Natural Cordage Part 2 The Process of Reverse Wrap 2 Ply Cordage

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Video Transcription

okay so I'm going to sit right down here in front of the camera and I'm going to move this camera around quite a bit so you guys can get different views of this but what I want to show you first is I want to show you using backline kind of what we're looking to do here so you might get a quicker understanding so I'm going to take a piece of this backline it's just a few inches long I'm going to cut it off and imagine this as one strand of your cordage you'll notice that this is twisted in one direction that's what you want to do with your single strands you want them twisted in one direction if we double this over like this and we look at it we can see that you have both of them twisting in the same direction this one's twisting this way and this one is twisting this way

that's what we're going to want for our pieces so we want them twisted one direction the same direction both of our tags but we have to do that and then reverse twisted at the same time so what will happen in effect is we'll twist one in our finger this way and then we will turn it over the next piece in the opposite direction so if we're twisting if this twist is going away from us then we're going to twist the cordage away and then the whole thing back toward us then we'll grab the other one and we'll go away and back toward us and I'm trying to do this opposite in the camera here so you can see it better away from us and then both bundles get twisted toward us and this is not a very tight piece of cordage but it's serving the purpose for the demonstration so both bundles are twisted the same direction so we're going to grab the bottom going to twist it away and then twist both bundles back toward us then we'll grab the top one now which was the bottom we'll twist it again away and we trap the whole thing and turn it if we want to toward us just like that or we can just trap both bundles and turn them with our finger like that and you're going to end up with something looks kind of like this now let's look at this on natural cordage so you get a better understanding that's just a good way to teach people what court is supposed to look like because you can see it really well in cordage like that that's already made in Reverse wrap one direction or wrap one direction so let's grab out a piece of this material that's sitting in here wet let's see what we got here and if we've got this processed half way right it shouldn't be too bad again I'm going to try to use bigger pieces so that you can see it a little bit better but I would take these and split them down even further if I could like this so that I could make a smaller diameter cordage most of the time especially if I were trying to make fishing line or something like this so what you're going to have to do with this is you're going to have to do essentially the same thing you're going to have to twist this one line one direction now you can start with two pieces like this and it doesn't matter or you can bend one over like this and then you'll end up with a loop at the top the other thing that you can do is you can twist that cordage in your hand that beginning piece you can twist it like this in one direction and get it into a tight twist until it doubles up on itself

twisting it against itself and you'll see that it kind of doubles up and turns on itself when you do that like you tighten up a piece of rope and it's much better to process this stuff wet then dry now you can see I've got that twisted down now into a fiber and when I turn it it wants to turn on itself that's where you would take that and turn it over and this would be where you'd make your cordage and what you want to start out with is one piece shorter than the other piece so this one's a little bit off as far as that goes so I'll just go ahead and twist this down and you could do this part of it if you're twisting this whole thing away from you like I am you could do this on your leg very easily you can just take that piece of cordage and you can run it across your leg to twist it down just make sure it's good and what stays good and wet twist it on your leg like this to turn that fiber down and now what you've really created is you've created one side basically of that bank line so now you have one side of this bank line that we looked at a minute ago everything being twisted one way in this case it's twisted away from us like this okay and it doesn't matter which way you go whether you go away from you or towards you as long as both of your fibers go the same direction when you do this you're going to roll some water out of it so it's better if you take that thing and soak it for a minute again or just slosh it in the water and get it back out and do the same thing again and that cordage will start to get a memory in it at some point when you do that and it will somewhat stay twisted it's not going to stay completely twisted obviously but it will stay somewhat twisted you can see it's coming undone a little bit but there's areas up in here that are staying pretty twisted right there okay so now if we were going to start off with this as our cordage or for our piece of cordage we would make sure that we've got this is a bad spot right here in the core so let's go ahead and take that right off just like that I would take it somewhere out in here and turn it on itself just like that until it started to turn and twist do you see that

when I when I turned that thing against itself as tight as I could get it and gave it some slack in the middle it automatically wants to become cordage it's trying to twist on itself the opposite direction and what you're going to do at that point is you're going to do exactly that you're going to trap that loop

