Pocket Hunter A Comprehensive Look at Design and Use

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com/pocket-hunter/?sort=bestselling

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

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,Pocket Hunter,Slingbow

Video Transcription

horn folks Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school what I wanted to do today was you can see I've got a box straight from the Pathfinder school with several packages in it here what I wanted to do today was I kind of want to talk to you about the pocket hunting system the pocket hunting system has recently been licensed to marksman slingshot for worldwide distribution it's available in a lot of major sporting goods stores right now in a lot of places online you can type in pocket hunter and you can find it the difference between the pocket hunter that was licensed to marksman and the pocket 100 that's sold by the path on your store is that the pocket hunter we license to marksman does not have the fishing attachment and our fishing attachment may not fit they're molded part and we'll talk about that a little bit more in detail but what I wanted to do today was I wanted to kind of go through the pocket hunter itself talk about how to utilize the pocket hunter talk about the accessories that are available talk about how to load it how to shoot it different modifications that you can make to it with available accessories and what you can use the pocket hunter for and what it was actually meant to be used for compared to what you might think you can do with this pocket hunter so let's just kind of break your stuff out like I said this is all brand new but you can go back I'll put this in the video playlist on the pocket hunter and you can go back and look at four or five videos in that series and you'll see that I developed this system clear back in it was either early 2009 late 2008 something like that the first videos came out on this system as I developed it we are now to the current patented design of the pocket hunter and we're going to talk about that a little bit as we go as well so stay with me guys okay so let's first talk about what you receive with this pocket hunter when you order it from the pathfinder school and now this is the deluxe pathfinder pocket hunting kit I believe it's called on the path on our website and again this stuff is brand new but if you go back to my earlier videos that are in this playlist I'll say this one more time you will see this product in use from the very beginning in late 2008 early 2009 I'll also put some pictures and possibly a little bit of pieces of video at the end of this video that will show you the effectiveness of this tool for taking both small game medium game and fish alright the reason I'm getting this stuff brand-new for you guys is really because I want you to see what it looks like when you receive it in the package not because I'm trying to do some kind of a review on something that I've been working with for five years deluxe pathfinder pocket hunting system and it has a list of what's included the Pathfinder slingshot the pocket hunter adapter and spool with cap modified hunting bands one additional set of modified hunting bands and the two pocket canvas pouch now it's important for you to understand in this video that the bands that are on our pocket hunter these bands here are not your normal everyday slingshot bands we specially manufacture these bands to ensure that they are of a certain weight when drawn like a bow at a certain amount of inches of draw or pull it works very much like a bow or any other piece of archery equipment the further you draw it back obviously the heavier the poundage is to its maximum I have tested this on a scale these hunting bands that come with the but with the pocket hunter standard are 42 pounds at 28 inches so this is very similar to shooting a 42-pound bow longbow recurve bow compound bow 42 pounds

