Hibiscus Cordage

Description

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The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school when I wanted to make a video today really based around cordage

for the most part but I also just kind of want to talk to you about a few things one we're making a video this plant beside me here is hibiscus and it makes one of the best cordage a--'s that I found in Eastern woodlands as far as tensile strength and ease ability if that's word of harvesting the material we'll talk a little bit about harvesting cordage materials and things like that in a few minutes while we're making our cordage but what I want to talk to you about what this plant is I used this plant for a couple of years once I discovered the properties of the plant before I even knew what it was I actually had to send pictures of it in bloom to my buddy Arthur Haynes to get a positive identification on it I don't know if that was my own lack of ability to research the plant properly or because we've just didn't that many pictures of them around but there's lots of this out here in this wetland area of the wildlife area and so it's an easy plant to get to one of the things about this plant and plants in general that you're making cordage out of you know everything is a seasonal thing and for the most part in Eastern woodlands most of the plant materials that make good cordage in the Eastern woodlands are best harvested after the first frost when they are partially readied or partially rotted by nature and their steps that you can take to make the cords even better after that we'll talk about that while we're making our corrigan if right so again this plant is already dead so I'm gonna find the biggest stock I can and I'm going to split it down and cut it so that it will strip off and then I can pull it and it'll strip along fibers off the plant like this one here I think you guys can see that pretty well from there we'll get some of these fibers and I'll show you how well it works here in just a minute there are some really really long straight shoots right here and these are the ones you get the really nice long pieces out of let's set this on the tripod for me okay so here's some quick and dirty material that we harvested now here's the thing there's a lot of things that people don't talk about I think when it comes to coragem bushcraft a lot of this stuff especially this it's got good tensile strength right off the tree like this stuff does it off the plant like this stuff does you can pretty much use this for like a wig just twist it up and you can use it to tie stuff off with as is with almost absolutely no processing just twist it down just like that and you can tie that around something very easily just like that to tie something off and it's got pretty good tensile strength just like it is so there's really not a lot of processing involved to just make a quick lashing or binding out of this stuff what happens when you make cordage is the reason you increase the tensile strength of the material that you're using is because you spread the stress on the material out over lots and lots of fibers now the other thing with this cordage is you've got usually some kind of a chafe or an outer bark for lack of a better word on the plant that you may want to get rid of if you're just trying to make cords quick and dirty you don't have to worry about that you could take this cordage and you could use it just like it is just get this twist started it's really simple twist both bundles in the same direction and then basically twist that direction and back the opposite direction taking the bundles over the top of each other so twist it this way and then twist the whole thing this way so the technique is very simple you're just twisting one side away from you and then both bundles towards you the top away both towards you the top away and both towards you and that's gonna alternate them every time and you're going to get some fairly decent cordage that way very quick on the fly that's gonna be really really strong so if you're in a hurry to get cordage made and you need it right now this is an easy way to get that accomplished

and you can see again it doesn't take that long but it is a process and that's why I recommend carrying cordage in the five C's because making three or four inches of cordage only takes a few you know a minute but to make 400 feet of cordage like you'd have on a rolling bank line could take a long period of time it'll harvest a lot of materials to do it so it's easier to carry it but this is an easy skill to learn so I consider this a core skill from your students okay so back to the whole thing of this being a core skill I say it's a core skill because when you're talking about bushcrafting you're talking about the crafting portion in the bush or in the woods whether you call it wood crafts bushcraft it doesn't really matter but the point is that you are making usable objects off the landscape that you can use to make life more comfortable or affect your immediate survival and cordage is one of those things that you need for almost everything that you do for lashing for binding for tying you know if you'd lost everything god forbid for a bow-drill fire and this court is just strong enough for a bow-drill fire no question about that now if you want to make some fine cordage and you're trying to really do this the right way you've got time to mess around with it what you really want to do is you want to soak this material in water and you kinda have to pay attention to how long you're soaking it because you're reading the material you're helping a material to rot faster you are the water is going to separate the fibers from this chaff better they're also going to release some of the Callens within the material and you'll feel it when you get it out of the water if it if this chaff material kind of just peels off really easy with your thumb and doesn't stick to the material then it's probably good enough and you're also going to feel it slimy if you get it out of the water you start to work with it and it feels slimy it leaves a slime on your hands that's the colleges and the material and you've released those it's time to start working at cordage you don't need to let it go any further beyond that now the next thing I want to talk to you real quick is about splicing and it's really a simple process but there's a right way to do it I guess there's no wrong way to do it unless your cord breaks but there are lots of ways to do it but I want to show you the way that I teach because I think it's a more stronger higher tensile strength cordage in the end at the splice okay so let's take some of this cordage here and we'll just cut a piece of it off so that we've got a place we would have needed a splice let's say right there so we get down to where we've got one short side get a little bit longer there I want to give myself about an inch and a half or two inches there and I've got one alongside and so now I'm gonna try to take another piece that I split off like this one I'm gonna splice it in so what I'm gonna do when I do that and again if I had processed this cordage properly this would be broken down into lots of fibers and not just one solid piece but four on the fly this is the way we're doing it now you can't just overlap just like this a lap joint that cordage and then start twisting that as one bundle and just blend it in and you'll have this tail sticking out on the other end and you can cut that off later but a stronger way to do that is to actually make a V in the material and put the short side to the long side and the long side to the short side tuck that up in there and twist that together as one fiber just like this you won't have anything sticking out on the end when you're done and that V up there means that you've actually woven that splice into both sides of the cordage instead of just into one side and just keep going until it disappears just get that thing going here real quick a second once you do this does it take much time it's just hard on the hands and you can see our splices right here this quarter he's a little chubbier right there where the supply says but we've got a nice strong splice in there and I'm gonna go just a little bit further with this thing for a minute here just to show you kind of it's hard to give you a demonstration of the strength of the cordage without picking something up with it we generally test that with like a five gallon jug of water that's a school but I'll give it a pretty good tub and it's not coming apart and breaking and that was right on the splice itself so you can see that's a pretty strong cordage well I probably rambled on a whole lot longer than I intended to folks and I apologize about that I believe in getting to the point getting it over with but I appreciate your views appreciate your support and thank you for anything you do for our school for our family for our business or our sponsors and structures affiliate some friends I'm going to run back up there trapper shed and get rid of my traps and I got to get back to write in my fifth book which releases late this summer the Illustrated encyclopedia of bushcraft thanks guys