Canvas Ship Hammocks and Weaving a Clew

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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 folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school what I like to talk about today is the canvas hammock stay with okay so let's have a discussion about canvas hammock real quick canvas hammocks or hammocks in general have been used since before the days of the Mayflower by Europeans aboard ships they were mentioned in a couple of different books by people like Horace Kephart Hyatt Verrill Warren Miller all of those guys spoke to hammocks but they didn't talk too much about carrying a hammock into the woods that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't done it just means they didn't talk about doing it themselves it must not have been the best thing for them to me a hammock is one of the most comfortable things you can sleep in and getting yourself up off the ground has lots of advantages although there are some disadvantages you have to understand and understand how to mitigate from things like convection in cold weather but that's easy enough to take care of so what I've tried to do is figure out a way to make a simple canvas hammock that would be good with traditional gear like oil skin tarps canvas backpacks and things like that instead of carting all of that traditional gear to the woods and throwing a SIL nylon hammock between two trees so jason hunting myself came up with a prototype for a canvas hammock and i looked at lots and lots of sites on the internet from eighteenth-century sites that showed how to make ships hammocks all the way to hansen site on the perfect hang on how to vote hand weave or finger weave clues for a hammock and i used all of those resources together to come up with this with jason what i want to do today is I want to show you how this thing's put together a little bit and show you how to weave a clue so that possibly you can make your own hammock out of canvas if you choose to do so stay with okay so this is a pretty simple concept you have a woven clue here and we'll talk more about the clue and a few minutes when we weed it but basically it's just a series of loops that are the same length basically you have a large piece of rope like a five inch diameter rope that acts as a toggle so you take a grommet hole and traditionally these would have been sown in grommets in the eighteenth century and before probably now you can stamp those dramas in using metal grommets with several thicknesses of the material hemmed over you would slide that loop through the grommet and then you would use the rope as a cleat or a toggle right there and the reason they did that traditionally was so that you could remove the clue very easily from the hammock so that you could service the hammock to sole repair or to clean the hammock like washing it and things like that then you didn't have all this stuff attached to it so it's very easy to attach and detach it also makes it very easy if you have to make a new clue or repair the clue to get it away from the hammock to do that so it's got several advantages as well as packability advantages and I think this heavy 5/8 rope just gives it a little bit of rigidity on the hammock itself on the ends but it is a surprisingly surprisingly comfortable sleep and you just thread that through the clues and jump right in the hammock and it holds up very very well so what we're going to do today is the prototype that I made here has paracord for the clues I want to replace these paracord clues with traditional cotton materials because I just had this pail to the tree with heavy sisal rope like a three-eighths sisal rope

and I'd like to have this whole thing made out of traditional material so we're going to weave a clue today out of cotton okay so we're gonna do this a little bit over the shoulder for you guys but the first thing you need is you need a clue jig and a clue jig is just something that you can wind your ropes around and then be able to finger weave in between the ropes so that you can't mess with the warps and the wefts and so you're basically just setting up a flat jig and this one has 11 nails in the bottom of it because I have 11 holes in one side of my hammock and it's about eighteen inches from top to bottom and I have a nail at the top to hold my ring that's the extent of the jig very very simple construction all I did was divide this width up and put 11 equally spaced nails on here one nail at the top in the dead center and I've got a 3 inch block ring that I'm hanging on there just like that

now how much rope do I need I started out with about 10 poles which was 50 feet of a rope and that was a little bit longer than what I needed so when I make this cotton when I'm going to do 8 poles so there's one and when I mean poles I mean both arms stretched out in length which is about six feet so what you want to do is you want to come in here and you want to pull this one this line from underneath always go to the same direction with this so if you're gonna go over the top go over the top every time if you're going to go underneath go underneath every time so I'm going underneath and I'm pulling myself about a 4-foot I'm gonna hold it here and I'm gonna come up and I'm gonna wrap under my first nail and then if I came underneath I'm gonna come underneath again so I'm gonna pull all this line and this is where your time-consuming portion this is going to come in because you've got to pull all this line through there every time come down to the next nail wrap the same direction come up and again going down through up through the bottom same direction every time no matter what wrap I'm doing whether it's my wrap at the bottom of the nail or the route coming up through my loop so now I'm going down to clockwise and in from the bottom

