Wood Carving & Crafts: Bushcraft Tinder, Skulls, Knives, Carvings & Furs

Description

I teach bushcraft for a living so having natural examples of useful resources to show people always helps communicate the point your making. Tinders like mushrooms, barks and resins can be dried and used later down the line, also cordage, cravings, skulls, bones and furs were all things our ancestors used to create clothing, tools and useful items for day to day living.

MCQBushcraft:

If your interested in Bushcraft & Survival skills, fishing, hunting, fire lighting, plants & mushrooms, camp cooking, shelter building, self reliance, wilderness & primitive living skills, weaving plant fibers, knives, axes, saws and maintaining these tools in the field and much much more then check out my channel page below for playlists and more videos.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft II and welcome to another video hopefully you can hear me above the high tides at the moment the ocean is pretty fierce today and it's making a lot of noise but in this video here I really wanted to show you some of the items that I carry around really in this basket here I collect a lot of natural items and it's something I've always done since the age of about 12 and this basket here is really a fairly posh basket for those a year in the know you're probably having a look at the front and seeing the F and M on the front there and that stands for Fortnum and Mason and they're a company that produces very expensive hampers a lot of you are probably thinking where I might just got a lot of money but that's really not the case I was actually doing some gardening for a friend cutting some hedge trimmings and things and doing the lawn and I went to the recycling center and saw some guy take this out the back of his car and just chuck it straight into a skip I thought I'm not letting that opportunity go to waste so I ran over to the guy at the recycling center and said can I have that basket and the guy who managed the place said yes you can but you can't climb in the Skip because it's too dangerous if you can fish it out and you can have it I have lots of long branches so I managed to get one round this rope handle here there's one on either side and actually fish the basket it was empty at the time it wasn't particularly heavy it is made really well

it's got rope handles either side that are woven in really nicely brass buckles and leather straps at the front and it's even got pigskin hinges at the back but enough about the basket let's have a look inside it and I'll show you some of the items that I've collected I've got a whole range of things in here and we'll have a look at some of the skulls I've collected this isn't all the skulls that I own but these are just some of the nicest ones that I like to hang on to most of these species here are deer as you can see with the antlers although some non-native species that we have over here in the British Isles and others have deformities in the horns which we can talk about a bit later but there are other bones in here and tusks and things from wild boar from the forests of Dean but we have a nice skull here and this is a badger and you can tell it's a badger the bottom jaw is locked in which is quite typical when you find badger skulls and you have this Ridge along the back of the skull there we have other skulls here as well this is a muntjac which is a type of deer which isn't basically an introduced deer here in the British Isles this one's fairly weathered you can see it's not bleached particularly well by the Sun and that was because it was found under the canopy in woodland but it's a rather nice skull actually we have another muntjac skull here you can see this one's been bleached by the Sun and you can see a deformity in these antlers it could be for a number of reasons it could be through fighting or it might have been that just got damaged on barbed wire or something like that it could also be damage to the testicles of the actual muntjac which kind of creates an irregular growth but it's nice when they get bleached by the Sun you can induce this with bleach and you can boil them as well and get the whiteness to come out of them a bit more but that's another muntjac there we have a roe deer here this is a really nice skull missing a lot of the front end around the nose unfortunately but that is particularly fragile part of the scalp this one's got quite a lot of teeth on it which is nice and we have a deformity as well look at that an antler that some it's really deformed this one's really quite nice and normal quite a substantial antler but there's this one is really taken on a strange form it's a shame it doesn't have the tip of this portion here or at the back it's been broken off but again could be testicular damage could be maybe even some sort of health issue you'll damage from barbed wire or just it damaging itself by accident you've got a really old boy just here for a for a roe deer that's some pretty impressive set of antlers there and some of these antlers I cut off off the least impressive skulls or sometimes I get given heads with all the flesh on I don't really want to wait for the flash to come off but also parts have been cut off for keychains and fire steels and to make other sorts of things we do have another row here just got you know a good aged really got some perfectly intact antlers

what a nice skull got all this teeth and the front portion of the actual skull is in good condition so that's a really nice find from just the local nature reserve by me as well I think some people can find it quite morbid the collection of skulls and keeping skulls in your home or something like that but for me I actually just find them fascinating it don't represent death to me I don't think about death when I look at skulls