at 28 inches now you get this multiple pocket-pouch that's made out of canvas so you can put this on a belt if you want to the way this was conceptualized in the beginning was so that you could take this system and fold it up and stick it in a cargo pocket that's why it's called the pocket hunter it is built on a standard marksman wrist rocket slingshot this is a heavy-duty steel construction with a plastic handle slingshot this is even though they sell these in Walmart places like that these things are no toy they will kill medium-sized game without question and I'll show you pictures to prove that okay there is a piece of paracord ran through the pocket which is your our arrow capturing device that captures the knock of your arrow it comes standard with orange you could put any color in here you want it to it has the standard 42 pound heavy duty hunting bands on it and again there are only 42 pounds if your draw is 28 inches if it draws less than 28 inches it's not going to be 42 pounds the adapter that comes on this device the actual pocket hunting adapter and this is the patented portion of this system has a butterfly screw on the backside it is reversible so it can be put on this slingshot in either direction it will only fit and is only molded to fit this marksman slingshot so now I can use this thing as a regular slingshot if that's what I choose to do and shoot regular ball ammunition out of it I can just take this piece of cord out of it just got a knot tied in the end of it and use this as a regular slingshot that's going to be very powerful with ball type ammunition the adapter itself is set up so that it can go on with the Pathfinder logo to the front or to the back and the reason it's set up like that is because on the backside of this adapter there are two slots molded in and those molded slots are what allow you to put a fishing reel attachment of sorts on this system and basically that is a spool with a cap on it so that you can keep your string and other assorted accouterments for boat fishing inside this and then it simply snaps onto the adapter like this and locks on so it snaps off it's just push on push off so what you'll do is you will take this adapter as it comes and you'll turn it around so that those slots are to the front just like this it just snaps right on the front and again it's reversible so you can put it on either way it has a lock washer put your threaded thumb screw in and again it's designed with a thumb screw so you don't have to have any tools to mess with this and then you would put your fishing reel attachment on the front and snap it in and that contour reel allows me to wrap line around the front of this loosely so that I can then shoot an arrow for fishing to use this at the water's edge and we'll talk more about that in a few minutes so let's take that off to begin with now it does not matter when you shoot this whether you have this adapter on front ways or back ways in other words if you've got the fishing attachment to the front or to the back it doesn't matter it's still going to shoot exactly the same for sake of this demonstration I'm going to put it on the other way only because the logos on the front and that's the way it was designed to be displayed for sale and that may be the way that you receive it so I want to show it to you and the way you receive it again that thumb screw just allows for easy assembly and disassembly without tools so this is the way you'll receive your pocket hunter especially if you buy it from the path on your store now let's talk about the concept of loading an arrow in here and let's talk a little bit about this adapter and why this adapter is designed the way it is alright to truly understand this system you have to have a base knowledge of both how to shoot a slingshot as well as archery and that's the bottom line as far as the design and engineering of this part is it takes knowledge in both of those areas to be able to make something that's going to be effective on a slingshot for launching an arrow when we first started working on this and developing this I started out with just a key ring in between these two uprights there were two main design flaws or two major flaws with that system even though you can adapt it and shoot it pretty well it was not ideal I'm going to tell you why number one it's very hard to get that ring to be level or centered with these bands when you draw them back so your arrow was always either canted a little bit up or a little bit down depending on where you were at with that key ring in the uprights and how far it had slid up and down and things like that so that doesn't give you optimal consistency for aiming the device because it doesn't stay the same there's no repeatability in that the second problem with that is is that most people who shoot slingshots will aim their slingshot off the upright so this thing has to be able to be turned sideways in the hand when you're shooting it like this so that I can use the upright as an aiming device most people that shoot bows would be holding the bow like this in their hand but a lot of people can't their bow anyway and the can't is important with this device because you need to understand that if you're trying to aim the slingshot off your upright like you would a normal slingshot

