5 Tools and Functions to manipulate Wood

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

morning I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I wanted to do this morning is I want to kind of revisit a video from two years ago called the five tool rule and the five tool rule concept is a very solid concept for understanding the types of tools not necessarily a specific tool but the types of tools that one should carry in a woodland environment for situations other than emergency survival in other words you plan to be there and the question really becomes do you plan to be there short-term and enjoy yourself for a little while camping while you're hiking and hunting or fishing and things like that or are you planning to be there a little bit longer term like a hunting camp that may last a week or more or do you have conveyance and you plan on staying for a month or a season and all of those things will dictate the exact tools that you'll take but this five tool rule goes across the board in almost any scenario and I want to explain to you a little bit before we get into this and talk about the different tools and different scenarios I'd like to discuss this five tool rule and one of the things I didn't talk about too much in the first video that I think will help you digest and understand the concept a little bit better and when you're talking about manipulating natural material especially wood material and plant material there are really five tasks that you have to perform in order to make usable objects from those materials number one you have to be able to cross cut the wood across the grain you need to be able to split the wood along the grain you need to be able to shape the wood depending on what you're making you're going to need to be able to hollow or make concavities in the wood and then you're going to be able to need to bore holes in the wooden material and if you're using plant material some of these things still apply although plant materials are so much more pliable you're really talking more about cortas and things like that from plant material or shingling temporary shingling and things like that bundle

making brooms those types of things that a knife will pretty much do anything you needed to do but when you're talking about actual wood material you're going to need to be able to do those five things to manipulate those woods and barks and things of that nature to get usable objects made from the landscape and carrying those tools is important because they're hard to recreate from the landscape they take specialized materials or they take a specialized skill level just like the five C's that we talk about in an emergency kit those five items are the hardest to recreate from natural material and they take the longest amount of time to recreate and sometimes they take a specialized skill level to recreate those materials to make them long-term useable objects so with this stuff what we're talking about is five tools that will do those five tasks in good passable fashion so let's talk about them one at a time in a larger kit and this would be a kit more like if you had conveyance and this is a base for building your kit these are the five minimums and you would go to your kit from that depending on how long are you planning on staying and what you're planning on doing so if you've got to split the wood or if you're trying to cut the wood across the grain you can do both of those tasks with an axe especially a large felling axe like this but when you're talking about cross-cutting the wood across the grain this is going to sever the grain at an angle if you're trying to fell a tree but it's much better for splitting the wood with the grain to create firewood materials to create plank materials to create things that you need to use for making furnitures and all of those type things if you really want something that will effectively crosscut the grain and manipulate that wood to make manageable sizes or planks of lumber and things of that nature you really want a saw for that and a large frame buck saw like this one is going to be the best for that task for that task if you're trying to tackle larger materials and again the size of these things is dictated by the scenario that you plan to be in or that you plan to operate in when you're talking about

