THE 8 ESSENTIAL KITS™

The Tool Kit — Knife, Saw, and the Discipline to Keep Them Sharp

Tools are facilitative. They don’t provide for a survival priority on their own — they process the resources that do. The right tool kit is short: a good belt knife, a folding saw, a multitool for redundancy, a way to keep the edge sharp, and a small field-repair kit. The long version, what each one needs to be, and why — below.

By Joshua Enyart · Founder & Head Instructor, Gray Bearded Green Beret

Former Army Ranger, Green Beret, and full-time survival instructor · three decades of professional instructor experience

Why the Tool Kit Is Short — and Why Each Piece Matters

Fire, shelter, water, food — those are the survival priorities. Tools are not on that list. Tools are facilitative: they process the resources that let you cover the priorities. A knife doesn’t keep you warm — it processes the tinder and feather sticks that light the fire that does. A saw doesn’t build your shelter — it crosscuts the poles you build the shelter with.

Framed that way, the Tool Kit gets short fast: a quality fixed-blade belt knife, a compact folding saw, a multitool for redundancy, a strop and compound to keep the edge, and a tiny field-repair kit. Everything else in the Tools collection supports or extends those pieces.

The Belt Knife — What Actually Matters

Ignore the marketing. There is no meaningful distinction between a “survival knife” and a “bushcraft knife.” Your needs in the wilderness are the same whether you’re practicing skills on a weekend or dealing with an emergency — a sharp edge with a handle on it, sized right for the work.

What the knife does: slice and shape smaller, softer material, process tinder and feather sticks, cut cordage, strike a ferro rod, carve trap and shelter notches, and baton small-diameter wood. What it does not do: chop down trees, pry open doors, or substitute for an axe. The sharpened-crowbar category solves problems you don’t have and fails at the ones you do.

High carbon or stainless?

High-carbon steel sharpens easily with a field strop, holds a working edge, and — if exposed — will throw a spark off natural flint, chert, or quartzite when paired with charred material. It rusts if you neglect it. Stainless resists corrosion and needs less care, but holds its edge stubbornly enough that a field strop often isn’t enough — you’ll want a stone. Stainless also won’t spark off natural stone, so if you carry stainless, add a small ferro rod to the sheath.

Choose by environment. Wet or coastal: stainless. Drier climate with frequent in-field maintenance: high carbon. DLC-coated high-carbon Moras split the difference — corrosion-resistant like stainless, still spark off natural stone.

Keep It Sharp — The Three-Level Maintenance Ladder

A dull knife is a dangerous knife — not because it can’t cut you, but because it needs more pressure to bite, which makes it slip and blow through material in uncontrolled directions. A sharp edge takes light pressure, stays where you put it, and lets you work without fighting the tool.

Maintenance is three levels. Sharpening resets the edge geometry with a low- or medium-grit stone like the Bushman Dual Sharpening Stone — rare, only when the edge has been damaged or neglected. Honing straightens a rolled edge with a high-grit stone, ceramic rod, or steel — occasional, after a sharpening reset. Stropping is the daily discipline: a leather paddle strop loaded with green honing compound realigns and polishes the edge without removing material. Stay on top of stropping and you rarely need the other two.

The Folding Saw — Where the Knife Stops, the Saw Starts

Knives cut with the grain. Saws cut across it. Bringing a sapling down or crosscutting shelter poles is a saw job — every time someone crosscuts live wood with a knife, they’re burning time and hammering their blade.

Rule of thumb for saw size: your blade length should be roughly twice the diameter of the material you’re cutting. A blade the same length as the wood has no room to stroke. Most field cutting is 1/2–4″ diameter, so an 8″ (203 mm) blade covers almost everything. My primary is the Silky PocketBoy 170 (Outback Edition) — 6.7″ blade, slightly under the rule of thumb, but I rarely cut past 3″ and I’d rather save the pack space. Outback Edition is rated for bone, so it doubles for animal processing.

For cold-weather trips where I’ll be processing firewood to get through the night, I swap to the GB2 Packable Bucksaw. A frame saw cuts faster than any folder — the long blade takes full strokes and the frame keeps it taut. Right tool when you need volume, not portability.

Multitool and Field Repair

The multitool isn’t a replacement for your belt knife or your folding saw — it’s compact redundancy for the three tools you use most: blade, saw, and awl. My preference is a Swiss Army Knife-style tool over the pliers-based design. Outside of cutting snare wire or removing a deep fishhook, I rarely reach for pliers in the field. SAK geometry sits better in the hand for carving, which is what I’m doing most of the time. Hunt for a locking blade and a decent saw.

For field repair, most gear failures — a torn pack strap, a split tarp tie-out, a popped stitch — just need a needle, strong thread, and tape. My container is the Exotac RipSpool Field Repair Kit: machined aluminum tin with needle, braided fishing line, and repair tape, with a cap that doubles as an awl. Modern take on the traditional Saami Repair Kit.

Alongside repair, a small tin of Smith’s Leather Balm protects sheath, canvas, and carbon-steel blade. Martexin Original Wax goes in the pack if you carry waxed canvas gear. Rule: if the sheath gets wet, dry knife and sheath separately and never re-store the blade in a wet sheath.

Knife Safety — The Rules You Never Bend

Every cut goes somewhere. If the answer to “where does this cut end?” is your own hand, thigh, or anyone within arm’s reach, stop and reset.

Learn to Survive

Gray Bearded Green Beret's Guide to Surviving the Wild

Hardcover · Full Color · 430 Pages · by Joshua Enyart

The tool kit principles in this post — cutting tools, field repair, the skills to back them up — are all covered in Surviving the Wild as part of Joshua's complete framework for wilderness readiness.

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