Natural Cordage Part 1 Harvesting and Processing Materials

Description

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http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Pathfinder-School-LLC/167050689997806?ref=hl

Tags: Dave Canterbury,Survival,Bushcraft,Archery,Pathfinder,Cordage,Reverse Wrap 2 Ply Cordage,Primitive Skills

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do today is discuss a little bit and do a quick demo for you guys explaining how to make cordage and what the properties of the material that you're using to make cordage should be to make good cordage and a lot of that depends on where you live the materials are gonna have available but if I show you the properties that I'm looking for in a cording material you'll get a better understanding of what you have in your area

that might work cordage is not a complicated process but it's something that you need to actually see to understand so I'm going to try to get some close-up pictures of it for you and I am left-handed that may be a problem for you so if you watch my demonstration and you get a little bit confused I'll try to explain to you what I'm doing so that it won't matter whether you do it right-handed or left-handed it will work for you either way stay with me guys we're going to harvest a little bit more bark off this tulip poplar we'll talk about how to process the cordage material off the bark and then we'll talk about how to make cordage okay so this is the tree that we were messing with yesterday and when you peel this bark up it's gonna come off you see there's a hole right there where that branch is coming through that's not a big deal you just cut that off and pop it through the bark it's going to do that anywhere there's a branch on this tree okay so there's a piece of bark it's probably eight or nine feet long now we're probably not going to get one or two pieces of cordage out of that eight or nine feet long we'll have to do some splicing we'll talk about that in a minute but what I want you to see is I want you to see this layer that's right underneath the bark and that's the inner bark and you can see those fine fibers that are pulling up away from that and this is where we harvested yesterday is starting to dry out and those fibers are starting to split and that's the reason that this stuff makes sense great birdnest material when it dies is because of those fibrous properties it has you can see I just pulled that one off of there and it's probably a foot and a half long very very thin there's no way I could get the camera close enough for you to see me making cordage with a piece of a couple pieces of fiber that big so we're gonna have to work with something a little bit bigger than that what I'm gonna try to do is I'm gonna try to weave got most of the bark off of this edge right here so what I'm gonna try to do is I'm gonna try to slice it down through here like this just like this and take some of that off now that's got once I pull that bark layer off this is pretty much all coragem material right here and I want to show you how to process that down real quick we'll just get right down here on this tree what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pull this through my knife just to see just put my knife on an angle and if there's any bark left on there I want to get that off you're gonna want a good sharp knife for this you can see that peeling straight off of there okay again you want to get sharp knife

okay let's get back to square one here for a minute let's take this bark that we've got and we now have a piece of bark that's got inner bark attached to the outer bark and you can see that what we need to do is get rid of that outer bark so my best bet to do is to take a split this just like this to a smaller piece that's easier to work with that's going to be thinner and then you can see right here's a knot but I want to get this outer bark separated you can see right here this is inner bark and this is outer bark and I need to get that outer bark off of there the best way for me to do that is to get it on my knife get my knife in a stationary position holding at an angle and pull that bark toward me just like that that's going to separate the majority of the outer bark from the inner bark you're gonna want a good sharp knife to do this stuff with so let's just get us a couple pieces here that will work you see I hit a knot right there that's okay not a big deal we can always splice okay but this is what we're really looking for so we're gonna have to get rid of all of the outer bark that's on here and you may still have someone there you need to shave off even after you've done your initial cut or got your initial bark off you may still have a small layer that you want to get off of there because what you're trying to do is you're trying to get this thing down to fibers

so let's work with this piece right here that I'm guessing is probably a foot long because that will make us that'll force us to supply some stuff as well so let's work with this piece and process it down to where it needs to be and you could do this on a larger scale now one thing you can do is just scrape it with your knife like this to get the rest of that off of there there's anything on there that you don't want leftover Clark wise outer bark wise you can scrape it down just like this you can see the fibrosis of that material and what it looks like when that's dry that is fantastic fire tender well it's what it makes really good cordage