both of these are twisted away so you're going to twist the top one away from you trap the bottom one and turn it over toward you so you're going away with the top fiber trapping the bundle and turning the whole thing back towards you now the bottom becomes the top and you just start the process over again just like this and you're just going to move your thumb up as you go now let me get that camera kind of over the shoulder so you guys can look at this just a little bit closer okay so now looking at what we had here this is what we're starting to get and again we've got both of these fibers are twisted away from us like this so we're twisting away trapping the bottom bundle and turning it to the top so now the lower bundle becomes the top and you can see that's our longer tail that's become the top we'll twist that one with our fingers trap the whole thing and turn that back toward us now the short ones on the top twist the whole twist that top cordage away twist the whole bundle toward us now the long ones on the top will twist it away and then toward us now this is a really short piece of cordage right here we're already ready to make a splice in here and that's okay I wouldn't do this if I were trying to make a good strong piece of cordage out of this I wouldn't want to splice that close to the beginning but I can show you how to make a splice with this example now very easily so what we're going to do is we're going to set that one in the water for a minute and let's soak while we get our splicing piece ready to go so let's grab something out of here that is suitable in diameter and length basically to what we just had and we use this piece right here and I'm just going to scrape it with my thumbnail to get any excess off of it now that's on there that I don't want and then I'm going to remember that we twisted the initial bundle so now I'm going to try to get it twisting first in my fingers because it won't roll on my pants very well unless I do that once I do that then it'll start to roll on my pants a little better this will also help you to get those fibers separated a little bit buttering your cordage keep your fingers wet keep the cordage wet and start to twist it down and again it's not necessary to do this to every piece of cordage that you're going to use as far as inside your cords you don't have to twist every one of them down first but it helps to get the first few inches twisted for sure the rest of you can twist as you go and if that barks pretty sappy or that that inner fibers are pretty sappy they're going to be a little bit slippery too in your hands because they're going to be a little bit slimy as you can see we've got that twisted pretty good right there too we're trying to bind on itself again and I'll just roll that a little bit on my pants just to get that first few inches and I'm holding that in when I do that to twist that down I get those first few inches twisted pretty good so it's holding a little bit of twist memory just like that now what I'm going to do is I'm going to again I'm going to soak this I'm going to put it back in the water and I'm going to grab my piece I'll lay it right here and I'll get the piece that we were working on out which is right here and again this is a very small diameter cordage guides but I think you can see it now what we want to do is we want to make this our long and now in this our shorter end with our splice so what we're going to do is we're going to take normally what we do is we have about an inch tag in both directions so I would lay another piece in here just like this and then I would try to make this piece right here that was the longer piece that we just added in one piece of cordage with this one by twisting it as one piece like this that is the normal way to splice cordage a really good thing that you can do to make a cordage a little bit stronger is take and make a V with that area that you just twist it down with the short end going down on your long end of cordage and your long end going down your short end and treat that as one piece at that point back up just a little bit pinching it with your fingers just like that alright match them up so your short ends here and your long ends here and then start twisting that down as if those were each one piece of cordage now instead of two and what you're going to find out is you might get a little bit of a hump where that splices out and that's okay it's just because the fibers are a little thicker right there so now what I've done is I've created my short end has now become my long end and my long end has now become my short end and I'm just repeating that process of twisting the bundle away from me away from me and then back toward me away from me and back toward me away from me and back toward me the top bundle goes away from me and the whole thing goes back toward me the top bundle goes away and I twist the entire bundle back toward me toward me and away and this is where my splice is now now my splice is right here on this piece of cordage and I have extended the length of my cordage by doing that and when I get down to the end of this one I'll have to put another splice in that's longer than this tail and I just continue to do that and I always try to keep my fingers pretty damp when I'm doing this and you can either put them in your mouth to do that or you can't do it like this let me back this cam round just a little bit now okay

