Building a Discount Bushcraft Kit Part 7 (The Blanket Pack)

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Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bug Out,Bushcraft,Scouts,Scouting,Primitive,Primitive Skills.Traditional,Archery,Bone,Stone,Tools,Self Reliance,Navigation,Orienteering,Tracking,Trekking,Camping,Backpacking,Hiking,Tents,Campfire,Fire,Wool Blanket,Kit,Emergency Preparedness,Spear,Hunting,Cooking,Fishing,Game Cleaning,Meat preservation,Nature,Naturalist,Trapping,Traps,Primitive Traps,Handdrill,Bowdrill

Video Transcription

morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school welcome to part 7 in our series of building a discount bushcraft kit you can see that I have my single-shot H&R 12-gauge these can be picked up at most gun shows for less than $100 they can be picked up at Walmart for right out $100 or you can pick these up many many times at garage sales and rummage sales for well less than $50 I actually picked this one up at a gun show about two months ago for $60 it is an hnr three-inch 12-gauge modified choke very handy gun to have and if I were to pick you know one cheap gun that I was going to have in the woods for a survival or wilderness self-reliance situation it would either be a 22 rifle or a 12-gauge kind of a hard choice between those two 22 rifles will kill a lot of things but twelve gauges will kill anything with a slug so I choose to carry the 12-gauge for my you know discount bushcraft kit and what we're going to talk about today is making our blanket into a backpack alright so what we want to talk about today is this blanket pack that I'm wearing now I have seen videos on YouTube of Hudson Bay style bed rolls and things like that and understand that those were very popular back in the fur trade era even the lone runner that carried things like that but this was also an option that was used and from my personal experience and I want to show you what I think is the best way to do this there's a lot of tricks and tips that you can know and learn about bedroll type setups that you're not going to know unless you've actually went out and done this stuff anybody can throw a blanket on the ground and roll some stuff up in it and say this is my bed roll but there's ways in trucks to do it that you only learn from experience in doing it so I'm going to show you some of those tricks of the trade today from using this type of setup for several years me doing reenactments of the 1760s and I think this is one of the better ways to carry your equipment if you do not have a backpack so that's what we're going to talk about today stay with me alright so looking at this thing that we're wearing here we're wearing it right now backpack style but the way it's set up it could also be worn over one shoulder or the other the problem with the one shoulder style blanket rig or Hudson Bay pack as some people call it is that all your weight is bearing lunch on one shoulder all the time now sometimes you don't mind that you can switch it back and forth not a big deal but by setting up the way I have you can wear it very much like a school backpack type style and it distributes the weight evenly now there's some other important factors in this thing that we need to look at as far as accessibility to your equipment we're going to look at that as we take this thing down and put it back together right now all right so let's look at this for a minute from the outside and understand accessibility to our equipment as we go through this so we're going through this kind of in a reverse order well I've got a right here you can see the head of my axe is sticking out right here now the reason for that is there's no cover on this axe head so I don't want to get cut by this axe head right now until I can make cover for it so by sticking it in this seam right here I have ready access to that axe if I need it by pulling it straight out the top now if I had a cover on it maybe I put it on the outside a lot of people do do that and that's fine but this is a very easy way to carry it and get to it very quickly is to have it in this pouch right here this envelope now the other thing that I have in this envelope or quick access is a trash bag that I've added to this kit today and that just gives me some rain gear if I need it very quickly and those are both in what I call the envelope portion of this bedroll now we bought two bungee cords and I utilize those for my shelter but I also utilize them on my bedroll and I just attach them on the ends and we'll talk about that we put this back together so if we take these off of here then we can look at this bed roll close-up and that's what we're going to do right now okay so I'm just going to take both of these bungee cords off of here and leave this bed roll lay bundled up right here now when we had this on remember that we had an envelope right here on this side accessibility to your equipment that you need an emergency's or that you need quickly is the most important key to putting one of these together like you saw we had immediate access to our ax we had immediate access to some type of rain gear without opening or undoing anything and that's very important because you don't want to have to take this thing apart to get to this stuff now the way we've got this set up if we just take the rope off of it for now and undo it just like this and set it aside now if we had to get to equipment quickly we still have this thing fairly well rolled up as you can see we peel this back and we have equipment that's immediately accessible to us very quickly we have our rope we have a roll right here this in our bandana that contains all of our tools including our utensils are mini saw our vise grips are four and once everything is in that and it's immediately accessible right at the opening or the onset of having to open up this bed roll then if I peel back a little further I have basically the majority of the contents are right here I've got my fire kick quick and ready it's stored in that bowl and it's ready to go I have my ditty bag right here that has all of my first-aid essentials in it and all the rest of that stuff that we talked about yesterday and then I have my cooking bowl now I've added this rag and this is basically a head rag very similar to the ones people wear after they apply this pomade to their hair but it is almost made out of like stocking material and it's stretchy so I can use this for a lot of things from filtration to over my head I can use this for a if I can use it further a type of camouflage I can use it for a lot of things and it doesn't weigh anything it's almost like stoking it doesn't weigh anything so it works really well and I just keeping the kit for that reason because it's a good multi-purpose item and it costs like a dollar fifty at the Dollar General Store so all of that stuff goes right inside here the only thing that we do not have in this kit from our original kit we do not have our buck saw blade and we do not have our backpack and we do not have our flashlight those could the flashlight could be put in here easy enough I just decided that wasn't really that necessary and I took it out of a light travel kit like this because I'm not carrying a pack the buck saw blade is too long to fit in this rule however we do have the small saw if we need an emergency saw and we have our axe so we're not hurting ourselves any by leaving the saw leaving the buck saw back so this is basically the contents of our bedroll and our kit of everything we had now a couple of additions I'm making to this first-aid kit I want to talk to you about some of this comes from viewer suggestions some of it is things that I had already thought about putting in here obviously in later videos so we can show development of this kit a DOS bar a magnesium Flint striking Bartley picked up from Walmart for $6 is now in our kit for fire starting the other things that I wanted to add to it today or a piece of three foot by three foot aluminum foil we can put that right in the bottom it's not going to take up any more room really and we can use that for a covering of our dish if we want to to give us a cover we can use it inside to cook it if we're cooking some kind of a muffin mix of some kind so we don't have to dirty up our bowl we can cook it right inside there make a little oven to the first-aid kit

