In all fairness to Bark River, that knife had an inclusion right at the blade/handle junction. A defect caused the breakage, not the stick tang. They replaced it with a Smoke Jumper at my request, which also has a hidden tang. It performed just fine in batoning and other hard use. But you just know that the Scrapper 5 is tougher. I really have no complaints with BRKT, as they honored their warranty. BTW, that SJ is made from old CS SRK blanks in Carbon V that BRKT got at the Camillus sell off.