Bushcraft Basics Ep12: Knife Safety

Description

In this video we have a look at some basic aspects of knife safety.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys smite from seeker bushcraft here and welcome to episode 12 of bushcraft basics in last week's episode we have a look at knives and we specifically focused on bushcraft knives we did touch on other grinds that you may find out there the types of metals that you can find but specifically we looked at bushcraft knives and a bushcraft knife in this day and age is often something that you see with a Scandinavian grind and looks quite traditional that knife has its pros and cons and we did discuss those last week in some detail a very good knife will good grind for working with wood but something with a secondary bevel is generally a lot more better suited as an all-round knife but let's talk about some of the ways in which a knife can be held so I have a basic bushcraft knife in front of me here and we talked about this knife in some detail last week in our previous episode I've just taken this knife out of my sheaf and obviously when I take it out of my sheaf most of the time I'm holding the knife like this and this is called the fore grip hold is sometimes called the shake hands grip but often commonly referred to as the fore grip hold where you're holding the knife like this blade pretty straight on when you hold your arm out and this is quite a powerful method of cutting allows you to put a great deal of force down it sometimes allows you to lock your shoulder and apply a great deal of force like this if you don't want to fatigue your arm too much and you want to lock these muscles together and use bodyweight to actually make the cut but it's a fairly efficient way of holding a knife and a very common way of holding a knife we can reverse the knife as well so the actual finger groove goes just here where our thumb is and we reverse the knife like this so the blade is facing us and that's called the reverse full grip and that again is a very very good way of holding a knife if you wish to cut towards yourself but it requires a lot more skill because obviously the blade is now pointing towards you the key to using this method is to make sure your elbow is tucked into your side here and you'll just be using your wrist like this and it often requires you to put a lot of pressure into the item you're cutting we take this piece of wood for example like that but it allows you to make very powerful cuts and I can really pull as hard as I want on the knife and because my elbow is tucked into my stomach there it will break for me and it won't allow the knife has come any further so even if I put down a huge amount of pressure you'll see the knife just can't come back it stops there a lot of the pressure is in the wrist really and pushing against the piece of wood I'm not just pulling back like this recoiling quite violently I'm using my wrist guide to the cut and methods like that can be very useful if you're carving something where you need to carve this way because of the wood grain for example and you need to hold it on the end and there's not much to hold on to so you're not going to hold it like this for example which would be quite dangerous and there'd be very little control you can hold it there and achieve the same thing with more accuracy by bringing the knife towards you just like that and that's quite a good cutting technique but there are other methods as well we obviously talked about this method here which we'll go over in a second but there may be methods that you wish to use I mean the most common way in which I use a knife and it always comes back to the knife handle for me which is why I like this curve just here on a lot of the knives that I use is because I like using the chest lever and it's probably 80 to 85% of the way in which I use a knife and that's where instead of reversing the knife towards you like this you turn it like that you put your thumb on the back of the blade and you bring everything nice and tucked in like this and this is a very powerful way of cutting

there are other ways of holding a knife by locking the knife into the knee you can feather wood this way you can also strip the bark off sticks very easily by not moving the knife at all just literally adjusting the angle of the blade depending on how it feels but it's a very safe way of using the knife and a clean way of using it to achieve a task that's actually pretty simple and can be made very complicated by using a different technique so if we look at the environment I'm in I'm in the woods I'm on my own I might be out here just camping on my own or I might just be here for the day practicing some skills going for a walk and soaking in nature just to get away from it all but the key point is I'm on my aim well obviously when you're on your own it can be quite dangerous if you're not experienced with tools and you're using them the wrong way things can go wrong if I get my knife out here and I'm holding it like this and let's say it's been raining and there are some exposed roots on the ground they can be quite slippy there might even be small holes the animals have made I can't see them because they're covered over by debris or leaf litter let's say I want to go pick up a piece of wood over there and I start walking over there with my knife at the sheath holding it it's actually quite a dangerous thing to do and I would never walk around too freely with my knife act like this simply because if I trip over I have a full no matter how good I think I am or how control I think I'm going to be if I have an accident accidents happen when you least expect them to and you don't really have a lot of control it's not like you envisage them to be whatsoever you can fall down and you might land on your blade and that's a four inch blade that's a hell of a depth to go into your body depending on the angle it goes in for example and where it goes in but that would be pretty much fatal for me and if I was out here on my own it doesn't matter whether I'm one mile from civilization or tan I'm probably not going to make it back if this knife goes straight in there and you know punctures something pretty serious so rule number one is you never walk with your knife out just

