Basic Knife Handling and Bush Craft Notches Part 1

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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 guys I'm Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school what we're going to do today is we're going to have a little chat about knife safety knife handling different cuts that you can make with your knife and then we're going to talk about different notching techniques to make wooden implements out in nature I've had a lot of questions as of late about safe handling of knives and notching of sticks and things like that we've reviewed a few different notches and some of the bushcraft series videos that we've done as of late but I wanted to consolidate them into one video number one so students coming to the basic class could review this video to see safe knife handling techniques and a few simple notches and as well as my instructors being able to understand what the standard should be for students completing notches at the basic class so stay with me and we'll get started ok guys so the knife that we're going to use in this video today is the more of bushcraft block the more of bushcraft block is by far one of my absolute favorite knives when it comes to just an all-around simple inexpensive bushcraft knife that will do just about everything you needed to do the only disadvantage to this knife that I can possibly see is the fact that it is not a complete full tang knife the scales are not bolted to a solid piece of metal that goes all the way through the knife it's some more of a rat tail tang the tang comes about 3/4 of the way through the handle and the handles molded around that and then it has a rubber molded piece on top of that which gives you a very good grip in wet weather which is another reason I like this it has a nice thumb guard right here a finger guard I should say right here I believe that's called the choil that keeps you from sliding up onto the blade and because it's rubber it also gives you a good safe handling of the knife like I said in wet weather it has about a five-inch blade with a scandinavian grind it has a really good 90-degree edge on the back of it for removing material from your ferrocerium rod so that you can't start fires much easier you never want to use your blade to scrape a ferrocerium rod you always want to use the spine of your knife so that spine needs to have a good 90 degree grind on it so that's nice and sharp for that purpose and this one does so it meets most of the criteria that I really like about a knife for bushcrafting or survival it also is a high carbon steel blade so it strike sparks very

well if you're just hitting it with a hard rock like a piece of Flint shirt or quartz it will throw sparks to ignite things like charred material or charred cloth so all around this is one of the best knives money can buy for Less tannerite at 50 bucks in my opinion has a nice plastic dangler style sheet that's a lightweight knife it's not going to weigh you down you can wear it around your neck if you wanted to or you could put it as your main carry knife or just stick it in your pack for a secondary but as far as carving and fine cutting and things like that it's hard to beat this knife so we're going to use the MOR bushcraft black today the other tool that we're going to use today is a baton and a baton is just a piece of wood I like them to be made out of hardwood and I like them to be at least an inch and a half in diameter and about as long as my forearm or a little bit longer if I put that thing in my hand I want and I want that thing to be about the size of my forearm or just a little bit longer so that I can get a little bit of reach with it but I've got control I'm not trying to swing something big and bulky I don't want something the size of a baseball bat unless I'm trying to beat on the back of an axe or something to split wood I'm just beat awning my knife it doesn't have to be a complicated affair just any green or nice hard piece of dry hardwood will work just fine okay so those are the two tools that we're going to use now notching can be made a lot easier if you have a saw you don't always have that option so we're going to talk about knives and batana in this video today so let's talk first about a couple different knife safety tips that I teach my students at the basic class one of them is called the blood circle what that means is when I pull my knife out to use it for anything I want to check the circle around me at least 180 degrees where that knife could go and make sure that there's no one in reach of that knife that's called your blood circle you want to make sure that no one is in reach of that knife if you're carving and you were to slip and that knife goes out you're not going to cut someone else so you want to check that area really really good 360 is even better 270 but 180 is a minimum that you should be checking to make sure nobody's around before you use your knife the second thing I want to talk about is called the triangle of death the triangle of death is the area basically between your legs your groin and foe of the main femoral arteries that are in your legs you don't want to carve in that triangle of death so you never want that knife down between your legs or it could slip off and cut open a thigh and cut a femoral artery and obviously you don't want that thing in your crotch or your growing anywhere so you stay out of that triangle of death and you always carve off to the side or way out well out in front depending on what you're doing and we'll talk about that we talked about knife holds a knife handling in just a minute okay so let's talk for a minute about how we hold our knife and that's important believe it or not there are people out there that don't understand how to properly hold a knife it depends on what you're doing with that knife how you're going to hold it the most common and safe grip is to hold the knife in your hand just like this with no fingers sticking out here nothing dangling out over here that you can cut your hand is wrapped in a fist around that knife that will give you the best force as far as carving goes but it will also give you the most safe handling now you may choose to turn that knife this way with the blade towards you if you're doing a chest lever grip and the chest lever grip basically involves just holding the knife still and pulling the material away from the knife like this and you're going to slip a little bit with that knife when you pull that material away but what's going to happen is you're pulling like this with the muscles in your back and not so much using your arms it's a very good way to control what you're doing with that knife especially if you're trying to carve something fine or if you're trying to remove a piece of hardwood that's a little bit stubborn it will keep you from pushing that knife off a long ways out in front of you by doing that chest lever type grip the other thing that you can do is you can put your thumb on the back of your knife pushing down on the spine and that's if you're doing some type of fine carving work where you were up in here and maybe you're pushing with the other thumb and you're pushing that knife up like this and you're trying to do fine carving work then you may want to have your thumb on the knife or you're pushing on the back of your thumb to get deep up in the spine most of the carving with that knife is going to be in an area from about right here to right here it's very rarely going to be out here unless you are trying to drive a hole or something like that which we'll talk about in a minute but most your carving will take place in about the first two-thirds of that blade so that's where you're going to be working with that you can still hold it just like this and you can push it with this thumb just as easy and keep everything out of the way so this is the safest grip this is a grip that some people use I prefer to have my students keep their hand wrapped around that knife at all times with no extremities hanging out anywhere that can be cut ok let's talk about the knee lever for a minute because I need lever grip is a very good grip to use if you are carving a point on the front of something like a stake you

