Making a Sun Compass

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

okay I wanted to give you guys another lesson on the shadow board for navigation the way I've set this up this could be a piece of wood this could be a notebook it could be anything that you can draw a circle on with a piece of chalk a piece of charcoal a marker a pencil anything you've got to write with and then you're going to bisect that into a pie basically to give yourself 45-degree quadrants then you can easily draw in the rest of the hours in there to give yourself a clock face for the most part that would be like a 24-hour clock but you're really only going to use from 6:00 to 6:00 on this clock because your horizon line is your east-west line so look at that as a horizon now I've counted the hours and to me the local apparent time in other words I've counted how many hours it is until the sun goes down is between 3 & 4 o'clock so if I take this board and I move that shadow so that it's pointing between the 3 and the 4 here we'll just go to the 4 just to make it easy to understand I won't say 4 o'clock and if we put our compass on there to verify and that's what we're doing right now we're practicing so we're verifying our methods if we lay our compass on there on the straight edge we're dang near north-south with that board which means the front of this board is facing north all right so we've accurately figured out a northerly direction and all the other cardinal directions simply by Counting hands down to the horizon and figuring out what the local apparent time is that's pretty easy to do now if we want to navigate with this all we have to do is understand the differential between the 12 o'clock and where we currently are and in this case that is one two three four marks or four times 15 which is 60 degrees off of an east-west direct line if the Sun were coming up right now so let's say we want to travel in a westerly direction we would turn this board and you see I've got West T which means westerly travel which is actually the east side of the board if I turn it to that that would tell me that the board is facing west but it's really not because I haven't added in this differential so I have to add in the 15 30 45 60 degree differential and now the front of this boarder in my travel direction should be facing west so if I lay my compass on here now I should have a north-south line going straight across this board which I do which means the front of this boards facing west the back of this board is facing east so that means that we can now dial in a travel direction so if we didn't bring a compass with us and we happen to get lost and we didn't bring our proper kit we can verify direction fairly simply by drawing a circle on something with a cup a bush pot even a makeshift circle that's pretty close will be more accurate than nothing but what this will allow us to do is understanding this shadow is going to move 15 degrees approximately on this board every hour that means as long as I keep this shadow here for the next hour I can point this board in a direction pick an object like I would my compass take this board and walk to that object put the board on a flat surface again line it up with the same direction line understanding that I've got an hour before this thing is going to move or it's going to move very slowly throughout the next hour but I can walk 5k at an hour so if I know that there's a road directly west of me I can dial that bearing in leapfrog my way for the next 5k or the next hour and I'm only going to be off a maximum of a few degrees but at least I'm going to be walking a fairly straight line and I'm not going to experience a lot of lateral drift that's the key to this now if you wanted to make this thing really really accurate and they've used these in the desert for accuracy because especially during the war when they tried to have compasses on large metal objects like tanks jeeps and things like that they use shadow board navigation you can't put a bezel ring of sorts by getting one of these circular protractors from map tools comm and letting it right on top now you have a 360-degree bezel ring that you can move so now if I put this zero to North and I've lined my board up to where it's supposed to be which is 60 degrees off of North verifying again with my compass that we have a north-south line and we're only like two degrees off of that at that four o'clock all right now if we want to do the same thing let's say that we want to travel that easterly bearing or 200 or westerly bearing excuse me that 270 degrees what we would do is we would move this 360 into our Eastern quadrant and then we would again adjust those 10 20 30 40 50 60 degrees move our shadow back to the 360 and again we should have that east-west line going across this board which we do so we could increment Li plug in a particular travel bearing down to one or two degrees knowing that we're going to have some error but it's going to be fairly accurate and now we actually have created a Sun compass not just a shadow board I hope you followed that it's once you've done it a few times and you understand what you have to do and how to estimate hours of daylight and get local apparent time it makes it a very very accurate system and you can actually use it to navigate with over distance because you can always recalibrate after the next hour count hands again to the closest tower and make sure where you're at