freely walking around no matter how safe you think you are fingers can catch you out so before I go pick up that piece of wood knife goes back in the sheath and now I can go get it whether I'm in a group I'm on my own the knife goes in the sheath while I move around and the same rules apply because obviously I don't want to fall on somebody else and have the knife in my hand because it could be pretty damaging for them but I've got the piece of wood now and I'm standing up I'm here on my own I take my knife out I start working you can see immediately I've just idli way in which I'm holding this piece of wood I was holding it like that and then suddenly I've put my hand like this and I've locked the piece of wood into my forearm to make it one piece by locking the piece of wood against my hand it eliminates the movement in the actual object I'm carving with or sharpening and if I'm using this method the foregrip method to actually take some wood off the end there for whatever reason I'm doing it for there's very little movement in this piece of wood and if I just tuck it under my stomach there I can carve quite firmly with the piece of wood and there's very very little movement so you can see it's quite a powerful way of using your body and the knife correctly to be able to take off a large portion of wood but you don't necessarily need to take off lots of wood when you're carving you can just let the knife do the work let the grind let that Scandinavian grind or chipper grind you're using bite in and do the work for you it's not about how strong you are really sometimes with knives it's really just about technique and the strength develops with it and you don't really notice in is they start naturally gelling together to create better knife use overall but if I was in a group and I'm cutting like this for example let's say there's somebody there and I put down a lot of power and do this and follow through with my with my arm then with my swing again this is something just to be mindful of if you right with your friends which is a lot of what you do in bushcraft you go out in groups and you experience this sort of thing together you might be moving towards me to come and see what I'm doing or she and I might be like this and I might catch him in the hand or her in the handle something it's just good just to be mindful of who's around you that's more of a group setting but on your own obviously you don't have that kind of problem but I'm standing up and I can incorporate other techniques standing up is a very safe way of working you're far away from your legs which are quite vital areas you have some pretty major arteries in there which we'll talk about later and if you're sitting down and working you really want to adjust your techniques but I can use the chest lever as well if I want to put a point on this a very very powerful way of using a knife no problems they're not going to have any safety issues if I tilt it like that and I start being a bit sort of strange with it you know that could be dodgy because I'm whipping the knife across my face but you just keep it pointing out in front of you just make sure your hands are far enough away and that you're going at a slow enough pace you're not now see some people using knives and they're they're getting mad with it trying to hack away at the piece of wood you need almost demonic like you don't really need to carve that way it's not about how quickly or how hard you're doing it what will happen is and I've seen it before is someone come back and take the tip of their thumb off with the nail attached or gone in an instant and you know they're just going too quick and putting too much power into it so just go slow and just focus on concentrating that power if you wish to use it in the actual cut itself rather than coming back and going super quick if we're sitting down and we want to do some carving for example let's say we're making a trap and we need to sharpen some steaks as a particular area of the body you really want to be careful with and that's the inner leg a lot of accidents can happen in the inner leg and they can be really serious when they do occur and it often goes back to a sharp knife is a safe knife the way I'm concerned I see a lot of guys when I'm out on courses with pieces of wood working near there in a leg and their knife might be a little bit dull and they put down an enormous amount of pressure on the piece of wood because the knife is slightly dull and then the grain goes and the knife can go through the inner leg if you're not careful you have some major arteries running up your inner leg your femoral arteries and it doesn't take an awful lot to get to them you know if you nip the blade in too deep you really could potentially hit one of those arteries and if you're out in the woods on your own your dad it's as simple as that it doesn't matter how good the first data you are if you hit your femoral artery you're probably going to die this is a 99% chance you're going to die if you're out there with friends and I suggest you better hope that they're good enough too to put enough pressure on it and react quickly enough to help you out but if you're out exploring the wilderness and you're in very remote areas the chances are that you're going to run into troubles and that beale your last trip so you really have to be careful when working sitting down if you want to sit there with your legs apart and what I generally says if you do want