the material just a large belt life like this lake ooh or anything with a five to six inch blade on it is going to be good for that and it will enable you to be able to do carving work to a certain extent to be able to shape that wood the next thing you want to do is you want to be able to hollow that wood and we can always hollow wood or make concavities in wood by fire and we can drill holes in wood by friction but all of those things take lots of energy they expend a lot of resources with the fire that you're using to recreate that resource or to create that resource so that's not the optimum way to do things that's the more primitive way of new things the faster way the more exacting way is to use things like a large gouge that you can hold in both hands to create a concavity in the wood to manipulate that material for making anything from a small spoon Bowl to a large door off and then as far as boring the wood what you're going to want is something that's large enough if you're talking about a large-scale kit like this we're talking about something that's big enough we can drive pins in to hold it together or put legs in a stool or legs in a table and things like that so now we want something around a two inch auger and this t-handle auger Scotch I'd order if you choose to call it that that you can just shove a branch through there and use that as a t-handle that cuts large diameter holes will give you the ability to make things like furnishings and that's important on a larger scale and you could even use that for pinning cabin components together and things like that so a large scale kit like this would be for larger scale projects for bushcrafting just a couple days in the woods and things like that the tools would reduce in not only size but they were reducing weight as well but it's also going to reduce the ability to process larger materials so you have to cater this kit to your planned outing okay so as we reduce the size of our kit or reduce our length of stay or we don't have conveyance and now we have to start carrying this gear on our back we can start to reduce the size of these tools understanding it's going to reduce the magnitude of projects that we can complete within reason so now we may go down to maybe the same belt line of like a five or six inch design or maybe even the knife that we're wearing on our hip that's only four and a half inch or something like that it's a Scandinavian design and Scandinavian grind so that we can do fine carving work and manipulate wood easily with that knife and then instead of that large gals we may go to a smaller swept type gouge or a hook type gouge that we can use either one or one and a half handed to manipulate wood but it takes up much less room in our pot and it still has a nice wide blade on it to do lots of work again from making spoons to making bowls if necessary now our auger bit we may go down to something like a three-quarter inch auger fish which is the handmade adapter for it that will give us that ability to drill holes for lashing things together if we want to are also lashing or pinning furniture together and we can easily make pins from green wood that will work with this temporarily if we have this auger bit with us and we may choose to carry a couple different sizes of auger bits all of that sup to you but you're going to want something that you can still bore holes with at this point and then something like a 24-inch axe like this would craft Action Council tool which is one of my favorite carry axes and then your saw may go down to something like a folding buck saw design made of wood or a folding one made of metal like the Boyle 21 or something like that that will work well and you can carry a lot of these tools in combination together where you can put the ax and the saw and one sleeve you can put these together in one area and have your belt life on your belt and you've got all five of those tools in a much more compact and much smaller package than you would have carrying the largest but again you're dictated by the magnitude of project you can make by the tools that you carry but you can get an awful lot of stuff done even with a kit the size you can make all the furniture spoons bowls and can't craft the items that you want to make to make life more comfortable around camp or just to practice your skills in general but these tools will make anything that you need to make for the most part on a medium scale okay so let's reduce that kit down just a little bit more so now for our axe you know we may have something small like this hELCO Rhineland hatchet made in Germany I think this is a very underrated little carving hatchet but it will do a lot for busting up kindling and making firewood down to four four and a half inch knife I've got an axe not going to be a problem and this will do some fine carving work for shaping my wood a folding saw now I've gone to just a straight folding saw like a bahco laplander or an open L folding saw something like that a smaller hook knife that I can use for making concavities in wood and then a handle and all that I can use for drilling holes in barks and wooden things like that so now I've reduced my five tools in size but they all do the same five functions that I needed to begin with to be able to manipulate wood and bark and plan material but I've got a smudge more condensed kit that's much easier to carry and like add a pack or something like that okay let's go down to one final reduction just to show you how really you can make this a micro kit that will still accomplish those same tasks again at a different level we can't keep this small hatchet in our kit or we can forego the hatchet understanding that we can't split the wood with our belt knife if we baton it properly and we select our wood properly if we have an sak there's a saw in there there is an awl on there and again there's a finer or smaller cutting blade on there as well so that gives us the ability to be able to bore the wood to be able to split the wood we have a saw when we can cross cut the wood we can carve the wood and shape the wood and all that leaves is making concavities in the wood if we carry this small pocket carving jack it has several blades on it that are made for exactly that it is a small pocket carving tool that's made for doing whittling work that has lots of blades on it that create concavities in wood and there's about five or six different blades on this tool and then you really have a small pocket kit and so now we can really reduce the weight and volume of our kit still accomplish all five of the major tasks that we need to accommodate manipulating wood or to accomplish manipulating wood but we can do it in smaller scale with these tools and again we can either keep the hatchet in there so that we know we have the right tool for the right job or if we're just trying to make spoons or something like that we need to cut down small spoon blanks we may choose to baton our knife as long as we do it properly so that we don't take a chance on damaging that knife we make sure we have the right knife for that so again I wanted to revisit the five-tool rule really so that you understood why those five different tools are important and really the five functions that you need to understand to manipulate wood materials because if you have tools that will perform those five functions they can be as small as a couple of pocket tools or as large as something that you may need conveyance to carry depending on the magnitude again of the projects you plan to accomplish I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance out there in the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me today for this quick video review or revisit of the five tool rule and the five functions to manipulate wood I appreciate everything you do for our school for family and for business for all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys