Okay, so maybe I am a bit ignorant on the subject of batoning, but I split quite a bit of wood with a Cold Steel SRK a few years ago. I had no idea anyone thought batoning was a bad idea. I just figured I had a decent knife that was suposed to be fairly tough, so I went ahead and started splitting wood. A lot of the splitting was done to make kindling for fires, but there were a few occaisions when I split some good size logs with knots in them. On some of the big pieces I beat the crap out of the tip of the SRK and it is still doing just fine. Maybe I unknowingly used an ok technique, but I don't know. Needless to say, now that I have far better knives, batoning is not even a small concern for me.