Vines and Withies

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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 folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the path under school what I'd like to discuss this morning with you are natural vine courreges and with ease there are lots of materials in the wild that you can use for lashings and bindings so that you can't concern the resource of cordage that you're carrying and cordage is a very important aspect of our survivability both short-term and long-term because it allows us to do so many different things which is why it's one of the five seasons of survivability what I'd like to talk about today is a couple options that you can use in Eastern woodlands for lashings and bindings that are a natural type cordage material available to you one of them behind me here is a large stand of honeysuckle vine and honeysuckle vine is a good substitute for a lightweight cordage that you can use for lashings and bindings and I'm going to show you how to harvest it and how it works today stay with me okay so the first thing we need when we're harvesting this type cord is you're going to use it is we need a couple stripping sticks and stripping sticks are just two sticks that aren't too far dead but they're easy enough to harvest off dead fall from the ground that we're going to use to peel the outer material or the outer bark off of a vine material that we're going to use to make chords and in this case like I said it's going to be wild honeysuckle so I'm just scraping the bark the outer bark off of this and I want these two sticks to be able to sit fairly close together like this with not much gap in them when they're squeezed together with my hand so if we just reach in here and grab one of these it's hanging and start pulling on it it's growing up a tree now the higher it gets and the whittier it gets the less good it's going to do you but I've got a good piece of cordage here probably 10 feet long now I'm just going to take these two sticks and put it between there and push it with my thumb and you can see it peeling that bark off and if the cordage breaks on you when you're peeling it then that piece wasn't that part of it wasn't any good you're going to have some of this especially in the winter time that's going to dry out and it's not going to be as good as the other stuff but you can see how that rips that out or okay they're broke right there so that gives me a piece that I know I pull through now it's a good there's one arm span and almost too so I've got probably seven feet of cordage right there that should be pretty good and I can just continue to come through here and harvest at I can take that and wrap it in my hand just like this and stuff it in my pocket just wrap it inside of itself just like this make myself a roll of cordage stuff that in my pocket and harvest some more so we'll stick that down in here and we'll get some more of it we'll grab one more piece off of here usually where they're growing together they usually be three or four of them growing in the same spot where it might be the one we just had there's one right there look that one went very good to dry on a raise you'll have to pick through them to get the ones that are good and you get to the point where you kind of recognize a good one when you see it but they grow in huge clumps of line to hear right there let's pull this one out there

this one's got involved all around it too and these bigger vines are fantastic tinder sources with this bark that comes off of them and shreds we use this a lot at the Pathfinder school for a tender resource now you can see where this vines growing off the larger vine so we'll snap that off of there and then we'll pull that runner down out of the tree and where it is and starts to grow into a bunch of smaller offshoots like this with the leaves on it that's generally the part that's going to be woody enough that you're not going to win it anymore so just back up to a node and snap it off then just go back to your two sticks that you had and repeat the process again of pulling off that bark

this stuff is great basket make this material you need something that's nice and bendy but got some maps to it this is a bigger piece this piece is probably eight inch in diameter this would make great material for making a basket with and we've got a good piece of it here that's probably Oh 12 feet long that didn't break when we were stripping it off and chances are if it doesn't break me strip but it's probably going to be okay now with cordage like this you're not going to want to tie overhand knots in it necessarily not going to be strong enough to take that kind of a not but if you're wrapping it around things and pulling close or pulling a clove hitch in it or a constrictor knot or something like that it will work fine for that no problem so we've got another good-sized piece right there and again if I were making baskets and things like that traps that were basket type traps for fishing and crayfish this stuff is all excellent for that and using this stuff when it's wet is best but you can also soak it for a period of time in lye water or ash water you've got from your fire and that will help soften it up as well it's a little bit stiff right now but it will still work for its intended purpose so we got two pretty good links of cords there in no time at all now that we've harvested about 20 foot of this honeysuckle vine for cordage got in our pocket let's go see if we can find a couple with these real quick and then we'll take this stuff out into the woods will actually bind a couple things together and I'll show you how ok so now let's talk about where these furman a witty is basically just a hardwood long fiber piece of sapling material that's been processed down to expose the fibers and those fibers are used as cordage and it's called a witty now you can use a branch off of a small sapling like this hickory sapling here and remember we talked about during our tree identification series how you can usually tell a hickory because the way the branches kind of grow like this out of the tree they kind of hook up out of the tree and that's what these are doing so I

this is a sapling hickory it's got a nice small flexible branch right here on it on its lower end that's going to be a perfect woody there's two ways you can do this you can use small branches like this that are on a sapling or you can use a small sapling itself but what I prefer to do is so i don't have to cut sapling trees and kill off a whole tree as i prefer to use the branches and a branch like this will make a great witty so what we're going to do now is we're going to process this down there's a little bit of processing has to be done to this to make it a good with you but you've got something right here that's a foot and a half two foot long that you're going to get fibers out of that you can tie and bind dangling ok so let's talk real quick about processing these widdy's now get this one here then have any branches on it we use it first what you're going to want to do with this you can twist this by hand if you wanted to but the easy way to do it is just take your axe get yourself a good stump and just start smashing that thing down just like this separating the fibers

