Toggles The Woodsmans Friend

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

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 dave calibrate the pathfinder school what I want to do today was I wanted to add another video in our basic bushcraft series I want to talk about the multi use or multi functionality of the toggle very easy to make right off the landscape as long as you have some cordage you can use toggles for a lot of things we're going to cover five six seven different things that you can use toggles for around your camp area right now show you how to tie them on the end of a line and make the best use of them stay with us guy okay so let's start off with something real simple basically a toggle is just a stick that you have tied onto the end of a line somehow and you're going to use that toggle as a levering point against something else most of the time so let's just take this belt for instance we'll start off with this kusa this cooks ax which is just a drinking cup basically has a toggle that's tied on the end of a line that can just be tucked up inside of this belt and I have yet to lose it I don't need to wrap it around anything and hasn't come out yet it's snagging it up on a few things I'm never lost it so that's a good use for a talker now the belt itself is also held on by a toggle basically I just have a rope belt that has a loop on one end and a toggle tightens the other end and the toggle becomes a fastening point for that belt very quick simple way and very simple explanation and visual of how toggles work now we're going to talk about some other uses for them around camp as well okay so here we have a toggle that's tied on the end of a piece of rope and this piece of rope is only about four feet long and I keep this piece of rope with this toggle in it to use for a lot of things but I can wrap this thing around in a clove hitch type constrictor knot on the tree and I can hang my gear off of that toggle to keep it off the ground I don't have to look for something sticking out of the tree on the pound nails in a tree or anything else I can create my own attachment point and I can hang anything off of this that the weight of this rope and this toggle will take including my backpack to keep it the ground if I want to or to be able to access it more easy without having to bend over so this is another simple use for a toggle this works really good for a tarp if I were going to attach my tarp to this tree and I didn't want to tie a bunch of fancy knots I can just wrap this rope around the tree slip this toggle through my tie out point and this becomes the corner of my tarp for something like a plot point shelter so it works really good for that that's why this piece of rope with this toggle in it is pretty handy to keep around because I can use it for a lot of things again everything is very simple to get undone I don't like that the untie knots which is one of the reasons I like to use toggle so well because my eyes aren't real good and looking at small diameter cords and things like Bank line makes it difficult for me if I'm not wearing glasses I don't have a magnifying glass out to see those small knots to try to untie them so anytime I can get away with not tying a knot in something or making a self loosening knot I'm going to do it alright so let's talk real quick about our roy croft packing that we use sometimes this is our Roycroft pack frame it has toggles tied in seven places on the frame and aside teach my students to make them in our pioneering class they put seven toggles on here and these are used to lash your gear to the frame they give you something simple that you can wrap the rope around and pull against to tighten up your load and then when you get to the end you just put a jam knot in there of some kind we'll talk about that in just a minute too because a lot of the toggles that I use on things that are going to be under stress I use a jam type knot these are just an overhand slip knot basically like a larks head knot you can see all I've done is folded that over made a loop in there and put that inside the toggle has a notch in it without the catch into just like that and that self tightens as you pull I'm going to show you how to make this if you have a single string that you want to use you can use this in conjunction with what's called a jam knot and put a jam knot in that large set and it won't come undone either and I use that a lot especially with tarps and things so let's talk about that next okay so let's talk about real quick using toggles as tie outs on our tie out loops for our tarp

see I have a toggle on the end of this line and all I have to do is pass that toggle through the loop there's no untying of knots to get this out I don't have to try to fiddle with something that I've doubled over in there and pull down on and this puts less pressure directly in one spot by having this toggle because it spreads that surface area out across that tie out really good to use these if you're using grommets as well then we can just tie that at the tree I'll show you that once I stretch that thing out tied up to a tree once you see what that looks like when it's pull tight probably went out of camera view right there we'll see yeah just out of camera view okay so there it is piece of cake when we get that out I like I just pull that toggle through the loop I don't have to mess around with untying anything okay let's talk about toggles around the fire okay if I use a large toggle like this one I can hang my bucket over the fire with that toggle now obviously I don't want to get ridiculous and have flames this high when I've got a piece of cordage here but we've had flames pretty high on these type toggles in a lot of our camps and never burned it one of these pieces of cordage off this cordage is pretty resilient to flame again you don't want a bonfire but if you've got flames up here you're not going to hurt it a bit so let's talk about how to tie this toggle on real quick before we go any further because it's a pretty good sized example what I've done here is to get this off you know I said I don't like untying knots all I have to do is pick it real quick with my hand I don't have to have my glasses on it's going to loosen up all I have is a straight piece of cordage here that I've tied a knot in the end of what I did was I took that cordage and I doubled it over I took a bite in the cordage basically just like this and I doubled that over against itself to make a loop right here and when I put this toggle in here that becomes what's called a larks head knot and when I pull that knot tight it's going to jam this other not inside the larks