now I'm going to turn sideways a little bit here so you can see the process a little bit more now this is my splice gorges in here right now and I'm turning the top bundle away and then trapping and twisting the whole thing toward me so that now the other ends at the top just like this and I'm twist this hand as well when I come back over I twist this hand as well that just makes tighter quarters you can see how tight that cordage is that's a nice tight small diameter cordage right there you could use this diameter cordage easy enough for a fishing leader or something to that effect you could not use this for a bow-drill you'd have to have something bigger in diameter the other thing that you can do with cordage like this to kind of make it stronger well definitely make it stronger if you were trying to make a bow-drill cordage with this a bow-drill cord with this you'd really want this to be strong and what I would recommend that you did for that would be to make a couple pieces that were this diameter about four feet long and then turn it just like a piece of Bank line and take two of them and make reverse-wrap cords out of it again by doing the opposite this is tortoise tortoise so we go toward us in a way toward us in a way and that would make reverse-wrap two-ply cordage out of your back line that is going to be stronger than the one single ply and I do that a lot when I'm making a bow drill fire with this stuff but with you do natural cordage it will make that natural cordage a lot stronger as well now stuffs starting to dry out a little bit I'm going to wet it down it doesn't matter that I put that thing down and picked it up I can spread it back out and see exactly where I'm at as I'm almost the end of my spliced material now okay

and once you have done this enough times and you understand this process you'll be able to do this stuff why you're just standing around you won't even have to look at it to do it the biggest pain with this cordage stuff is not the amount of time it takes really to make the cordage although you can see that does take quite a bit of effort to make that it's the harvesting of the material my processing material to get it ready to make cordage that's where your that's where it's hugely time consuming and I think that you need to remember that when you're thinking about you know the reason for the five C's of survivability the reason that cordage is in there is not because it directly affects your body core temperature as much as it's something that you need to build other things with and make other things including like your bow drill fires and whatever and if you don't have it readily available you have to make it it becomes a major-league pain now you can take this stuff and roll it on your leg during the process and it's not going to hurt anything to do that that will just help you that will just help you make a tiger piece of cordage when you're done I actually should have done that back in here but I can I've got some tags in here and you can see them and you'll see those tags sticking out where your splices are out so you're not making a beautiful piece of cordage okay big deal you can trim those off down the road if you really want to make a pretty piece of cordage the key is to keep that thing tight and you can see when I'm doing that I'm kind of separating and pulling back as I go and that's just a muscle memory thing to do that now my cordage is going to get thinner down here because I don't have that spliced material in there so I don't have the thickness that I have up here where I put an immediate splice in it now it's going to get really thin down in here and that would make a good fishing leader type situation because it's thicker at the top where you need that strength thinner at the bottom where you're trying to fool the fish and if you start to get fibers coming off of your quarters while you're doing that just pull them off it's no big deal and like I said you can keep rolling that stuff on your leg but you got to keep it wet the key to cordage really the real true key to cordage if you're really trying to make nice tight good solid cordage you got to keep it wet I can't stress that enough to people about cold as you want that stuff to be wet because you're going to get a good fine you can see how fine that fiber is right now I mean that's like fishing line stuff right there I was going to try to get down here so we can put one more splice in this thing so you guys can see that people do that here in just a minute we should be down there and then we'll get the camera back on and make one more splice in here okay we're about to the point where we need to put another splice in here and my cordage is drying out on me again I'm going to wet it down some now if we're trying to keep this cordage the same diameter in other words we want this nice thin diameter cordage that we've got going on right here below our splice then we're going to have to do something about the diameter of our cordage and that means we're gonna have to split off some of it and we can do that with our thumb just stripping some of the fibers out of it you can see when I do that you see these fibers coming out that's going to reduce the thickness of that cordage one of my splices and you only need to do it really on the one side unless you are going to do that double over splice like I showed you then you might want to do it on both sides just a little bit you can see those fibers collecting on my nail there that's really all you need to do and just make sure that your cordage that you're splicing in there is fairly thin as well so let's search around here and find this up piece the material with the splice in there now here's a piece that's not processed all the way out yet so what we'll do is we'll take it right here at this fork and we'll split it down as best we can we'll try to get it pretty much in the middle