you can't shoot this instinctively like you would shoot a longbow or recurve bow as well but if you're trying to aim this can't is important most people tend to can't their bow or can't their slingshot when they shoot it and that was the other design problem with the keyring in-between here something had to attach that key ring to these uprights generally a piece of rubber or a strap tie of some sort whatever it was it was inside the keyring to wrap around and it created drag on the arrow or didn't let it rust directly in the center it would be resting off at one side or resting off to the other side or it would drag when it went through which throws your accuracy off it also caused a deflection when it went through and that's a problem as well anything that deflects your arrow is going to make your arrow flight less accurate at that point my father started to work on this design in 3d models and came up with the current attachment which we have a patent on for the slingshot that has now been licensed in marksman for worldwide distribution it's made out of one solid police piece of ABS plastic excuse me two pieces of ABS plastic with a thumb screw to bolt it together and it has a solid device for your area to rest on it doesn't matter what position you hold that slingshot in it's going to be on a nice flat rest you can hold the sideways straight up and down left-handed or right-handed it doesn't matter it's always going to lay in that rest exactly the same way now one thing that's important or two things that are important to understand when you're going to shoot arrows out of a slingshot a if you're trying to get maximum power from that slingshot you need a full length arrow because that arrow needs to be at least a length of draw that's the maximum for those bands in this case 28 inches gives you 42 pounds of draw so if I pull these bands back 28 inches that's going to give me 42 pounds of draw if my arrow is not at least that long it's going to slip through the rest so it needs to be longer than that a full length arrow is about 31 inches and that's about what I would recommend don't ever shoot a crossbow bolt out of this thing unless you want to compromise a safety and be accuracy and see power the arrows that we sell and you can't you can shoot any arrow out of this device but any arrow that does not have feathered fletchings if it has plastic veins they're going to deflect off of this arrow rest which is going to throw the accuracy of your arrow off you need feathers that will compress when they go past that rest so when they go through this rest they will compress and there's no deflection you have to have that for maximum accuracy the arrows that we sell for this pocket hunter are made of the smallest diameter carbon that we could get and the takedown portion of these arrows which we'll talk about in a minute is titanium solid titanium so you have a very lightweight arrow the lighter weight your arrow is the faster it's going to shoot there is a hundred and ten grain field point on most of the errors that we sell although we do sell broadheads and we do sell a fishing tip for these arrows as well and we'll talk about that in a few minutes the important part to understand is you need to have feathers on your arrow and you want to shoot the lightest arrow you can possibly find okay so real quick let's discuss bands for a minute slingshot bands as I said before when you buy the pocket hunter you receive a set of bands on the pocket hunter that are heavy-duty hunting bands that are 42 pounds of 28 inches these bands have been tested to be 42 pounds at 28 inches we also sell a heavier hunting band that looks like this and you can see the diameter is much different and size is much different in this band and these are 50 to 53 pounds at 28 inches so they're a much heavier hunting style band made for larger game animals all right these cannot be bought anywhere except through the Pathfinder store replacement bands like this cannot be bought anywhere except through the paths on your store when we licensed this pocket hunter to marksman they have only bought licensing for the attachment itself on their slingshot without the fishing attachment and no peripheral accessories or replacement parts so all of those parts are only available currently at the Pathfinder store these larger hunting bands are well worth the investment if you're trying to hunt bigger game these will do you plenty if you're just trying to use this for small game or a backup hunting device okay let's talk about arrows real quick when you buy take down arrows and again these are available only at the pathfinder store there are other take down arrows available on the market or on other websites but what I will tell you is this we have spent the better part of three years developing these take down arrows there are the only take down arrows like them on the market and they are the most accurate with the least amount of run out on the market today I feel very confident in telling you that these are the absolute best there is available there is nothing else that comes close this is again the lightest weight carbon shaft that you can possibly get for the diameter the inserts that we use are solid titanium when we first developed this product and I started working with take down arrows I started out by just taking an insert like you would put an arrow in like this one and putting one of them on each end of the arrow similar to this and then using all thread in another piece of this and epoxy it on one side and screwing it in I started with steel I went to aluminum the problem with all of that stuff is what's called run out and run out is how straight that arrow is for its overall length once you start screwing components together that's when run-out becomes a huge problem because now you've taken one piece cut it into three and you're trying to put it back together with a screwing device like this and when you get it together it may be like this it may be like this that's exaggerated but it can just be a little bit off but it throws a flight of that arrow off considerably with very little run-out whatsoever these titanium inserts are ultra lightweight they're designed with a shoulder or a sleeve on them that automatically aligns both inserts when they're screwed together so that it causes near zero run-out and we have put these on run out machines and check them all right you get three of these arrows and that's part of the reason that these arrows are more expensive is because all of the hardware on these arrows the inserts and everything in the end insert they're all tight

you get three of those arrows in a plastic tube that you can put in your backpack just like this three arrows coming this too now of course you guys know I'm all about multi-functionality I'm all about can I use it for this that and the other thing so I would not be satisfied with an arrow like this that could not be shot from any bow because that's the purpose of it these are backup arrows and the pocket hunter was really designed to be a backup hunting tool to shoot arrows I can shoot ball ammunition I have a sling shot and kill small game all day long with it squirrels rabbits and the like but if I want to use that thing for fishing or if I want to use that thing to hunt medium-sized game I really need to shoot arrows out of it and to do that I had to be able to make sure that any arrow I was going to use for my bow could be used with that slingshot and vice versa this arrow has been shot out of a 60-pound