I want to add a female pad which is very good for bandage and absorbency it's also good fire starting material and emergency and there's two large safety pins attached to that and a tampon which is very good for sealing puncture type wounds or bullet holes and I will put those inside this ditty bag or first-aid kit bag that we have here with our other essentials in it and then I'll put all that back inside here and again it all fits right inside of this bowl so we set those aside the only other things that we really have in this kit we roll it out all we have left in here at the moment is our shelter tarp in our blanket now the reason the blanket is on the outside and I've had this discussion in the past with people when we did things like this in my early videos I carried a bedroll a lot and one of the things that you need to understand is number one these tarps are pretty noisy okay and because of that you don't want that when you're traveling through the woods like trying to hunt the other thing is if you put these down on the snow they're very slippery so you don't want that the other thing is your your tarp is going to tear up easier as far as abrasion goes then your will blanket so if you're catching this thing on snags and sticks and bark of trees and things like that you're going to tear this up faster then you're going to tear up your wool blanket if you get a hole in this wool blanket it's still going to be warm if you get a hold of this tarp it's not going to be waterproof anymore so I always put my tarp on the inside now okay so the things that I would probably want to add to this bed roll before we discuss the rest of this very quickly within the next few days especially if I was going to use this in the woods which we are going to try to do I would try to add a fifteen dollar emergency reversible space blanket to this number one for a moisture barrier on the ground and number two because reflective side will Fleck heat back up on us when we are sleeping the second thing I would want to add to this would probably be a ruby or a military poncho liner and those are very good lightweight items that will give you more insulation to go with your wool blanket now somebody asked me yesterday about using a Wu B for outerwear like I showed this wool blanket yesterday and the reason I say probably not to do that is number one there may I have a sylheti 'real and they are stuffed with a synthetic baffling on the inside for insulation and if you get them around fire and they get sparks on them you'll burn holes straight through them just in seconds you don't want to get them around too many snags and things either or they will catch on things so you're better off

put the wool blanket probably for the outerwear but the woobie is a very good piece of equipment to have in here to use as extra insulation and covering so I'll probably want to put those two items in here over the next couple of days and add that to our sleep system now when you get down toward the bottom of this bed roll and remember we're starting from the top I mean justice Cameron just a little bit here when you get toward the end of this bed roll and I don't have any in here right now but this is the point where you would put your clothing would be down to bottom because that's the last thing you'll probably need to access so you'll put you know if you have a spare pair of socks that you're going to wear that night and maybe a spare synthetic long-sleeve shirt that you're going to wear underneath as a moisture barrier those are the things that you're going to put down on the bottom of this and the only thing we did to put this together really was we folded our blanket basically in half and then we folded it over one-third to one-third over the top of our tarp just like this then we put our equipment we peeled it back when we put our equipment on the inside so our clothing would be down at the bottom of this to get to at the end of the day but up here is where we want the stuff that we need to get to immediately all right we've got our cotton cord and we can take this white cord and go buy a dollar box or it died and we can have this green in the washing machine in about 10 minutes so just because it's white doesn't mean have to stay that way you'll just have to go through the hassle of undoing it to make it another color so I've put those items up at the front and then of course my cook kit and fire kit because fire is always important to have right away and those things go at the top of the kit we're pretty close to the top I put them about two-thirds of the way up because I'm going to fold the top over anyway in the end and I leave my bag in my axe out last because those are going to be items that I want to get to from the outside in the envelope that I create so then what I do is I fold that back over just like this