I actually just find them quite incredible and it just really shows that you know the complexities of nature things that people don't normally think about in everyday life I've got a horse's skull and a bull's skull at home obviously too big to just lug around in a basket like this but I mean there are really heavy-duty

quite quite impressive really but it's the smaller ones that I've always quite liked to have a look at and take to shows and things I think kids especially I've always expressed a real interest when they come up so I cast all and they see all these things hanging up I did a Medieval Faire in a local village not long ago and you know the kids really find it just fascinating all the skulls they sort of just processing the information and

exploring having a look at these things say it's something I've always had a real keen interest in but let's have a look at what else we have I have some feathers here I don't have too many feathers I do have a few from different species but this is from a tawny owl I put it on Instagram a little while back I found a dead tawny owl on a fungus for a in the Forest of Dean and I stripped some of the feathers off of it because I'd never really held a dead tawny owl before and I think it just died of natural causes really it just just looked absolutely fine but no sign of it being shot or anything or maimed it was just on the ground and I think it was just the end of its life but some really nice feathers from the tawny owl and the others are non-native they're from a pheasant is the tail feathers and some of the wing feathers of a pheasant and mail these are really the only feathers I have and I imagine at some point I'll need some more because I intend to make quite a bit out of them what activity you may see me do a fair bit is hunt and as a result I end up with quite a lot of hides and these are from rabbit again a non-native species in the British Isles but something that's almost everywhere now some of these have been prepared I've brain tanned them or use various solutions others like this one here haven't been turned yet this is just rawhide and it's waiting to beat and I haven't had a chance to do it yet as a result I've ended up with quite a few rabbit hides I don't do a tremendous amount of hunting but when I do these days I quite like to hang on to the hides I don't always hang on to the hides obviously you've seen videos of me acting coastal survival and hunting and throwing hides away that it just depends on the circumstance these are all from rabbit I do have some squirrel and some deer including muntjac I don't actually have those in the basket I'm not sure where they are I think I've left them at home somewhere else but this one here is a brain tanned hide finished off with a pumice stain it was mauled by a dog you can see where it sort of got bit and the holes have expanded through stretching that's just something that happens really but it's turned out really nice and it's very supple it could be even more supple if I wanted it to be but I tend to get mine to a usable State and I'm not too fussed about them being really really floppy and supple

I just prefer them like this really because they retain a little bit more strength especially with a thin hide and that's why I'm saying this rabbit hides a really thin with a deer you can get it much softer than this but really warm and you can make things out of these we have other ones here as well these ones are finished with a solution but this one is rawhide you can see that it's really cracking and making a lot of noise it's been flashed and it's been cured with salt so it will last like this forever really unless it gets really wet and remains wet and then it will rot a lot of these hides I mean this one's been smoked which is why it's taken on a bit of a color and that helps repel water but it certainly doesn't make it completely waterproof in fact it would need to be smoked tremendously to actually make it completely waterproof but this one here really needs finishing off and it can be finished off with brain it can be finished off with egg or it can be finished off with an actual tanning solution that you would buy so this one here is a waiting to be tanned and it will be the fourth of the rabbit hides that I've got and the reason being I've got four is I'm going to make a winter hat and I want more rabbit hides from the rabbits that I'm gonna hunt anyway to actually make a nice hat with other hides that I have in here a much larger

and this is again a commercially tanned hide and this is reindeer I actually have two reindeer height neither of which I've tan myself but I think the climates a little bit too warm for reindeer hides over here you get a lot of molting and the weather gets warmer with the reindeer hide and when it starts to molt it's incredibly hard to stop they're generally okay for the first couple of years and then people start storing them in their homes and they literally just melt all the time I mean the one below is it's terrible the fur just goes everywhere so I generally keep them rolled up and in here and I use them for various things I've slept on them before super warm put them in my sleeping bag and underneath and it was a very very warm night in what were - conditions and they're really useful but they're very nice I mean I could literally just soak them in water let the hair slip refinish them and just have suede or just have thin leather and actually make something out of it and I may do that with one of them but I like to keep one for displays and things for doing shows a teaching bushcraft just to give people idea of what a larger hide is like but one of these it was this one at the bottom here 10 pound got it thought was given to me for Christmas actually for 10 10 pounds it cost someone they just took it to a charity shop they didn't want it anymore probably because it's molting and just driving them mad and they put it in there and it was sold for 10 pound they cost hundreds plus about 120 pound to buy reindeer hide the other one was given to me I did a medieval show in a village and I had one reindeer hide hanging up and they said would you like two more I said yeah of course and I went around their house after the medieval show few days later and they gave me two more reindeer hides and I was very grateful and offered to teach their son and daughter bushcraft at some point say I really should get in touch with them in future but yeah got some nice hides out of that really and they are now quite useful I have other items in here that a fairly basic I have them this is made of dog rose this is a bow for a bow drill kit it's what I use for demos and things it's not a particularly plush item it's got paracord as that as this piece of cord here and funnily enough this piece of cord has done hundreds of bow drill fires and it's never been changed and the reason being is it's infused with wax beeswax I always put these wax on my cord and it literally stops it fraying almost like a bowstring that you would find on a recurve bow compound bow crossbow putting a bit of wax on them really does help the bow drill kits here I've got a few different types of wood I did have a huge selection but it just takes too much to carry them all around but this is ivy and poplar two pretty good woods really but more exhibition woods and what I mean by that is you use them as a failsafe when you do shows rather than struggle because you know it keeps the audience interested and it all happens really quickly they're not words that you just commonly find dead fall from in the actual wilderness or the natural and landscape of the British Isles but quite useful anyway and the spindle or the drill is hazel piece of dead hazel that I found it was off the ground it was just at that stage of its life where it wasn't rotten enough to be punky because it seriously goes off quickly hazel it's not ideal for drills if you expect to just find them intact loaded

