Practical Imperatives
It's a sad thing to entangle the imagination with practical concerns.
me said:
Somebody at Wenger & Victorinox should take a whack at military shovel design.
hso said:
Yeah, the Swiss will probably never do it.
I've never really paid much attention to multi-use shovels. In the last few days I've had a chance to glance at SOG, Gerber, Glock, Marbles, Cold Steel, some others I've forgotten, and that Chinese thing.
The more I look at these combo gizmos, the more I am inclined to look for a stout shovel that's good at being a shovel and maybe a hoe, and find a reasonably lightweight companion tool that does hatchet and/or saw duty.
I'd be okay with the saw-in-the-handle type thing (Glock), but I've watched some demos of guys chopping with the shovel, and I've concluded that shovel chopping is a fallback position from your fallback position. Even a crap machete outperforms them. A modest hatchet definitely outperforms them. After seeing one video where a guy
wearing a large Bowie knife demonstrated chopping down a sapling with the shovel, I just wanted to reach through the screen and smack him.
Dude! Just use the big knife!
I really want the combo tool idea to work, but the more I see, the less confidence I have in it. I get the concept of "expedient" tools, but I'd really prefer to achieve a quality level better than "half assedness."
I like the fundamental shovel + crowbar idea, even though I understand that those two tools are from disparate domains, and the fusion isn't going to be clean.
My inner geek yearns for the "do it all" tool, and the inner engineer protests that we should "use the right tool for the job."
I don't want to carry 20 lbs of tools. Hell, I don't really want to carry 10 lbs. Every pound of tools is a pound less of other payload.
Under all but the most extraordinary circumstances, I will have a good knife, and probably more than one. So I don't worry about that. I need to find a hatchet that's lighter than the Estwing (maybe the Canadian Trail Blazer or Fiskars X7 for that) or a decent bolo or khukri to stand in for it. (And of course, a decent khukri is gonna weigh a pound and a half or two all by itself.)
Anyway . . . I'm rambling.
It's late, I'm tired. I'll come back in the morning and see if I made any sense.