so it's basically folding in thirds a little bit less than thirds because you've got a flap right here and that flap doesn't really do anything doesn't really matter you can fold it all the way in thirds if you want to this just makes it a little bit longer package not going to hurt anything but you don't really want it too wide either because then you get it too wide your stuff is going to flop around on the inside and then of course we've got our bungee straps underneath so the first thing I usually do is I'll fold up just a little bit of the bottom here probably you know say that much and it'll do the same thing on the front side I'll fold that up and that's where my ties and tie offs are at that we sewed on yesterday and I'll leave that just like that I'll fold that right to the edge of my equipment then I'll just take my rope I'll fold it completely in half want to just this camera just a little bit more for you guys so you can see this back us up just a shade here there we go all right now I've got my two is folded up I've got my equipment at the top the bottom is where I'm going to put my rope and all I'm going to do is fold it in half and leave a loop out here and what I usually do with that is I usually tuck it right in my fold right there just like that then I'll begin to roll this up just like this now right here is my equipment I'm going to fold right up on top of that and right here is where my envelope gets formed so I'll tuck the two items I may need to get to you fast in that envelope and roll that over and then I'll use my bungee cords to cinch it down and the way I'll do that is I'll just hook that bungee cord in and pull it back against itself just like this pull it down tight bring it all the way around back to the other side where I had the loop and hook it right in there in opposite directions just like that then I'll do the same thing on the bottom side you can see that my axe head is now hung up on this bungee cord so it's not going to slip and fall out if I'm running or if I get in a hurry and I'll do the same thing down here and I want my bungee cords in the same spot right here by my pot because I know that's going to be on the outside of my pack and I'll come around with that and hook it in to the other loop the opposite direction just like I did the top okay so once I've got my bedroll rolled up here I've got my axe on one side my ten full of equipment on the other side and either one of these sides can go against my back it doesn't matter because they're flat but here's what my buddies are so this is what I want against my back now I'm just going to take these two ropes pulled them over put them through this loop and time off that whatever length I think is going to be appropriate to where this is a backpack okay so we've got our backpack back on now and let's talk about our water container real quick because we didn't talk about that what we do with our water container was we just tied a loop on it right there and we just put it on our belt we just tied it around the outside on the top and we just hung it right off our belt so it's easily there for access if we need it while we're walking we don't need to connect out or put that in our pack we can hang that right on the side of our body okay this has been segment number seven in our discount bushcraft kit series one thing that I wanted to talk about real fast at the end of this video I had a few questions about a couple different things that I wanted to answer on this video the first one was a guy asked me you know what's the advantage of having that wooden handle axe over the metal axe

well the metal handle axe I know from past experience that those metal handles are actually tubes it's a metal tube and they do have in tendency to break over time especially if you're putting them through some really rough use I would much rather have a hickory handle that I can replace if I have to in the woods with a Hickory handle or ocaña or whatever I can manufacture if that handle hop is a break you're not going to hurt the head any so it just gives me that advantage in the future the other question I had was when it comes to wool blankets number one how can you tell if you have a 7030 wool blanket seventy percent wool 30% polyester fiber or whether you have a 1% wool blanket the only thing I can tell you with that it's very hard to tell by feel or touch you almost have to take some scrapings off that blankets and Buzz and burn it and if it seems to melt then you know you've got some polyester in there if it just burns then you know you've got full wool fibers in there and that's probably the easiest way to tell the other question I had about the wool blankets was why is will itch versus wool that doesn't it and the answer to that is is that wool fibers have a diameter size micron size they call it and the thicker the microns are the thicker diameter it is the more scratchy it is that's why I like merino wool and things like that that come from Australia that are very fine fibrous wools I think those are less than anything they recommend less than 10 microns if I remember right or less than seven for garment quality so the wool blinks to get a lot of times from overseas like the Italian won't like it well it's a little bit at first because there's thicker wool fibers in it it's not made with this high grade of wool but if you wash that in in like a cold water solution in your washing machine and dry it and you can do that 100% wool blankets just dry it on cool air and you put some fabric softener in that water a lot of fabric softener in that water when you wash it it takes a lot of that itch away and there are chemicals that you can add the wool to take the itch away as well that you can buy online so I just want to answer a couple of those questions real fast at the end of this video my name is Dave Canterbury from the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me for the seventh in our series of discount bushcraft kit we'll be back with another video soon we'll see you later guys