okay now one thing that's important with cordage is you really want to keep this stuff pretty damp so if you've got a canteen cup or something like that with you or some type of a pot that you can put water in it's really best to keep this stuff damp when you're working with it as best you can now let's kind of split this down a little bit here let's split a piece off the side here and see what we've got and you can see that splitting off of there and there's still a little bit more bark on there or meat on there I guess I would call it then I really want there we're getting somewhere you see there's just a thin layer there but I don't want on there now it's gonna give me the fibrous material that I do want right there you see how string it up now that's what I'm looking for now I'm gonna have to process this down a little bit and really the best way to do this is like I said keep it nice and wet so if we take this stuff after we process it make sure that we're down to where we need to be we're not quite down the far right here on this piece see that coming off of there once we get that down to the thickness that we're looking for as far as our cordage goes before we break it down into finer fibers you can see I can break that down very easily now but before I do that I'm going to soak it in water so I'll just take my Scout bottle what I have here and I've got a small cup that I use with that bottle all the time then I'm just gonna fill that up and set it off to the side here and that's where I'm gonna soak my cordage now you can put this court in your mouth as well just soak it if you wanted to but tulip poplar is a very astringent acrid type tasting material and it's going to not feel very good in your mouth it's gonna taste really really nasty so I'm gonna put some of these fibers in this water and just soak it push it all the way down inside the water and just let it absorb because it's starting to dry out here you can see some of that fibrous material right here where I stripped that bark off yesterday there's a really good piece of it right here along this edge right here that I can trim off but it's already starting to dry out that piece right there is a real good candidate for a piece of cordage but again it doesn't need much processing it's got a little bit of meat on it right there you can see me shaving that right off and once we get that off we've got what we want then we can soak that entire piece and get it wet and we can use it as well and again it depends on you know the diameter your cordage dictates number one how strong it's gonna be but also dictates what you're gonna use it for if I'm trying to make this cordage for a fishing line it's got to be really really thin if I'm trying to make it for a trap mechanism of some kind it's got to be really strong so it's gonna have to be thin but it's gonna have to be robust same time if I'm trying to make it for bow drill string or something like that it's really gonna have to be strong because it's gonna have to take abrasions as well you know a lot of guys asked me yesterday why I didn't make cordage out of this tulip poplar to sew up that quiver with well the reason should be obvious by now I didn't want to spend two or three hours processing cordage to lace up a quiver that's why carry backline there's nothing wrong with combining primitive skills with modern materials cordage is easy to carry a quiver is not if I need a quiver on the fly I can make one using natural materials to make the quiver body and then materials like cordage that I carry make it very simple with a sail needle make it very simple to assemble without having to use a hundred percent natural materials to get the job done that might take five or six hours versus an hour the reason I think this would make a good candidate for cordage is because it has that fibrous property just like we talked about the other thing

that I'm looking for us I want something that I could twist around my finger without it breaking if I can twist it around my finger tight enough to cut the circulation off like that and it doesn't split out or break it's probably going to be a good candidate for cordage if I can yank on it pretty hard as it is and it doesn't break it's probably a good candidate for cordage if I can take it and tie it in a knot on itself like that and it doesn't break or split out then it's even going to be a better candidate for cordage and that's got a very very small tight knot in it that didn't break so that makes me believe that this is a good candidate for cordage so that piece right there is really really a good piece to start off with for our cordage exercise then we can add some other pieces in now it's got a couple spots or a little thicker in it you really want your cordage to be pretty uniform when you're making it you want to use pretty uniform size pieces if you want your cordage turnout good and I just split that one but that's okay we still got a good piece right here that we can use so if I could twist it up like this on itself and tug on it and it's not breaking that's going to be a good candidate for cordage without a doubt there's no question that's going to make good cordage so that's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for if I'm out here collecting natural materials to make cordage with and that's what you should look for

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