but one really interesting item my tab or two items is this this is a bracket fungus and this is native to the British Isles it's a really nice one and I really wanted to use this as an exhibition piece because it's a beautiful bracket funghi but I have another one in here as well but I brought back from Norway or another - actually this one here and another one there which is the layer from the inside of it and a bracket fungus is one that looks and basically like a bracket grows off of a trunk like that and you can break them off if you wish - a lot of them can be fairly parasitic not breaking them off saves the tree because it's well within there no matter what you do but they are nice to find and interesting to look at and they've had many uses and this one here is called foams foaming Terrier so I got this from Norway you may find it up north in Scotland as well but mainly it grows in colder climates in the northern hemisphere I found a part the river wye that has them - just down from Herefords only enough but you can use this as an ember I mean I collected this because I've been looking for this particular bracket funghi for years and reading about it studying bushcraft and suddenly I found it whilst that in the wilderness in Norway up in the mountains and I was over the moon and I decided to make a Madhu out of it and I made quite a lot of allergy on my trip into Norway using the trauma layer just here that's really what it looks like if you cut it out of the bracket fungi which is what I did when I was away it can be used as it is like that it can be charred and used with a flint and steel be used with a flint and steel without showering it but it's much more challenging and it takes a bit of preparation even used with iron varieties and flint naturally-occurring iron and Flint but again more challenging takes more preparation so you're working with a colder spark so conditions need to be a bit more ideal it can be burnt just like this put this on a fire will smolder and it will glow for a very very long time if managed properly but that isn't a very big bracket fungi as you can see but a particularly nice one but this one we have here

this is Gaunt Ganoderma australia massive bracket probably about 20 years old an enormous bracket you can make an a MIDI material out of that as well this is what they often call this material there'll be a lot softer than this it would literally be like the hides we looked at really floppy and malleable this has not been treated yet so it's really just for demo purposes to show people what the layer looks like but this has layers in it as well in fact you can see this darker layer and it can be taken out with a bit more work given the size of this bracket and actually turned into like a poor-man's a MIDI that's what I always called it anyway like a substitute a MIDI not quite as good but again this whole bracket can be burnt and it will last for days you could probably keep this smouldering for a week if you managed it properly and to carry fire which many the native peoples did years ago primitive people's it would have been a very very useful method of carrying fire this is too nice to burn really it's a beautiful specimen and one that I like to show people and they often don't think it's from the UK they say Oh where's that from some tropical environment nope it's from about two miles from where you live and it's a really nice one we're losing a lot of daylight so I'll pick up the pace a little bit but you've seen most of the items that are in this kit probably the only thing I haven't really shown you is quite a few of the spoons and in here the live card we have other tools as well I have my grandfather's Brooks wildlife hatchet which I use for carving a back a Lac lambda mainly a lot of the items in here just for Show and Tell just to show different types of knives I've got a more robust sorry I'm more a heavy-duty and another Mora knife there just to show that you can buy affordable cheap knives that actually perform really well got other things in here as well