just like that you see how this knot jams up against that loop going over that larks head I can adjust it where I need to on the toggle and the tighter I pull it the harder it's going to jam and it's not going to come undone but it's very easy to get undone if you need to and very easy to adjust if you need to and I use this 99.9 percent of the time to hang my implements over the fire like buckets or cook sets okay I have a roll of cordage bank line in my belt pouch that I keep in there all the time and there's probably I don't know maybe five feet something like that a thirty six bank line with a small toggle is pointed on both ends and it is off-center in here and you can move that anywhere you want to okay doesn't matter but I keep it on there almost all the time and I do that so that I have it in my belt pouch that ready access and I use this for a lot of things but one thing I'm going to show you real quick I use it for is to get my water bottles out of the fire if I have a water bottle in direct fire so I've got my canteen sitting here and we'll say that we have a fire here and my water is boiling or it's done I can take this simple piece of cordage and I can drop this toggle into the mouth and pick it up off the fire when I set it down because I've got a tied off-center I should be able to pull it sideways and it comes straight out and that's important to understand that you need to tie that off-center to make that happen but it's a very simple process to drop it down in there and pick it up and it's a very simple process to pull it out of there just by pulling sideways it'll come out of there okay okay the other thing I use this for quite frequently in my belt pouch is I use this for cleaning my gun my 12-gauge because I can drop this through the barrel attach a cleaning rag to the other end soaked in tallow fat warm water and ashes whatever the case may be I'm using to clean my weapon with the bore of my shotgun with and I can grab this toggle and pull it through kind of like a makeshift bore snake it also gives me an emergency trapping device because toggles make great trap triggers and as what we're going to talk about next okay so let's talk about a simple way

use a toggle as a trap trigger what we need is we need a loop in this loop I just tied an overhand knot and went into the line ran the other end through it just like this okay I tied an overhand knot in that side and just put my other line through it I just tied a small knot on that end to keep them coming unraveled if I needed to then I need to decide how big I want this loop and once I've decided how big I want this loop to be then I'm going to put my toggle in so I'm just going to take a bite in that line just like this and I'm going to fold that bite down so that I have two loops and I'm going to put this toggle through the two loops to form that larks head once I've done that I can take either one of these other lines and tying overhead knot in it close to an overhand knot excuse me close to the toggle itself and if I sense that up close to the knot when I start pulling on the other line it's going to jam now no matter how much I pull on this thing it's not coming undone so that gives me my toggle in the line so I've got a loop that's going to catch my animal I have a toggle that's going to be my trigger for the trap and then I have the line is going off to the distance here that's going to go to my trap engin whatever is going to spring my trap whether that's a sapling whether that's a dead falling log that I'm using as a counterbalance and the V of a tree whatever the case may be the only other thing I need to effectively use this toggle as a trap trigger is I really need to tee a fork because what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this in the fork and I'm going to hold it in there with the bait stick by friction so that when it releases it comes up I'll show you that on the ground over here okay so the way this works is you've got your toggle here that's pushed into your Y you have a bait stick that goes across in your loop is laid on top of that bait stick and that bait stick is dead ended on the other side - just a dead stick of some kind driven into the ground you'll bait this whether it's by shoving a whole frog on there whether it's by gluing some type of nuts with pine pitch or something like that to it but whatever it is you want the animal have to work at it to get it so that when he goes in here to work out it it pulls loose and the spring pulls him up off the ground you