Stump Anvil Improvements The Clave

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, 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

we are continuing to improve and work on our stump bites that we talked about in past videos and a stump was really the original workbench the stump is what you use to work your wood on so that you didn't have to worry about your axe or your knife going into the ground or into a rock or anything like that you always have a solid stop for those tools the first workbench type configuration was called a clave and we're going to build a clave inside our stump anvil here to make it more multifunctional but we're not going to put legs on I'm going to leave it on the ground and there's reasons that I like my stump ample to not have legs on it one of them is so I can turn it up even for a stump the other so I can roll it around and use the different configurations on that stop animal for vices for holding points to carve lumber and all those types of things but what we're going to do now with this clave is we're going to cut a section of this log out that we can use to hold material like a vise and in the old days when they were going to cut a notch or hew a log or make dimensional lumber what they would do is they would take a piece of line of natural material and this one's made of hemp and they would take that line and rub it down with charcoal some type of soft wood charcoal probably like willow or something like that and they would stretch that line across where they wanted to cut down to or cut to line and then they would tie knot in one end and cut themselves a small notch in the end of the log to hold that knot pull the other end down and then they would twang or pop the line I suspect that's where the term twang came from originally and they would pop that line it would leave a charcoal line very similar to what we do with chalk lines today on the piece of wood to give them lines to cut to and then they could level those and plumb those I'm sorry form those with a palm Bob so this is the way that was done now we're just kind of doing this by eye right now and I'm just kind of looking to see where I'm at I think you go a little deeper on this side because I don't have any charcoal at this point but I want to go over that with you guys today while we're working on this I've got a pretty hardwood stump that I'm working with here so I'm just trying to get my lines evened up here on both sides you can see here's the one I cut on this side already and then we're going to pop that notch out of our log to make our clave or our stump vise now once we've got our distance cut out of here we can do some more fine chisel work in here to even things up but this part of this bench is not something that has to be completely flat necessarily and smooth we can come back and we can do that at our leisure what we're trying to do is just open up an area that we can use in here as a vise put a piece of wood under to keep them rolling just like that just like we've always done we've got it on the ground at our workspace now if we want to lock a flat in here it's pretty easy locking around in here around onto a flat that's a little more tricky but the precedence of this thing is you would take other pieces of wood and close this gap and at the end of the gap you would take a pair of wedges and these are just two wedges cut from the same poplar branch I just split it off and wedged it and I'm putting them in opposite each other like this and that's what you would use to close that gap so you would stack your off all lumber in here or scrap lumber that you've got and again this is where the round on a round becomes kind of a problem trying to lock that round in place then you would put your wedges in just like this and what I generally do is I will put my leg up against one side like this and use my mallet to drive the other side in like that and now we have something that holds that stable so that we can work on it then we can rotate it anywhere we want to and that's one of the things I like about not having legs on this stunt bamboo is that I can rotate it like this to give myself a more comfortable area if I'm digging out a bowl with my bow lads I can tilt this thing toward me while I'm working on it and that's not a problem and then I can't move it back and forth flip it around and all that stuff and stay right here in my comfortable workspace while I'm working I had some people asking me about this bolas last night how well it worked

I'll tell you it works dandy fine you can see it's just eating that pine up this is really exactly what this tool is for it's a roughing tool for roughing a ball and you would then go back in with your finer tools I'll tell you what for or a makeshift tool for to do that in you know ten minutes five minutes I don't know that I've been very long and it did not come loose I think solid as a rock now long as you got space between that tang and that upper you're in good shape

you might need a little bit longer wedge for this thing in the future I don't know but for right now it's holding fine things definitely sharp a question about that and it'll definitely dig out a ball folks I appreciate you joining me here today for this quick video just kind of goofing around that gas more anything else making an improvement to our stump vice and finalizing that getting a clave setup with this and it be very simple to lock a sharpening stone in here where the case may be as well anything that you want to make stationary the other thing that you can do to improve on this even further is taking an auger bit and drill several peg holes in here so that you can actually put stop pegs in there as well to wedge things and hold things in but those are just future improvements and we tested out the boll eyes a little bit more today I made an improvement to it yesterday bent this tang over so that it was not touching this upper part and you could turn that around to the front but it just didn't look as good that way to me so I wanted to keep it to the back and once I made that improvement man that thing was rock-solid and it definitely was eating into that pine hard core right through the heartwood no problem at all so I'm real happy with that experiment as well but I think that these experiments in wood craft and bushcraft and trying to create things yourself and understand what you can do with the environment what you can do with a few simple tools is the most important part of bushcraft and wood craft and the only way that you can do that is to get outdoors I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining this video today I thank you for the thing you do for me for my school for my family for all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends I'll be back to the video so I can

thanks guys