okay so before we could talk about notching we need to take the bark off of this limb and I've chosen a green limb for this and I've actually chosen a piece of green hardwood for this and the reason I did that is because I see a lot of people on the internet using soft woods for carving and soft woods are great for carving but they don't have a lot of longevity sometimes and if I'm going to put any force or pressure on something that I'm carving a notch into I want it to be a piece of hardwood if I'm making a Roycroft pack frame or anything like that that I'm going to notch the wood at all or trap mechanism then I'm going to want that thing to be robust and I'm going to have to use hard wood obviously soft wood is easier to carve but hard wood takes a little bit more control and skill and it takes a sharper knife so we're going to use a piece of hard wood for this the first thing we have to do is we have to remove the bark so what we're going to do is we're going to get our knife in our main gripping fashion and we're going to get this on a surface that it's not going to slip and then we're going to start about halfway up and we're going to just get down and carve that bark off just like this

if you encounter or not the best thing that you can do is push under and pop a knot up that generally will get rid of the problem for you especially for small Mart okay now we've got this portion of our stick stripped we would do the other side as well if we're going to do a lot with this stick but for now we'll just leave the one side stripped okay let's talk real quick about one more thing while we're carving this bark off of our branch that we're going to use we can't turn our knife upside down and use the same grip and we can use that sharp edge I was telling you about on the spine of our knife to smooth this up really good and you can see those fine shavings but that makes and that will help to smooth that stick out remove all of the inner bark and get yourself down to the heartwood basically or the sapwood excuse me and give you a nice smooth looking finished product when you're done this technique is great if you are scraping things like fat wood to try to affect fire with your ferrocerium rod you can take the back of your knife especially one with a good 90-degree spine like this bushcraft Block and get those same fine shavings that you see coming off here you can get the same thing on a piece of fat wood and you can see what I have here now this was a piece of dryer wood something like that would make a fantastic bird nest so if I can get those type shavings off a piece of tulip poplar that's bare and had the bark removed the outer bark now I've got bird nest material and just use the spine of your knife for that you