to sit like this just put your elbows on your knees and carve like that I don't really find that very comfortable in fact I find it very awkward so it's at intensive I tend to work to the side of myself you can do the same with an axe as well just work to the side of yourself slightly and work like this and it allows you then to make this piece of wood an extension of your forearm tuck it into the stomach to reduce any recoil and just carve away quite happily obviously if you're using techniques like this you know there's not so much of a problem with the leg at all there's no issue whatsoever if you are using the chest lever then no issues with the inner leg at all in fact those are very very safe ways of using a knife this way is very safety the full grip like that if you hit your outer leg the muscle with the blade then it's not as bad at all and you're going to live to see another day quite easily incomparable so if you go into the inner leg with a knife so if you're sitting down just don't work within your inner leg the same with battening as well battening is another one people get a bit too comfortable a straddle a piece of wood that they're battening they batten down like this and a lot of people don't realize if you don't actually have as much control as you think you do when you're battening the grain can go you can whack it down suddenly your arm goes through perhaps the piece of wood moves to the side like this and the whole profile of what you're working with shifts and you go into the side of your leg you do have to be quite careful and just put some distance between your inner leg and whatever you're working with other methods in which you may want to use your knife is you may want to hammer it into a piece of wood so it's there as a stationary blade to cut string for example I see quite a lot of people ramming knives into pieces of wood like this and if your knife has quite a large finger guard on it it may be that you can get away with that but I've also seen as well people do the same thing and their hands slip down the blade and because they're gripping the knife they continue to grip on the way down and it slices open their hand now if you're out in the wilderness or you're on the trail and you're quite far from civilization immobilizing a hand can be a very very difficult thing to kind of manage in the field because your hand is a primary thing really a primary tool of your body it's what you do everything with and if that's immobilized and you're right-handed and you've just got your left hand and obviously you're going to have a bit of a hard time my voice would be to you not to do that to smack your knife into a bit of wood especially if you've got wet hands or their oily slippy it's just it put it over a piece of wood hold it against the block and hammer it in with your other hand or another piece of wood if you don't want to damage a nice piece of wood on you your knife user your hand for example the palm of your hand and then you can cut some string quite easily so in this episode we've really just covered the basics of knife safety I think health and safety has just been blown way out of proportion in this day and age mainly because of the breeding of fear people having fear instilled in them and they take safety to to ridiculous levels that's not to say that it isn't a bad thing in some respects with certain stuff but I think a lot of the time experience is really the way to go and just not rushing things if you rush things you will most likely run into trouble because you're not concentrating collecting on the task at hand and you're fueled by fear not concentration on what you're doing a lot of the time most of the accidents that I've seen whose people are just not concentrating and they just have fear instilled in them and they're working really quickly because they're worried about the rains coming in and they need a shelter up or they're worried about what other people think of them and they don't look competent enough and what they're doing and they start working really fast and doing something and you know the tip of the finger suddenly disappears and then there's that realization of I didn't even realize that actually happened because I was working so quickly so just slowing it down concentrating and just being aware of what's going on around you just having some basic spatial awareness is really all you need coupled with common sense that hopefully hopefully comes naturally so we haven't covered everything in this video but it's because it's very difficult to cover as time rolls on in the series we will perform other tasks and you will get to see how certain life techniques work and how they can be used properly in the field and it will all start to come clear like connecting the dots for example so I hope this videos helped out then in next week's episode we're really just going to have a look at maintaining the knife and we're going to start off with inspecting the blade and having a look at it seeing where it needs attention and then some basic tools that can be taken out with you in the field to help you maintain it and that doesn't involve sharpening which is something all different altogether we're really just going to have a look at maintaining that night

so thanks again for watching please see the links in the description below if you're interested in other videos on the channel the bushcraft basics playlist I'll see you very soon in another video take care guys