Tie the Jam Knot - Make a Cozy Bed

Description

Learn to tie one of the most useful everyday knots there is. A simple knot that has tremendous binding power. Ideal for use with nylon cord like parachute cord. In demonstrating the knot we show it's use in making a very comfortable bed.

Video hosted by Wilderness Innovation http://wildernessinnovation.vcom

Tags: Knots,cord,survival training,camp,hunt,outdoors,knot skills

Video Transcription

well

take a little snooze here slipped out here last night

I like my nice little bed here with my survival blanket on there and my bed is see the bed the bed still with reeds for a mattress really nice and comfortable let me show you how more particularly today I want to show you how I tied this framework together you see a like a simple knot that that I use Jesus not all the time one of the most frequent nuts I use and I didn't learn it in Boy Scouts right so what I've done here I just tell you got it quickly about the shelter itself this the the lean-to part is a punch RPS SL and this is a new or new wwl woodland clear coat very very lightweight almost as lightweight as SIL nylon and I'm just using that I've got it strung up because the mutts can be a poncho a hammock retire for whatever so I got it strung up to be kind of my lean-to deal and and then I've made this bed out of these logs I'm not going too deep that will be a whole separate video really detailing the detail and all that but I just kind of show you I put together and just kind of the primary not that I used to quickly put this together using very little cord all right my my pillow is just made out of the broken ends of the reed bundled up and then you don't really have to but I don't usually do this but using reeds these are just to kind of make turning space together too tight all right so the way the way this this mattress basically works is it's the idea is to get you up off the ground so you're not in the cold in the wit especially to in the wintertime or colder weather and if you have a fire out front the heat can penetrate underneath here so you get a little bit of a radiant heat kind of coming back to there and if there's a ton of different things that also has to do with that but the idea is to get you a bed to make your sleep now camping just as comfortable as if you were at home in your own bed and so we have just a framework it can be any kind of sticks whatever you got laying around whatever you can find if I have two bottom ones one on each side a little bit wider than shoulder-width the foot end can actually be pretty narrow I just left it wide but and then you have a cross piece here at the head and you have another cross piece here behind your knees you don't really need one on the end but I put one there anyway just to stabilize it because your feet don't really need much meaning down there and anyway so the design is is this gives you give right here where you need it between your head and your knees whatever happens beyond your knees doesn't really matter you just want to be able to have a little bit of give right in here so so everything here is just laid out and then we lash it together and let me just show you how we lash this together this whole frame is lashed together with a jam nut okay so I'm just using I'm just using scraps of cord here and that's kind of ideal for this little situation but one of the one of the advantages of using a jam knot is we've got a bunch of stuff to put together a jam nut requires probably the least of about any knot to live something together and you can lash it together very very strongly what we do the very first thing is we just tie a little overhand knot in the end just like that and that is what you call a stop or nut because the other night we put on here if we don't have that on there it will run right off the end of the cord so we have to have a stopper knot on there an overhand works good you could use a figure eight or something if you wanted to now the next thing we do is we just go around the pieces that we're going to secure so here I have a bottom the bottom bottom stretcher and a top stretcher and then in between there is our cross piece here this one it goes behind my knees so I do is bring my cord up around there and I just go around this in here I just go around there and then just to kind of I'm going to hold it up just to show you it's no lose track of things so what we did here is we just tied up basically just hide a slipknot and we have a stopper knot in the end to keep the knot from slipping off then you just pull that up okay so what happens here now in order to be able to in order to be able to tight to lock this knot once we just that knot itself we can pull down pretty strongly but the knot will actually not hold in place very long if we don't lock it so since we're going around something curved here we won't be able to get the rope back underneath there to tie a half hitch to to lock that so what we do is what we do is I just take this in here just tuck it underneath there like that just pull on it you notice how that not there just turned over so what we've done here if you look at it is this knot here is acting like a pulley so when I when I pull on this pulling through there which what that does is that doubles the amount of force I can apply to this so it allows me if I really got on something really tight I could fight use the stick or something I practically break this parachute cord I could tighten it so tight so now all I'm going to do is just keep pulling in on that I tighten that in so just as tight as it can be then I bring my end of the cord through there and then just pull that up tight like that with a half hitch and that's all I got to do that knot will stay just fine like that I can just take a knife and cut that off if I want to and that's how you tie the jam nut okay we're going to quickly go through this again so I tie an overhand knot a stop or not in the end and I go around my logs or whatever I've got here and then I take the end that I put the stopper knot in and go on a guide around this piece and I come up through the loop I just made so I made a slip knot okay now I can tighten it just a little bit but before I get too far I want to make sure I pull that in through there so I have an end that I can use to lock this thing with now notice when I pull on this this knot here will start it'll start running up closer and closer tighter a pullet and now see it run right tight against there give it one last tug I could actually even put my foot up on here pull on this I could just I could torque the heck out of this thing but I don't really need to for this and and then all I do and now just draw that down snap with a half hitch I can cut that off right there I'm good to go

with a jamb nut now I could use this framework if I wanted to as a like the top section as I could come set it up so i use it as a stretcher if I left the ends a little bit long so some two people could carry somebody out but that's a whole nother video but anyway there's the jamb not very simple very easy to do it's one of the most frequent knots I use and I've only used them only used about you know maybe a couple feet of cord to tie this whereas if I use the lashing or something I might use six or eight or ten feet of cord to tie this off so it saves a lot of cordage and it's very very effective you