Shrink Pot 1

Description

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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

afternoon folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school and what I thought we'd do this afternoon is make a piece of treen we're called a shrink pot and treen we're basically is any wooden object that you would use to either hold food some type of a container for using around the table like a bowl or a cup or cooks ax or even a spoon spatula all of those things that are made from wood and used around food and food products are called train we're traditionally in a shrink pot is a piece of training where that was used prior to the development of white wood coopering and bucket making and the pretense of a shrink pot and I'll show you this a little bit closer in a minute is that you take a piece of branch and you hollow it out and it could be a larger piece than this I've just got about a three and a half inch piece of tulip poplar here and I made this one last week from the same branch and you take that branch and you hollow it completely out and once you hollow it out you create a plug for the bottom of it you cut a groove inside it and the plug that you create for that is made from a linear piece of wood not from a crosscut section and what you're doing is you're taking advantage of the shrinking of the wood which is why it's called a shrink pod to create a seal so what you do is you take this round piece of wood and you cut a groove inside of it and then you kind of pressure fit a plug that you cut from a linear piece of wood into that hole and as that shrinks in diameter it will create a tight fit and you will have a watertight container at that point if you've done things right so again you're making a container here and this one's made as you can see I've carved on it and burned it in there so salt so this one is made for salt it has a lid with a simple tab on it made from grain Tanna leather and we're going to recreate something very similar to this today from this piece of poplar here stay with me and I'll walk you through the process

drop my wood okay so the first thing we want to do is we want to cut this off and decide how long we're going to make this piece of train wear and we're going to leave ourselves some space here to split our bottom from and all of those types of things but I think we're going to make it about this big now it's important to understand that we have to have a tool long enough to get in here and hollow this out one of the things I really like about train where is that it can be made with very very simple tools this could be a bahco laplander instead of a fine toothed cutting style and I could use my knife for most of the hollowing work if I had to a hook knife works much better but a straightedge knife can do the hollowing especially in softer pieces of wood like this one now what I'm going to show you today is how to short cut a lot of this and use the tools that you would have if you had a green woodworking setup so what we're going to do with this is to make the hollowing job much faster is we're going to bore the center of this out with an auger bit and what I'll do is I'll bore it down till it's almost to the bottom and then I'll cut the bottom off again so it will have a hollow tube there then we'll work on hollowing it out and getting it thinner around the edges okay so I've went ahead and cut this thing off to length to the final length of our project and you can tell it to hold off Sun board that doesn't matter don't worry about that long as you don't get one wall so thin that it's too thin you're okay because you're going to have to hollow the whole thing out anyway to about one growth running of the thickness you can see the growth rings and I believe and the one growth ring of thickness is probably I don't know a little over an eighth of an inch right there in thickness I'd like to get the whole thing turned out to that believe it or not the thinner they are the thinner anything is whether it's a bowl of spoon to cook so you need that stuff the thinner it is the less chance that has of cracking once drying it seems counterintuitive but that's just the way it is so the best thing for us to do now is to find a hook knife or a straightedge knife if we don't have a hook like that we can get in there and bore that out with you see I'm wearing a leather apron here to do this with and I'm just going to strike scoop it out this fatter side and I could do this with a knife blade as well not work if I start catching too much green because the depth of this hook is too deep that's exactly what I'm going to do I'll get in with a knife blade so let's take a long thin knife like this more 120 right here and again I'm on my leg cutting to the outside here just like this

and I want to get too thin on this one side so I've got to be cognizant of that all the time because I had one side thinner than the other already that we are born off-center and once I get this opened up a little bit here in the front then I can get in there deeper with the hook knife and I can go ahead and get in there deeper with this knife as well but the hook knife will make it nice and clean in the end so we'll just get our rough or roughing out done here with a straight bladed knife it seems to be working really well and we're just watching our thickness all the time of where we're at staying on the outside here with a leather apron on turn this thing over work on the other side I'm kind of rolling the wood as I'm coming down on thicker parts like this I'm kind of rolling into it it feels like I'm going against the grain I'll just pull it the other way but you're going to get checks in there as you're going anyway cuz you're in such a tight turn right there you're going to get some checks in there don't worry about that and clean those out the spoon knife a minute here just stay to getting that meat off of this water part just like this not really pushing real hard with this knife shouldn't have to in Greenwood you got a good sharp knife you should get plenty of shaves I have to push too hard and you can look down inside and see where you're at get things tend out again you get down with a hook knife in a minute

just get as much of the roughing out as you can get now and once you've hollowed that out quite a bit and you can go back and forth I've got a little bit of thickness I still want to get off here but I'm going to go ahead and go inside here now with this hook knife let's start getting that middle portion hollowed out where there's two knife cuts meet in the middle area you get that meat out of there with a hook knife again if you didn't have a hook knife this could be done with a regular bladed knife it might take a little bit longer it may be a little less convenient but it can be done that way now you should be able to look down inside here and see what areas are thicker than others and just kind of going there and make micro adjustments until you get what you want but you want to leave yourself about an eighth of an inch or a growth ring of wall thickness there because we're going to put a groove in here next okay now that we've got the body of our shrink pot hollowed out we have to put a groove inside of it that we're going to snap fit a plug into basically it can shrink too and I've made a tool for that now if you don't have a tool for this you could just carve in there with your knife and cut a V slot inside there a V groove inside there to fit that plug into what I've done here is I've just taken an old bandsaw blade and while it was straight I sharpened one edge of it so it's more like a chisel sharpening and I just folded it over put it through a hole on a piece of scrap wood and wedged it in place and now I can take this and it gives me a measurement gauge already for depth because I've got this front end on here and I can come in and carve in a circle to get that groove that I want just like that okay when you get that Inlet cut in there just run your finger around your ink feel it you can feel the depth of it and it's it's in real good shape now you can see it in there a little bit of Hope on the camera again this tool just goes in there and it's got a depth stop here so it lines itself up and it's basically just a routing tool to cut that in and it's just a bent bandsaw blade like I said it's been sharpened on one side of the tool you