compound bow multiple times to check for accuracy I shoot these arrows out of my long bows consistently all of the time and I'll show you a demo on that here in just a few minutes so when you buy arrows like this you're not only buying an arrow for your slingshot you're buying an arrow for your pocket hunter you're buying an arrow that you can use with any bow you have so you can put a couple three tubes of these in your backpack and you have a very compact way of carrying the arrows for your possibly take down bow or your pocket hunter in your backpack as well okay let's talk about broadheads for a minute because if you're going to hunt with this bow obviously you can hunt small game with a tough field tip just like this very easily it's no problem but if you're going to hunt medium sized type game you're going to want a broad head we have a broad head that is designed specifically for this arrow that we saw on our website it is a 110 grain broad head the same weight exactly as the field point that's sold with it it is a solid construction three barrette three blade welded broad head this is not a collapsible it's not an expandable I don't believe in moving parts I think they're a pain and I don't think they're durable and they last this tip will last you over and over and over again and you can resharpen it it's a solid steel construction

heavy-duty high-carbon broadhead okay we sell these as well in three packs and the only place you can get this broadhead is through the Pathfinder website current so that's the broad head for the takedown arrow for the pocket hunting system but could also be shot out of any bow including a compound bow very very accurate very durable and they come in three packs just like the arrows do okay let's talk about fishing tips real quick because we may want to hunt fish with our bow we also have a specially designed screw in not glue on fishing tip that's barbed on both sides heavy steel construction works really really well it weighs a little bit more you're going to sacrifice accuracy over distance but you shouldn't be shooting fish more in about ten or twelve feet it's not going to matter at that point you don't even need feathers on the arrow at that kind of a distance so this is a very good hunting type head for fishing around the water's edge with your arrow we sell this tip separately and we also sell it with a fishing arrow that we'll discuss in just a minute okay let's talk real quick about the fishing arrow and then we're going to get to the fun stuff and start shooting this dude the fishing arrow that we sell is a three-piece take down arrow just like the others it has a stop on it made by AMS that's made for fishing arrows and you get all the pieces and parts that go whether you're going to get the spool on cardboard of bank line with the arrow attachment on it and what you'll do with that is you'll just remove it from the cardboard and you will slide the arrow through the stop just like this and that is designed to stop against the back of the arrow so that it pulls line off the spool after you shoot it once you've done that you put your fishing tip back on the arrow then you have an attachment point where it's just a small swivel here and that swivel gets attached directly to the bottom of the frame just like this and once you attach that to the frame you cannot lose your arrow you got plenty of line here more than you really need like I said most of the fishing that you're going to do is really going to take place very close up I've done bow fishing plenty of times and I can tell you that most of your shots are going to be 1012 feet unless you're shooting in aerial targets like jumping carp or something like that your shots are going to be very very close if you're trying to shoot large bullfrogs on the other edge of the creek bank or something like that you're trying to shoot carp or Catholic gar you're going to get close shots so you won't have to worry about being a million miles away and having that much training and it comes on this cardboard just for your convenience not because something meant permanently to wrap it around so once you've taken all of that off you'll take your line and run it out and it's good to stretch this stuff out get the kinks out of it anyway the first time you use it then we'll get our fishing attachment attached to the front and I'll show you how to set that whole thing up okay like I said all of this line can be stored inside this spool that's why it has a cap on it so that when you put it in your kit you have a place to store the caps are on there good you have a place to store all of that gear that line and this stopper and all of that stuff can just be stuffed down inside here so to fish with this we have to take the adapter off if we're using it as it comes now like I said it does not matter which way this adapter is on here to shoot any arrow it doesn't matter if it's on there frontwards or backwards it will still shoot an arrow but it's totally reversible so we'll put this thing on in the fishing configuration and again this stuff is really easy on off easy to take down easy to put back together it doesn't take a long time in the field to mess with this stuff then we attach our fishing attachment to the front we attach our line to the frame wherever we want to do that you can do it on the side you can do it on the bottom really doesn't matter then what you're going to do is you're going to loosely wrap this line on the spool just like this and it does not have to be wrapped on there tight if you wrap it on there tight it's going to tangle up on you a lot worse than if you wrap it on there loose so you just wrap it around there just keep kind of going back and forth with it and you can decide how much line you need we give you plenty now what's going to happen with this is when you load this and you draw it back it's going to pull this insert or the stop backwards like this when you shoot it in the arrow travels forward this stop will catch or this connector will catch on the stop back here and that will remove line from the spool now you're not going to reel it in by trying to wrap around the spool you're going to pull the fish in by hand and then you're going to rewrap it just like you would do if you were both fishing with an open reel okay so real quick before we shoot this slingshot let's talk about loading a slingshot because that's a question I get a lot what you're going to do is you're going to set the arrow in the rest this string is designed to trap the nock just like that the nock goes into that string and when you pull backwards on this system it will lock it in place it locks that knock into a V in that pocket so that it can't come out it's trapped on the string is trapped by the pocket then when you release it and comes forward the pocket will open up and it will come off the string and I'll show you that a little bit more when we're out shooting this thing okay so let's talk about loading a slingshot in the field what I generally do is I will put it right across the slingshot just like that I'll bring my bands up stretch them just a little bit and make sure that I'm locking into that string and then I will let it slide forward and come up just like that and if you hold that in place when you pull back on the string it's going to automatically lock that arrow in just like that now you can shoot this thing two different ways you can't shoot it by holding on to the knot this is the way my father shoots it or you can take the string with two fingers like this like you're shooting a bow and it's exactly the same posturing if you were shooting a bow it's exactly the same there is no difference anchor point and release it's exactly the same this arrow has been cronograph at 115 feet per second at a professional archery range