I can whetstone ass drop the spoon knives that are curved as you can see just there and the strop part actually comes off and reveals a ceramic stone as well so you can actually take away more material if you find that the strop isn't doing the job so there's really a little bit more in there there's not too much Regis odds and ends I actually got a beach stain here which is quite good for an axe putt as well I'll show you that too but other than that the only thing in there is a shell I found when I was scuba diving in Cyprus or quite liked the look of it swam down and picked it up but again that's just really in there just as a show-and-tell it's not something that I I'm not big on collecting shells if I'm completely honest I'm more into the the skulls and bones that I am the shells but thought it was a nice one anyway something to remember the holiday by we've got a variety of things in here I showed you the strop for the spoon knives and that's the hook two knives a little bit like this scorp here you can see there it'd be very useful you put this through and then we'll back through like that and go back you can obviously strop the outside as well on a normal strop but if something's a little bit too tricky take that off and you have the ceramic part so that's just a strop for spoon knives and we have a dc4 there don't use that much anymore in fact Li anything I use it for is for flattening off the whetstone making sure I have a flat surface before I actually sharpen on it so really that can go with that it's my finishing stain for the actual whetstone this is a king whetstone by the way I've shamed that in various videos and if you look in the description of this video you'll see a lot of links to videos that will relate to this video as well so there's some tools there for honing and we have a puck for the axe which is just a beach stone actually works very well and it was quite a nice little fine there are loads of them on the beach and they're very easy to actually use so we have a few items there I have my Graham falls Brooks wildlife hatchet which I use for carving with very nice little carving axe probably see it in the older videos lightweight axe very useful to use but I carry a big on there because it's just much more useful for splitting few tools locking a bank got my prototype field masters you've probably seen in previous video still going strong I've got a jack Lal wasp just that is actually Zed's I'm doing a bit of work on the sheath for him you can see a nice Jack loss with a scandi grind I want tools steel very nice got on all is useful for making holes in the back of the spoons if you actually want to hang them up with a bit of cord got my scope this is basically a gouging tool for creating spins and a really nice one very rigid because it's mounted on both sides it's great for putting some power down and getting material a so these are really just the tools I've got in here this is a Jack law this is a three mil on a twenty five degree bevel it's a beautiful knife with a beautiful sheath really nice and some red liners red stitching on the sheath very nice combination I really like that knife I do have another one as well which is used as a first one he made me this is a four mil with a slightly thicker bevel I can't remember how thick maybe twenty eight degrees or my own one tool steel blades are oiled when they're in the sheaths they've always got quite a lot of oil on them it's quite important this is an English you very beautiful wood and this is slightly thicker a bit more robust knife but I prefer the the-- the three mil with a 25 degree bevel much much more responsive and I have another three mil the 25 degree bevel this is a forest bushcraft forest knife very nice with some curly birch and again very very nice knife quite rounded good for chest lever by steep point on it say get a bit of rotation in the wood quite nice as a substitute knife if you like you know using a field knife but doing a bit of carving

these are some of the spoon carving tools I use along with various other general knives but really the spins they're not all mine a lot of the strains I've made i've gifted away some fortunately I don't have too many we've got a variety of species just one I've made out of hazel with an antler tang and some pine pitch just a bit of a combination but the actual curve and crank of the spoon isn't quite right it really should be facing up this way a little more ergonomic cool but it works quite nice and it was just something I rescued got one made of birch they're too thin and neck on it went a bit over the top we just need to know when to stop with these things because there's one made for me by moleskin Joe it's a spork you can see very nice at one there's by John Mac I went to stay with him for a while and decent carving and that one there's by least offer this is Rowan you can see the two-tone there very nice little the yogurt spoon I was given that one by an apprentice who spent some time with me teaching with me or I was sort of helping him out he was being an apprentice on some courses a very young lad and he made this out of you English you that he found in a woodland fallen over so some nice spoons there they got a whole range of them really this one I brought back from Cyprus I think this is made of olive wood it's very very nice very old and that's why I liked it an old spoon again this one's made of cherry gifted to me by a friend who spent a long time making it the cherry tree cut down in his allotment and yeah quite a nice soup spoon that one quite like it this one I made on a videos you probably see in the description when I went to see John Mac this is made of older oldest probably my favorite wood for carving with at the moment very very beautiful wood and we've got another spoon I quite like that I made a cherry that's my favorite one and that's a salad spoon and yeah very nice so I won't go into too much detail over the spoons most of them are the gift aware I gave quite a few spoons away at Christmas actually spent a lot of time carving and making things and giving people gifts but carving to me is really just sort of like an extension of knife skills and you know you know how to carve it teaches you about wood teaches you about wood grain and you learn an awful lot from that experience well I hope you enjoyed this video I really just wanted to show you some of the natural items and some of the crafts that I make there are a lot more things that I own and make and things that I find mostly leather work and parts of my kit which I'll show you in later videos but a lot of the things you've seen we will cover in future videos things like spoon carving various types of bracket funghi definitely high Tanning carving and sharpening tools there are lots of things coming up on the channel this year I thought it'd just be nice to share with you the kind of things that I like to collect when I'm out in the field and I come across a bit of a treasure the Nature has to offer we're losing light though the tides finally going out and it's quiet and down I've actually got some trot lines out so I'm going to go check them see oh I've got anything for dinner but I'll see you very soon in another video thanks again for watching guys and take care you