once you do that now you've got something that is flexible that you can use to tie you don't really need to separate the bark or anything from this if you don't want you to use it you can pull it off you want to to make it look pretty if that's what you want to do but you don't have to do that you can use this thing just like it is and you can tie a pretty good healthy wrap on this thing and you're not going to hurt it any i'll show you that as well here in just a second all right so we're going to start this out with a loose timber hitch here

just like that you can see I've already got that timber has pulled on there and I'm or I can yank on that hard as I want to and it's not breaking right now that's a good thing the witty side alright so we've got our timber hitch tied on here and now we're just going to go around this tree just like this just like we would any normal lashing and then we're going to come around here and put a frapping on here again this is probably a better team and job than a one-man job but we'll be able to get it fairly tight there we broke off at the end there all right so remember what I said about the constructor type knots on this thing you want to not use overhand knots so I basically just used two wraps to fraps and then a constrictor knot basically on the frapping itself I want to show you this other side with the vine as well that way you get a better view I think I was in the way most of the time of on the other side but now that I've got one side held up it'll be a lot easier for me to demonstrate this so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to get our timber hitch tied in here pull through it just like this all right and then going to do a couple wraps let you down tight slip down the tree on me a little bit there once I've got a couple wraps on this thing then the rest of it i'm going to use fraps tighten it down and with the fraps what you want to do on your last time around here last two times around us remember I said you want to use constrictor type knots with this stuff you don't want to use any kind of an overhand knot because you're going to break it that way but if you use simple constrictor knots like that which is basically just a half hitch that I've rolled in there twice you're going to get a pretty sturdy thing there that you can hang quite a bit of weight off of and it's not going to come down on you alright so once you've wrapped that vine around there and put that constrictor style not in there you got something that's going to be pretty strong it's not going anywhere you can put quite a bit of weight on this thing come over here and kind of lean on a little bit you can put quite a bit of weight on this and you're not going to knock it down or break it okay so let's talk about places where this vine type cordage really shines let's say I want to take a piece of red bud like this bend it back against itself because I'm going to make a cooking surface i'm going to put cross pieces in here so that i can cook something on top of this like a roaster alright i can take this cordage and it works really really well for that just come in here and get yourself a constricting type not to pull against on here just like this and come in and just wrap it tight and as long as you're not pulling on sharp edges and you're not tying some type of knot in here like an overhand knot as long as you're just doing a basic lashing type movement with this stuff it's going to work fantastic for you and it's going to be good and strong then I can just come back in and tuck that itself just like this a couple times there's once come back in and tuck it around again in another simple hi fetch and pull it through and again as long as I'm not forcing it to bend over double and I'm keeping it in a round state or on a round object it's going to work out perfect as a lashing okay so let's talk about this witty now I can split this off into three pieces and give myself three pieces of material to work with here that are all going to be nice and strong because remember this is Hickory again if I'm tying up small projects with this stuff that's where this stuff really shines but it'll work on the bigger stuff as well you're just going to have to have longer pieces or splice it together but a small piece like this that was just a branch on a sapling will give you three pieces of cordage that you can use for a quick Lasher a quick wrap on something i'll show you how that works right now okay so just to give you a quick idea of how strong is where these are this is all three of them together and I have not done anything to them and I'm pulling down on them with all my weight okay so let's look at something kind of simple with these widdy's here for a minute just to show you how strong they really are I've got a piece here that's probably I don't know footlong something like that I could break it down a little bit smaller fibers if I wanted to so we just got one piece here that's right out about a foot long now I got a fork in a straight stick here and if I'm going to make a stand for my rifle something like that deer gun season I want to sit on the ground next to a tree give myself a good study rest this is a really simple way to do that like you come up in here and all I have to do is put an overhand in here just like that I constrictors type overhand knot come around this other side yank down on this dude and I can yank that thing for all it's worth and it's not coming undone do the same thing one more time here on the back side again those constrict your style knots are the key to this kind of stuff and the tighter i pull that the tiger is going to get and it's not going anywhere now I got a good steady rest right there that's good and stable it's not going to slip or slide it's not going to go anywhere and it ain't coming undone one thing about this gun rest and I've used a gun rest very similar to this a lot of times when I'm deer hunting especially with like a slug gun or something where I want to get a good steady hold or if I'm turkey hunting I want to get a good steady hold on my 12 gauge this works really really well and you can make this thing a week before you're going to hunt you just leave it where you plan on sitting next to a tree or whatever the case may be and come back and employ it but if you just tie it to one side of the fork and one side of the stick when you open it up and drop that stick between the fork it tightens up the lashing you can put that thing in the ground whatever height you want to like I said you can pound on this thing and you're not going to hurt that lashing a bit that lashings not coming undone alright so that makes a really good ready rest for a hunting scenario and it doesn't take any cordage to make it as long as you have a witty okay guys well that was kind of a quick video on a couple different types of ready resources of natural cordage in the Eastern woodlands those are the ones that I use most frequently there are lots of other vines and things that you can use and other species of trees that you can use to make wigs out of but I wanted to throw a couple little tidbits and tricks into this video like the folded over roasting cooker that you can make very easily the ready rest for your rifle or shotgun or your muzzle loader that you can make very easily and then how to lash up a crossmember between two trees very quick and simple with natural cordage as well I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school we appreciate your views I appreciate your support I appreciate everything you do for our school for a family and for business for all of our sponsors and structures affiliates and friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys