Simple Machines 3 Rope Spinner

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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

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afternoon folks welcome to the Pathfinder school when I would thought we would do today is we're going to make a video on another simple machine and this simple machine is called the Rope spinner and it has been used since ancient times for making rope and there are some very important facts about rope I want to talk to you about because we use ropes and Courreges every day in our bushcrafting in our wood crafting and things of that nature and we kind of take it for granted because we can buy it by the spool anywhere we want to but there are ways that you can compound the tensile strength or the capacity of normal cordage by creating rope so if you have a lot of cordage with you or you've made a lot of cords from natural material and you want to make it more valuable for holding a heavier load or you need to hold something heavier as a lashing you can make rope from that cordage in a very simple way in the bush and I'm going to show you how to do that right now archaeological evidence of rope goes back seventeen thousand years by fossil record there are also many paintings and drawings that have been found from ancient Egypt of people using a spinning device to make rope from cord it was used all the way up to a thousand years ago by Native Americans as a normal method for making rope as well so rope has been around for a long period of time it's not a new invention there are mentions of rope as early as the book of Exodus in the Bible and in the book of Ecclesiastes there is also a parable about rope talking about a strand of three cords is very hard to break and that parable references one person being able to defend himself two people being able to defend themselves or a group of three being harder to defeat or harder to break and what that reference is goes back to is that a true strand reverse-wrap two-ply cordage is not near as strong as a three ply rope as far back as the middle ages they used what was called a rope walk and a rope walk was used to make long pieces of rope and some of the rope walks in medieval Europe we're up to a mile long and these rope walks or rope making mechanisms that they use were called rope jacks and they employed a new type of technology with multiple spinning devices on it that was geared that was thought to be invented by Leonardo da Vinci called the Rope machine and we'll talked about that in another video but the rope twister or the spinner is a very simple way to make rope in very crude fashion in the bush and that's why I wanted to cover that with you today from colonial times through the 1940s before DuPont invented nylon hemp rope that was tarred was the standard for mariners line for the ropes of sails we still use tarred mariners bank line today which is now made of nylon covered in tar but the ancient ropes were made almost always the best rope were made of hemp now there were other ropes that were made from sisal there were other ropes that were made from other types of materials of plant fibers when hemp was at a premium

but hemp was always the preferred and always considered to be the strongest of any rope and today we're going to use hemp to make our rope okay so we're going to take a single cordage of hemp fiber here that we've got on this roll and we're going to create this type of heavy hemp rope and what we're going to use to make that with it's called a spinner and I've taken a couple pieces and made a quick spinner and this thing is just simple quick down and dirty bushcraft it took about 15 minutes to make this I've got one longer stick that's been carved down and this is going to be my pendulum or my spinner it's also counterweighted because it's heavier on the bottom it has a notch that's been cutting around the top portion to hold my cordage and then it has a handle that's just had a piece of metal crudely pounded into it and then bent over on a rock to allow it to spin on an axis so that becomes basically an axle and this will spin and this is a spinning device that we're going to use to spin our rope with today the only other thing that we're going to need for this is a stationary object that we can wrap rope around like the branch of a tree that we come up with a saw or something like that if we were going to make a longer piece of rope we would need probably two of these spinners and instead of using a stationary point at one end we'd use a spinner on both ends and then we would use a couple what they call rope walkers to walk our rope down to keep them from kicking up we'll talk about that as we go here in just a minute now I have an area on an oak tree here I cut off a branch and this is about at waist level I would like to have it a little higher than that but I've got some other Oaks growing out of this same nursery type tree it's not gonna hurt anything for me to cut one branch off right here so we're gonna use what we've got now all I'm gonna do with this George is I'm going to tie a quick bowline knot in this cordage so I'm just gonna make my loop in here real quick just like this I'm gonna come in here come up through this hole come around the back side and back down through that loop I created and that's going to give me that bowline knot and I'm just going to put that over the top here and that's where our first strand is going to tie on to then I'm going to tie the other end of this cordage to my spinner and then we're going to wrap it one time and I'll show you what I mean by that in just a

