Woodcraft | How to carve a tent peg

Description

A basic carving tutorial, in this video we look at how to carve a seimple yet effective hazel tent peg using just a knife and a saw. This project uses 3 different cutting techniques and leaves you with a practical object at the end.

Follow me on

Facbook: https://www.facebook.com/Forresterbus...

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forresterbu...

Twitter: https://twitter.com/forresBushcraft

Shot on canon 70d

Tags: Bushcraft,Bushcraft Skills,Wilderness Skills,Outdooors,Hiking,Camping,Survival,Survival Skills,woodcraft,wood craft,carving,whittling,knife,tent

Video Transcription

hello everyone i am out here today just enjoying a nice sort of quite cool but very very sunny spring day spring is well and truly here the world is turning to green again so the brown is fading back and the green is makers we're back it's really really nice day to be out here mainly what I'm doing is just enjoying being out in the woods but one of the things I do need to do is replace my wooden and tarp stakes or tent stakes and making quite rustic style ones day I'm keeping the wood in the round with my favorite type to use for the tarps and stuff so I thought whilst I'm replacing them I'll take you guys through the process that i use for creating really effective very very important natural tent pegs so to start with the wood that I society news for this for a number of reasons is a green piece of Hazel which I've copies from a small hazel copies where I am and one note on that before everybody goes crazy about me taking Greenwood I do know how two copies correctly I have researched it and I have done a few training courses encompassing so I know that I've not hurt the tree in fact what I've done is promoted new growth in the tree if you do not know how two copies and you don't know how to take Greenwood correctly and safely without damaging your environment on the soly don't do it find out first how to correctly take Greenwood then you can get on with it I've chosen to use Greenwood because it's much easier to work with and it will dry at home nicely hazel does have a tendency to go little bit soft mixed riding the outdoors are found and but one of the few of the reasons I've chosen this is one it grows pretty straight on the shoot so this probably three year old chute on it it's got a little bit of kink in here which I won't be able to use with the majority of this stick it's going to be ideal for ten paise there's a bit of just quite a large variance in the thickness of this but that shouldn't really be an issue for me also I've tended to find the dried pays or does seem to become quite rot resistant naturally one issue that you might find with hazel is that it does split very very nicely and very very easily which when you're banging it into the ground can cause your states to split later on in the process of doing this we're going to add something to the stake very very simply which should help to resist that splitting so let's have a look at how we're going to make this so the first thing i've done here is i've cut my four steaks to size and I usually carry six for me I still have two that are working that haven't been used as much so I'm only going to make for today and the measurement that I've used for the use is basically from my elbow to the center of my palm and you can make them a little bit longer and i have used them a little longer in the past however i found these they have the best kind of ability to pack and have just enough depth to em get a really strong hold on on your top people in the worst conditions so what we need to do now is to start sort of crafting these into an ice pack the little bit wonky than i would have right to put one nice straight one here but the nice straight one is a little bit thicker than i would have liked what they'll do they'll make nice don't make knife pegs like I said they are kind of rustic so it's unlikely you're going to get them all absolutely uniform and completely uniform that's boring so the first thing i want to do with some of these ones which have got a little couple little branches coming on them is those want to trim those edges off

with those edges nicely trimmed what I now need to do is I'm going to start by chamfering the tops of my pegs on the side which bit I want to be the top and generally the best way to do that is if you've got one side that's definitely thinner than the other like on this peg here this side slightly thinner I want the thick side obviously to be the top champion is really easy to do it's all I'm going to do is I'm just using this thumb to push across the edges they're like so this hand isn't doing any movement because I don't want to slip now what a nice controlled cut across the edge and what the shampooing does is this helps the wood to resist sweating greatly reduces the likelihood splitting and finishes off quite nicely as well back the other way so this way what I'm doing is what's the best way to show you is I'm pulling the knife towards my hand but you can see that blade stops at my thumb I can't stab myself with it so it's kind of like peeling an apple almost just to really finish that edge off and I'll do this of each and this is probably the most important part or one of the most important parts we can make it really nice I taking the bark off nice straight line this is just aesthetic

and this is what your left then I shunted edge

now saw shampoo my edge what I now need to do is start working on putting the notch in for the the ropes or the cord or whatever to to pull on two very very easy to do you no doubt will have seen a cut like this before if you send a few YouTube videos it's great for making things like pot hangers and stuff like that but it's also really effective as a temp egg not person we've got to do is put a stop point i will show you how to do that and then i will show you how to gradually start setting that stop cut into a really nice quite elegant peg notch so what i'm doing here to create this stock notch is I'm going to make sure that I'm work at the top of my peg here just adjust the focus slightly and I'm just going to put an X cut in here and i'm not going to press down on this knife all i'm going to do is going to put it in and rock it backwards and forwards so I'm keeping the knife pretty much where it is just angle in that head and putting a bit of force of it but not too much and I'm rocking my peg backwards and forwards and I've got this nice line left here peg round and do the same getting a little difficult to show on camera but here's what I'm left with okay so this is going to act not only as a guider but as a stock cut for when I start putting the notch in next ok so to put this knocked in what I want to be doing is I'm going to start cutting down into this stake in this direction so i turn the stake upside down and just as before i'm going to use that same motion why push using this film so I'm not doing this movement I'm simply gently pushing the knife long with this thumb you've got it quite gentle with those first few cuts to avoid going through that scope after you've made the first few they start to stop quite obviously at that point and then I'm to let slip those off slip this off yeah you using kind of the tip of the blade to the snipping off there as it has a tendency to be the sharpest part of the blade but you have less control of it what's on completely with that bit this is what it should look like we can pretty up a little bit later on if you really want to well that is fully functional I might make that a fraction deeper maybe now the next stage is what point on this spike here it's very very easy to do and I'm going to work to my side so I'm well away from myself use my knife with a nice fist grip like so and i'm going to be using this section of the blade here okay not the tip because i have a tendency to kick up when i'm trying to work i'm going to use it here so i've got a nice powerful grip and I'm not gonna be pushing the knife what I'm actually going to do is a little bit of both pushing the knife a little but actually the main thing is going to be pulling back on this stick so I can brace my arm that's my leg of our want to just keep working my way around to put a nice round spike on that feels like my knife is definitely in need of a sharpen stirs my spike done so what I'm now going to do is just extend that spike a little by doing more of these little cuts here try and keep it as neat as possible and the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take a kind of cross court across that heartwood that has a tendency to split so I'm just going to take it across so ultimately the tip looks like this so you go folks that is how I make a kind of bushcraft tent peg I realize these temp tags I think they're really really elegant they retain the natural kind of beauty and their work well it's next on way to Platts if you're nice girls as well if you're pretty new to working with wood and you need to work with knives and things this is a brilliant little starter project you've got a good little not there you're using how many different types of cut lead to the use one too yeah so using two types of cup and use practice of champagne your practices and delicate movements it's really really nice important to make sure your knife is reasonably sharp I wouldn't recommend trying to do this with a folder you possibly get away with a friction folder but I wouldn't recommend using like a Swiss Army knife you're likely to break it because you're doing some pretty pretty heavy work there and some pretty you know pretty rough movements with it full tank blade or stick tongue blade is where you want to be with that and there you go that is how we make a tent peg should last me another few years so as always I hope you've enjoyed it please like subscribe comment all that kind of stuff and I'll see you in the next video and we're crack on and make three more of these