as long as that's consistent you'll be okay okay so once our jig is loaded we should have to equal tails coming over the top of our ring and now we're ready to start the weaving process the weaving process is a very simple weave under over under over under over one side chases the other side so you don't cross weave and there's only one knot that holds the whole thing together which means you've got 50 feet or so of cordage here and you're only going to put one knot in it that's very easy to get undone in the end so you have that extra cordage as well if you need it it also makes it very easy to repair so what you've got here is you've got a rope that comes over here and if you're going to start on the left side and I'm left-handed so I do that I'm going to go under the very first one here and then over the next one and then it's under over under over under over all the way along there just like this and if you're dyslexic Azaria this can get confusing but once you've done a couple of these you're gonna get used to it real fast all right so when you come out you will now have put that first drink on it to the inside here because of your over under over under now what you want to do is you want to follow this on the same path going in but what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to come over the top like this pull that tight just like that okay there you've got two tails sticking out you're gonna do the exact same thing again that you did the first time so you're gonna go under locking it in over under over under over under now see I wanted a diagonal here but I could dress that up real easy just by pulling up on this thing and when I go to the other direction with this I pulled this one back through with my other tail it'll bring both of those straight up just like that you dress that whole thing up nice and tight just like that okay and now I've done two wraps all the way through alright so now we've got two of these that we've dropped and now we're going to start from the other side here over-under over-under we dropped one completely out and we don't need the last one at all then we just need to come down here and chase this one through just right our finger in there to chase that just like that pull this one through make sure we're right even with this one got under something they're shitting a bit under so I got you down out of there that's how easy it is to fix this it's not very hard to figure out you can you make a mistake then snug that thing up just like that and this time we're going to drop the next one so now we've got one two that we don't want now we're going to start it here same thing again going under over under over just like this each time consecutively now we drop one more set of strings

and we got one two three that's as far as we need to go we come out of this last set here on this side and chase this one just like this just like everything up not we've got one two three sets here one two three sets here all right now this time we're going to come back here again and we're going to drop two strands come back after almost to the point now we're done because when we get down to what we've only got a couple of strings and tie it off that's our last set we're going through there pull this one out of here and chase this one

yeah Snug it up now we've got four strings right here left so if we go over under over under one time right there chase it through here that gives us two strings left in the middle and we just tie a square knot over those two strings just like that and our clue is then complete now once our clue is complete I'm just going to tie a knot in both of the ends of this cotton cordage here real quick so it doesn't come undone we should just be able to pop that off pull it completely off and take it over to our hammock okay so now we just stretch our hammock out on the ground here just like this get our clue laying here we can get things separated the way they need to be then we just come in and we start feeding the clue lines a little loops through here one at a time speed rope through as we go then we would hang our hammocks and everything I'm straightening out from there I just want a larks head see there just like that figure out mine hang angle that I want there tree give myself a little slack and then I'm pretty simple you think about Rufus

really grabs a tree so you don't have to get real fancy with it just wrap it around a few times and tie it off on the back side with the neezy half-inch like that make sure our ropes pretty evenly distributed there do that first long everything up some rope through here pretty close

I've got the other end up a little higher right now than this end is but you get the idea and you can easily get a diagonal way in a hammock like this there's plenty of room here to get a diagonal lay if that's what you want right folks on Dave Canterbury with self-reliance off there's in the path minor school I appreciate you joining for this video today on how to weave a clue and make a canvas hammock appreciate your views that appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for school for a family for business all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends headed back to another video as soon as I can thanks guys