okay so one of the first things we have to do is we have to figure out how long do we want our finish rope to be and that's important because however long we end up with this first set of strands that we're going to spend our rope is going to be one-third that size a little bit less than one-third that size when we're done so if we want something that's going to be two feet long when we're done working on a small scale today we're going to need something that's at least six feet long triple wrapped so we're gonna need about eighteen feet of cordage to begin with so we'll go ahead and measure from here and we'll measure our pulls off and there's one pull to pull three poles and I go just a little bit more maybe another half pull on that and then I'm going to cut this hemp off and then I'm going to just tie another bowline knot on the other end of this that's fairly small and that bowline knot is going to go on my spinner and we'll talk about that here in just a minute now to set ourselves up to begin with we're going to again put this second bowline knot or the end of our cordage right over the top of our notch on our spinner and then we're going to divide this in thirds and the way we're going to do that is we're just going to take this thing I've made it a little bit more than three poles if you'll remember right so I'll wrap that over where I've got tied to the tree and then I come with the other loop and I'll put it right here and I'll pull it tight and when I get those evened up and tight I'm gonna have three cords that I'm starting off with right there and now I'm just going to take my spinning device and I'm going to decide whether I want to spend clockwise or counterclockwise well the first spin I'm gonna spend counterclockwise I'm just gonna spin this thing so that twists that rope down just like this now understanding how far to spin this rope it's kind of important but what I generally do with this I don't let's lock a little bit and see how much it's trying to twist it's not trying to twist real hard on me I'll pull it a little bit and set the fibers and I'll call that good now here's the tricky part because we now have to wrap this rope again and make three strands of it just like we did before remembering that the first time we spun this rope

we went counterclockwise and went this direction counterclockwise so our final spin will be clockwise so if I'm by myself it's pretty easy for me to figure out what 1/3 of this rope is and hold on to it and thrown it out again put that third over this loop take this third and put it over the top here and now I'm ready to make my final piece of rope and you can see what I've got here right out about two feet and now when I pull this out there's my three strands again and again all I did with that was I figured out where my thirds were I pulled this thing tight I came in here and figuring out about where the third was I wrapped that around here again and I came over with that loop to here and I pulled it tight so that those loops were even and in the notch and now I have one two three strands again now remembering that we went counterclockwise the first time we're now going to go clockwise with our spinner so we're gonna go this way like this

once that thing starts to get tight submit it a couple three more times again

you're gonna pull on top just set that's gonna set the Rope a little bit what they call setting the rope basically what you're doing is you're stretching the fibers setting them in that fashion now when you let this off of here it's going to loosen up a little bit but you're going to whiplash both of these ins and we'll do that in just a minute with another piece of this hemp cordage to hold this rope together so now what we've done is we've created a two-foot or thereabouts my hand is probably seven inches long 8 inches long and close to it so we've got pretty close to 2 feet here we're going to pull it off of this end and you can see it's not going to unspent too much that thing unwrapped about one time and now we have a piece of full balloon rope so if we take that off both ends of our spinner excuse me off the end of our spinner what we now have is a piece of rope what we'll do now is we'll find this in with the whip stitch we'll bind this end with a whip type lashing and then we cut off our excess and we would have the amount of rope that we had desired from the beginning like we said we wanted about two feet this is probably 18 inches looks a little bit shy of what we wanted to end up with but think that into account when you start off making your rope with your single piece of cordage that you can triple up on your first spin so let's go over and lash this dude up so all we're gonna do now is just get ourselves a piece of this single block over here cut that off and we're just going to create a loop here like this and then we're going to wrap down the loop like this as tight as we can get it we're gonna hold it tight as we go when we run out of cordage we're going to stick it through the loop that we created and then we're gonna take our tag that we've got over here and pull that loop and draw it up tight inside just like that and then all we have to do is trim off the excess and there's the end of our rope and it's been whipped together now we got to do the other side on both ends just like that and now we have our piece of rope and again we're working on very small scale here with this rope this is a piece that's right at it a little less than 2 feet long and so is this one this could be 30 or 40 feet long depending on how long we start with our single ply or single piece of cord then we're going to use to make our rope for another video in our simple machine series on how to make a rope spinner I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for our business for our school for our family for all of our structures sponsors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back to the video as soon as I can thanks guys

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