there's the shot and that was at about 12 yards okay guys I wanted to answer one more question real fast in this video I've had a lot of guys say to me you know since I can't get the fishing spool attachment for the pocket hunter at Bass Pro or any place else when I buy it off the shelf can I buy it from you as a separate component to put on the pocket hunter and the answer to that is no but I want to explain to you why the answer to that is no it's not because we don't want to give you that attachment what it boils down to is when we first created this when my father designed this we had this mold to make this plastic part and all of the injection process done in the United States

Indianapolis Indiana all of our titanium inserts for our arrows are made in Indianapolis Indiana in the u.s. factory employing US workers and all of our assembly process to put this stuff together is done by US workers in our store at the Cal Fire's going in Annapolis in the end at the Pathfinder store excuse me the school is in Ohio stores Indianapolis so what that boils down to is if you know anything about molding processes I'll try to explain to you real fast one mold may not match another mold exactly so if our mold that was made in the US does not match the mold that was made overseas by marksman and they're not making the spool in their mold they're only making this portion then our spool from our US mold may not fit the overseas mold that marksman made the other question I get quite often about the pocket hunting system is what is the maximum effective hunting range of that system and for me to be honest I would say 12 to 15 yards on medium sized game and I would go inward from there to 10 yards for small game because I want to ensure my accuracy and the accuracy of this thing is about a pie plate at 15 yards so small game is smaller than a pie plate so I'm going to get a little closer there's no difference with the pocket hunter then there is with a bow everything is about consistency and repeatability same draw length same anchor point same release don't move the bow or the pocket hunter until the arrow has left the rest okay folks the other thing I want to do real quick because we're featuring the three-piece take down arrows in this video as well and we talked about the ability to shoot these from a bow so that you don't have to buy two different types of arrows for your pocket hunter these can be shot just as easily through your bow as they can the pocket hunter and I've got my pathfinder bow pathfinder longbow here buy two tracks bows out of michigan this bow is 50 pounds at 28 inches so it's heavier than the pocket hunter and I want to show you what the actions these arrows are out of it take that shot every day nothing wrong with that shot I thank you guys for joining me for this video today I thank you for making the dream of the pocket hunter come true for myself for my family for the path on your store and Pathfinder school I thank you for all your support over the years for everything that you do for us for my school for my family for all my instructors supporters and friends and I'll be back to another video soon as I can guys thanks