Knives are specialized tools. Some are meant for carving. Some are intended for cutting fruit, chopping vegetables or slicing meat or fish. Some can endure downward forces and others (such as the yanagi-ba) cannot. And some knives are simply ornamental.
There are all sorts of different knives with many different specialized uses.
In this video I take one of my favorite camp knives (Bark River Bravo 1 in A2 steel) and put it through some exercise that would leave many other knives severely dulled if not chipped or broken. But this knife keeps a keen edge after all of the abuse only to be back to a hair-popping edge after some passes on the strop. Indeed, it is more than just a camp knife. It actually falls into the category of survival knife. The development of the Bravo 1 was a result of input from Force Recon of the U.S. Marine Corps.
This is the type of knife that can handle hard tasks such as batoning (splitting) wood, carving and light chopping, making nice, thin, curly feather sticks, fire starting, and even using the tip to drill holes. It’s good for hunting tasks with medium & large game. And while it can do all that and still stay sharp enough to cut rope, it’s not the right choice for filleting fish and there are other knives which are more efficient at slicing strawberries & peeling potatoes.
I do love A2 steel. It gets sooo sharp and stays that way.
Apex Knife Sharpening 