Splitting a Stick Safely With a Knife

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Video Transcription

okay in this video finishes off the camera went berserk today we're going to show you a safe way of splitting a piece of stick and I'm not talking about the taunting for firewood sometimes we need to split a piece of stick maybe multiple times to make some clothes pins or are even a piece of sick just you know hold your meat you're going to cook so let's take a look at a few methods now the first method that i'm going to show you is absolutely a no no you never do this and it's using your hand one side the knife on the other and just trying to push to try and split it very very dangerous because keep in mind that the first cut that you're doing here you're pushing and you're putting a lot of pressure and you're going from side to side to try and slip that and sometimes when this does open people think they'll have time to instinctively hold back but a lot of times this thing because of the platte the pressure it'll go right and cut you and not a little bit it's going to cut you deep so this way is a big big no-no obviously if you do have a straight stick which most of the time doesn't happen because you're splitting smaller pieces what you can do is just you know baton it take a baton and just baton a little bit so on so forth or you can use your hand your hand needs to be open and I'll explain why then you push down to try and split it a little bit if you leave your fingers dangling like this what can happen is once this starts splitting and it goes through instinctively you're going to want to pull your hand back and you can cut your fingers on this side so if you do this way make sure your hand is open now there's another method that some people use and they'll use the back of their blade like this put it on and they'll hold the piece of wood with their fingers and just push with the back of their hands like this now this way it can't go any further than the fingers and the fingers are safe but I find that way awkward and I don't like it so you clean this up a little bit I've been trying to find some ways that would be safe and easy and I came up with this little method here which is a lot safer what you do is grab your piece of stick you anchor your hand in your stomach on the side here you do the same with your knife so these two heads here are anchored and they're not moving and now all you need to do is push this way and split it so when it does split it can go you know let's say the splits it'll go this way I can't reach this hand it works fine you know I do it once in a while but now let me show you the safest method of splitting a piece of stick

now what you want to do find yourself a hard surface and let me move a little bit here a little bit high but what you want to do hard surface you want to use your knife blade away from you and split it this way now there's two ways you can do it you can either leave it like this hold it and just tap it a little bit with your hand or you can hold both pieces like this and just tap down now that's the method I like to do most now if you're planning on doing this method remember that when you're tapping down put your thumb on top of your handle because if your hands are wet or cold there's snow whatever the case may be and this hand slips and goes on the blade you are going to regret it so let's be safe put the thumb at the top and you just you know give a few taps you don't need to go really hard because you just want to split it a little bit see now she's nicely split now all you need to do is saw if you're using clothes pins if you're using it for a for to hold a piece of meat what you can do is turn the blade around put it back in there and just use the stick to split it more okay I'm an awkward positioning too high but i'm pretty sure you understand how this goes so let me get rid of this those that's pretty much the safest method to use to split a stick now I'll show you something else just in case you don't know about it when there's a knot in your stick a lot of times we do not like not right I mean except for those the knots we find in pine a good for fire but they're always a pain especially when you're splitting wood but when you are splitting wood you know that when you get into a knot is very difficult to split so knowing that you can use a not to your advantage to create yourself a tool okay now you have your not you leave about a couple of inches okay this way and the knot in front of the not about an inch you know in front you're going to take your knife now this time the blade cutting edge towards you and you're going to do as we done before you're just going to tap split it now she's well split nice and tight in there and the knot is going to stop this knife from going back because thou you can use it as a draw knife you know when you're doing some wood so I cut the piece of wood just so it's better but you can use it as a draw knife as you're carving this way this will not continue splitting well less of a chance anyway because there's a knot in there