the quality most desired in a survival knife is propinquity!
i know this because i read it in leroy thompson's book on survival knives. i agree most wholeheartedly. ie the best survival knife is the one with you. essentially this disqualifies any big honking knives from the title of survival knife. so not what the french call a "couteau a laisser dans l'armoire au quartier car c'est trop lourde"
i am often surprised by the notion that a kbar might be good chopper. really they're not, they are surprisingly light. and not that robust.
a survival knife needs to have a certain level of robustness, without over cooking the mass and portability. take away the silly beer bottle opener and the HEST is a good example of this. i have a small collection of broken knives, it doesn't take much to break a mora.
why not take a small suite of complimentary tools with you? ie axe, saw, knife, spade et al... well yes if your purpose is to go and do camping or bushcrafting for their own sake. but if you're in the field for a specific purpose, counting flutterbys in who'sbecky'stan, on a military tour or just third world travelling with a bit of camping thrown in this might not be feasible. a multi purpose utility knife might be all you can justify. at best a mora and a swiss army knife.
i think in the modern world, in travelling to less developed countries, the notion of a survival knife as a weapon ought not to be dismissed even if that topic is a little undesireable. i have read accounts of various scams with folks getting into the wrong type of taxi which then "got lost" only to be "hijacked" in the wrong part of town. the wee neck knives were used to save the day.
there are many survival folders out there which fit the bill of being around when you need 'em. but that might be a little out of scope.
so on one end of the scale we have the survival knife as last ditch tool but ultra portable, eg, a neck knife. the becker necker, the esee izula, or something like the survival wisdom orange thing posted earlier,
http://www.survivalwisdom.com/the-wisdom-edge-tm/ going up to the hest. there is a fair bit of overlap at this point with a number of mora knives as they're so light. the hultafors for example which would fit the bill. the enzo trapper is similar in size to the F1 but significantly slimmer, as is the esee3
from the hest you move into the dedicated wilderness survival knife class, like the F1, bushcraft knives, esee4, the old school jet pilots survival knife and the bear grylls things. also the 5" beckers by kbar.
the esee5, a knife designed by survival instructors for survival instructors is only 5 inches long, but being a full 1/4 inch thick with a shortish sabre grind packs a huge amount of weight into a sort of small package. it sort of straddles the two later categories.
going up from there you start moving into the six-seven inch field knife territory and reaching the limit of what might be considered reasonably portable if only in terms of bulk. the kbar, the Luftwaffe survival knife, which is sort of along a puma white hunter style. the mod survival knife, the D pattern, the dartmoor and the tom brown tracker monstrosity.
also in this class, i know i shouldn't want one but i sort of do.....
http://www.heinnie.com/tops-tahoma it's an affliction i have i can't help it....
anything bigger is really disqualified from the term survival knife. do your sort of risk assesment, decide what you'll need to do with it. go from there.
any chance of you making it to the moot mark?
cheers, and.
