0, bushcraft, wilderness, dave canterbury, cody lundin, bear grylls, man vs. wild, survivorman, les stroud, alone, alan, condor took and knife, prepared, prepper, prepping, extreme, shelter, fire steel, bow drill, hand drill, batoning, camping, hiking, hunting

Id: 57eLCz0lrt8

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 27 2019