Maul a good Learning Project

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 guys I'm Dave Canterbury with the pack on your school and what I thought we'd do this morning is go ahead and make our mall which is going to be our first wooden tool and to make that mall we're going to use two tools we're going to use our draw knife and we're going to use our carving axe so what I'm doing now is I'm just making sure that both of my tools are nice and sharp and I'm using a puck to do that with a multi grit puck and you can buy these several places on the internet this one I think came from beaver toothed handle company for $12 brand-new you can get a Lansky multi grip puck or you can even get grants for the Brooks and wetterling's make a puck as well that's got like a rubberized case around it as you can carry but this is a very convenient item to carry doesn't take up a lot of room and it's good for a fast own on your edge tools like your axes and you draw knives and things like that you're going to need a few sharpening implements to go along with your base kit I didn't include sharpening stones and things like that in the base kit yesterday but it's pretty much a given just like your knife for survival and woodsmanship you're going to need to keep it sharp you're going to have to have sharpening tools to do that with for this type stuff the base tool kit that we talked about yesterday pretty much a file that's made for axes and some type of multi grip puck like this is enough other than your knife which you want to use a regular stone for of some kind or maybe a diamond plate or diamond rod to keep it nice and hone but sharpen implements are something that you're going to want to accumulate over time as well just like your base tool kit but I didn't include them yesterday in the base kit because I figured we talked about sharpening as we go as we're doing today and like I said a puck is a very good tool for just putting another fine edge real quick honing that edge in before you use those tools a dull woodworking tool is like a dull knife it's pretty much a waste of your time you're going to have to work harder to get the same job done and you're not going to get near as good a results so just index that thing on the proper angle

and hold that thing up on a draw knife generally they're sharpened on one side is bevel the other side is flat I usually just take this stone across that to keep that nice and flat and then I'll come in on the other side and hone the edge down on my drawing line with your axe once you get a good sharp edge on there it's basically just a rotating motion like this on both bevels to keep that edge nice and Keeney once you've got that done you're ready to start on your project and we have a piece of black walnut here that is probably I don't know a little 18 inches long maybe and probably five inches four and a half inches in diameter first thing we want to do with this we want to remove the bark and to remove the bark we're going to use our draw knife and I tend to do this upside down on a short piece of wood like this and turn my draw knife around backwards so I really hold the draw knife like this and scrape down the bark what's this now what you're going to see is as we go through this you're going to see that this is really really wet Lee inside right here you can see that water and that's because we cut this yesterday and it's green wood so as soon as we cut this tree down it began to dry out but it's going to take it a few days to get good and dry and the wetter this wood is the easier it's going to be for us to carve as far as green woodworking goes okay so this is probably a good time for us to talk real quick about this tree we have the outer bark which is our protective layer here we have an inner bark which is this here and then we have the sapwood here okay different parts of the tree are used for different things in the case of this black walnut this bark and this inner bark can be used for things like natural dyes as well as medicinal value for the astringent sand tannins that are in this tree we want to get this thing down to where we have all of that off and we're left with nothing but the sapling harvesting this wood in the summertime the springtime will allow this bark to come off a whole lot easier because the tree is holding a lot of moisture this time of year because it's growing and that moisture in between that inner bark and that SAP wood right there makes it very easy for that bark to be removed so now you can see that we have a nice clean piece of wood to work with but it's soaking wet ok now there's a couple ways we can go about this the first one is to take pieces off all the way down like this and turn it into flats and then go round as we go you just way to do that is to start at the bottom and check the wood all the way up just like this and then when you get to where you want to go down all of them fiber is already broken and it makes it much easier take you on the way down the other way to go about this is to cut into it from this direction this way like this come in and cut the other direction like this into that cut and take out a wedge once you've taken that wedge out you can go behind that wedge and split down that piece of wood depending on the type of wood you're using in the grain it may run out on you like that did like I said even on a small project like this there's lots of things that we can learn one of the things that is really important if you're going to do a lot of this wood carving type stuff is to understand how to handle an axe like this without wearing yourself out and acts like this that has a heavy two and a half two pound head on it with a very small short handle will really wear your forearms and your wrists out very very quickly so what you have to learn to do is you have to learn to kind of throw the axe you're it's a motion like this you're not doing this because if you do this you're going to be wore out really quick you're kind of doing this you're kind of throwing the axe in as you go and then when you come down these chips you're just kind of using the axe weight use more elbow and more shoulder and less wrist and this thing will not wear you out near as quickly as it would otherwise if you've got your axe nice and sharp you should be able to do a lot of shaping with just the blade out axe just going around push cutting and get some really really fine shavings off of this thing so I'm just kind of going around this handle in circles now and knocking down high spots and working my way down the handle the reason that we started with this basic toolkit and didn't have a bunch of fancy extras in here for green woodworking is so that we could get used to the abilities or the capabilities of the tools that we have and a small carving axe like this if you have sharpened it correctly and you've got a good bevel on there you should be able to do a lot of fine carving and shaping work that you could otherwise do with a chisel or something like that you should be able to do even a knife you should be able to do with this axe and understanding the ins and outs of that and the importance of these tools and what they'll do for you is part of learning green woodworking so we started off with a very basic set of tools for a reason

