Stop buying useless survival tools

There’s thousands of companies out there selling all kinds of survival gear, most of which are high quality and useful pieces of equipment, but mixed into the bunch are a load of completely useless tools that companies made simply to get into the market. With the steady increase in popularity of various outdoor activities, there are people who have made things just to sell them, and not because they know what they were doing, so here’s a few of the most common tools that are next to useless and why you should avoid them.

Survival credit cards

Named as such entirely because of their shape, these compact and lightweight pieces of gear are supposed to offer any were between 5 and 60 different tools in one, but that’s only going to be useful if the tools are good enough and more importantly, you actually need them. Take the card below for example, this is one of the most common models out there and offers 11 different tools all in one small and lightweight package.

The next time you are stranded in the wilderness and struggling for food, water and shelter, and also just so happen to need 6 different sized spanner heads and an 8cm long ruler then this is the tool for you. It can also open bottles of beer and has a small and very awkward to use knife and saw blade to help you cut through things big enough to snap with your bare hands. Survival credit cards aren’t always a waste of space and money, but when choosing one you should consider whether the tools on them are going to be actually useful or just a hard to use waste of time, effort and money.

Fold out axe and arrow cards

These market the same advantages of the survival credit card, compact and lightweight, but it doesn’t matter if they aren’t going to be useful. The problem with both of these cards is that they require construction before being able to use them for their intended purpose, which isn’t ideal in the situations you’d probably be using them in. Axe blades are wedge shaped to add strength and weight, and to stop them getting stuck in the wood unlike flat blades often do. The flat design adds next to no weight as an axe head, meaning a harder swing to achieve the desired level of force and all of this with a handle you had to make yourself.

The arrow heads aren’t much better but do perform their job more efficiently. The arrow heads themselves lack weight and aren’t very streamlined but can still cause sufficient damage if fired with enough force, which brings us to the main problem. There are few people in the world who could find themselves in a survival situation and just casually make an effective bow and arrow shaft capable of killing wild game. If you aren’t one of those people than the money you spend on an axe or arrow card could probably buy you an actual axe or arrow.

Tomahawks

A tomahawk is just a thin axe blade on a straight handle, a weapon that has it origins in the native people of North America. It’s supposed to be a weapon and designed for cutting into flesh, which is why it has a thin and angled blade that’s built for speed instead of power. For some strange reason there are companies out there who started to make survival tomahawks as a smaller and lighter alternative to the standard axe or hatchet.

The problem is that tomahawks are made for fighting and don’t have the weight required to provide effective force, and the angled blade can tend to slip off the wood when striking. The straight handle also makes things tricky, especially for anyone used to the standard curved handle of a regular axe. Since these seem to be more of a novelty item they generally cost a little more than an actual axe.

Multi tool survival shovels

The main feature of these tools is the shovel head, but over the years people have added additional tools to them like one side acting as an axe blade and the other as a saw. The handles are normally name of aluminum to reduce weight and often hollow which allows them to hold other small things inside. The idea is good enough, and they serve their purpose, but the downside the majority of them seem to share is durability.

The axe blade is slightly curved and difficult to get a straight hit with and can be prone to blunting quickly. The hollow aluminum handle isn’t the best choice for this tool considering it’s going to be smacked against a tree or rammed into the ground over and over again, but they do hold up in the short term. In the event that you have one of these in a survival situation it will serve you well for the short term, but cutting down enough branches to make a shelter will quickly ruin the axe blade, and a dent anywhere in the shaft can cause bending if there’s a hit with enough force. The other tools inside the handle can be useful, but again aren’t as good as a separate version of them and are things you should already have in a survival kit.

When buying new survival gear, don’t just get what looks cool or happens to be popular at the time, and don’t be tricked by the number of tools in the piece because more isn’t always better. A weak and hard to use tiny knife blade that you can’t grip properly isn’t going to help you do anything other than clean your nails, and the money spent on some of these money grab items could buy you a proper and durable version of the same thing.