if it shears off a little bit we can correct it a little bit with our fingers it's not going to hurt much alright so now we've got another piece of cordage right here to work with and I'm working with pretty short pieces here guys so I can get splices in faster and things like that to show you guys all the techniques you could we only process those pieces of cordage about a foot long we could have processed them six or seven feet long if we wanted to unless we cut them off by accident somehow now I'm just making sure that there's no bark left on here at all you can see some of those fibers are stripping off under my fingernails this is all nice and wet now same thing I've got a process that's courted you a little bit at least the first few inches of it and I want to take the thinnest part of that to do that because that's where my splice is going to be and if I don't want to increase the diameter of my cordage that's what I've got to work with that's what I've got to do I've got to get a really thin piece in there so again I'll set this one off to the side while I start to process this one now we're getting there okay so now we've got the first few inches of this rolling this is what nice and I'm going to get a really close-up view of the splice for you guys I'm going to try to you this time okay guys I'll do my best to keep this in the camera so again I've got a longer piece and it's going to go where our short piece is at here on the top so I'm going to overlap that and put a V in it but that's the way I showed you before if I didn't want to do that I could just overlap it like this and once I splice it then I can cut that tag off later but putting a V in this thing and making that one solid piece right there all the way down really gives you a good solid splice in my opinion it gives you a better splice look I just lost it actually gives you a better splice and again I'm just treating both pieces as if they were the other as if they were one fiber at that point and you can see now we're going to twist it down in there and we'll just continue to do that away and toward me away and toward me away and toward me away and toward me away back toward me away back toward me and you can see where our splice is out it's a little bit fatter right there on that spot right where that B's at you won't get it it won't be that fat if you use a single side splice like I showed you where you just leave one side in there you won't get that hump in there as bad but you'll get a stronger splice if you fold it over like that so it's kind of up to you there's no right or wrong there you can do it either way and it doesn't matter if you're trying for a really pretty piece of uniform cordage like a fishing line or something you may want to not do that double splice or that V splice but if you are not trying to do that and you're not worried about it then you can put that in there and it's just going to make that splice a little bit stronger for you okay so I'm going to continue with this now that I'm passing my splice I'm going to go ahead and continue with this wet it down a little bit get it twist and good and I'm going to continue with this at the speed that I would normally do cordage now you could go by after the fact you could come through with some fixing wax you can wax this cordage especially if you were going to use it for like a fishing line a floating line of some kind for fishing and that would make it last a lot longer because I'm sure one of the questions I'm going to get is how long is natural chords going to last well depends on how well you take care of it if you don't boil or grease it or something like that and you let it get bone-dry you know it's not going to last near as long as something that you take care of now you can see there's about I don't know 10 12 inches of cordage there maybe if I had to guess and I don't know how long this video is going to end up being obviously I could do it a little faster if I was just doing it not talking while I was trying but the amount of time and energy and calories it takes to try to make cordage is the exact reason it is one of the five Cs for carrying it because I don't want to have to go through this just to tie up a quiver or to make a bow drill string or to make a lashing for a tarp or to tie something out I don't want to have to go through all of this okay we are to the point now we really need to put another splice in here a third splice in a very short piece of cordage and I hesitate to do that for cordage that I'm making that I really want to use for something now I would probably use this for a fishing leader even that it's got three two splices in it already because I'm pretty confident with green bark that does splices are plenty strong and I know they're double spliced you could go through here now and you could take your knife and you could trim off these small tags that are sticking out where you've spliced it and make a much prettier piece of cordage if that's what you were after but this is going to be plenty effective just the way it is you're not going to pull that apart I'm pulling that with everything I got guys and it ain't breaking and I was pulling right out of splice okay that's some strong cordage okay guys one Dave Cabarete pathfinder school and I hope you enjoyed this short lesson on how to make two-ply reverse-wrap cordage out of natural bark if you have any questions you can hit me up on the comment section on my video or you can send me a PM on youtube I appreciate everything you do for me for my school for my family for my business my affiliates my associates and my sponsors we backed another video as soon as we can thanks guys you