because we want to learn all the ins and outs of those tools and what they'll do for us and even a simple project like this one like I said we'll teach you a ton about the capabilities of these tools the same thing that I'm doing right here I'm doing under an overhang at the school here but this could be done against a tree just as easy in the model so you can use your body and a tree device that would in and then use your axe to do finer carving just like this almost like a plane or spokeshave of sorts

you know people people nowadays seem to you want to progress to things faster than they need to you know I would challenge you to take an axe and make a tool like this cut it off the length what you saw go ahead and use the basic tools that you have strip the bark off of it with your draw knife make it fast and simple and then shape the entire tool after that with this hand axe learn to use it as an axe learn to use it as a shaping tool learn to use it as you know a spokeshave or a small chisel like I'm doing now - just find shape the material because you if your axe is very very sharp like it should be you should be able to get some pretty fine shavings with your axe just like that look at that curl right there you're actually be capable of doing that for you I've got a little heart would run off in my handle right here and that's okay that doesn't bother me a bit I was going to do is give the tool character I'm just trying to kind of smooth it all out with my axe here get down to where I've got a SAP wood meeting the heartwood on this side and again you know get used to the tools that you have and get used to using them get used to manipulating the material in your lap and on surfaces like this and using the tool for kind of unorthodox things like a shaving tool like I'm doing right now where I'm just doing fine shaping work with this axe you keep your tools nice and sharp take care of them this acts as an old axe to begin with like I said this thing came from a flea market or sale or something that was really really cheap but it was in pretty bad condition when I got it Irie profiled it I cleaned it up cleaned all the rust off of it and now you know here there's a fine fine tool it'll do anything I want to do if I can take a piece of wood and shape it to what I want with this single tool that's a valuable tool to me and my challenge would be to someone that's new to doing this stuff is to make this first tool this small using your axe using your hand axe because if you can do that and you can get it shaped the way you want it it will teach you a lot about a the grain of the wood and working with or against the grain for different things and to get a different result it will teach you the ways to use your axe differently than you might normally use an axe for chopping and you'll learn a lot about the wood that you're working and the tool that you're using if you force yourself to just take your time and do with what you have instead of adding tools to the kit try to figure out what you can do with what you've got and then when you get to a point where you can't do something like boring holes we're making mortises that's when you add tools for now to make the basic tools that we need we don't need to add anything else at this point to make a couple wooden tools that will help us along the way now that we have our mall fairly complete we can use it in combination with our fro for splitting off wood if we want to make something like a kook saw or casas we just split ourselves a blank for that very very quickly utilizing our pro well folks I'm Dave Canterbury with Pathfinder school one I appreciate you join mater for this video today I would encourage you to go out and find yourself a carving type hatchet something with a nice wide bit sharpen that thing up and restore it and figure out everything at that single tool will do for you before you move on to other tools that will help you in your bushcraft and survival as well as your green woodworking because you will find that this tool will do many many things in passable fashion that you might think about adding or carrying other tools to do

I appreciate your views I appreciate your support and thank you very thing to do for school for our family and for business for all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back to another video as soon as I can

thanks guys