How to Make Reverse Wrap Natural Cordage | Tulip Poplar Bark

Description

Krik of Black Owl Outdoors takes an in depth look into the craft of creating cordage with natural materials. He displays two variations of the reverse wrap technique while offering insight into his own trials and tribulations with making cordage. We are always eager to learn more, so if you have any experience with making cordage from natural materials, please share you tips, tricks and methods for doing so in the comments below.

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Tags: Black Owl Outdoors,Outdoor Skills,Outdoor Gear,Outdoor Films,Bushcraft,Woodcraft,Wilderness,Sustainable,Self-Sufficient,Nature,Backcountry,Camping,Hiking,Trekking,Self-Reliance,Bark,Liriodendron Tulipifera (Organism Classification),Poplar (Organism Classification),cordage,rope,string,how to,how to make cordage,natural material

Video Transcription

sup Turtles I wanted to make some cordage in the winter and potentially it's not the most ideal I guess season of the year in the winter to be gathering organics to make cordage but in my area it's possible so what I did put my stuff down to camp started searching around looking for I guess ideal bark to help me make this cordage and like I said maybe I said I'm going to be using the inner bark of the tulip tree Leo dendron tulip affair that's those present year round it'd be really brittle sometimes and really starting to decompose so there is an actual you know I guess condition of the material that I had to search for and today I was presented with that to most of the stuff I was finding was just too brittle or it was just you know the tree has been dead too long and stuff which is decomposing and it really wasn't ideal candidate for me to try to make cordage out of this now this is a guess a pretty quick way to process this bark by peeling just the innermost fibers off of the bark I've seen it done where we basically you just take the whole strip of bark off the tree soak it rub it against a tree pull off the outer grab our stuff like that but for for sake of getting really quick cordage in the winter it's a great resource so I kept searching found an ideal candidate took it off did some more investigating making sure I felt comfortable with the condition of the fibers and I have a little rap with me like I said I try to get the the finest fibres I could by separating from the outer bark and the st. its looks the exact same as if you watch Star one-match fire in the snow with no tools i took the bark pretty much the same exact way that's why this resource is so great this tulip tree and i use it a lot and you know sort of challenge myself in other ways to stop using this resource because it's so plentiful and it's super versatile on what you can do with that one single tree with that being said i want to pull off a little thinner stretch a thinner section excuse me off of this

longer length I got that's our problem is 6 feet maybe i have here basically thin it down because this would make you know actual probably like a rope potentially i'm going to use our reverse wrap quarters but i want to do now like I said I just want to get it down to a more manageable thickness section if you will this would be the outermost part of the section i took off and the really coarse gray bark was out here this is even the underside of that you can see there's literally layers to this there's almost three layers right here this layer wants to come off there's a second layer and then this really fine inner inner layer and i'm not sure if i should be using all of this or just this fine much finer inner bark so maybe i'll experiment that today maybe you won't see it on camera but i'll come back and show you towards the end but what i'm going to do for this portion of the video i want to take the finest layer of this inner bark and we'll see how that fares with making some cordage sometimes it's nice to work with nice long lengths like this because you're doing less splicing or I guess yeah you will do less splicing but it sort of be a pain to keep it all situated and neat without destroying any of it so I'm going to try to get some finer finer inner fibers get a nice length of that and I really like practicing and learning about these resources around me specifically and well in our videos you really don't hear me say much about survival I don't use that word it's a really charged word right now they're so don't really use it the reason why I like doing this stuff is is basically the way I view it is I'm an animal on this planet and what are the basic things I need as an animal to keep myself basically in good spirits and alive it comes down do you know shelter and and fire and water and you know learning the basics of keeping myself alive and warm and just happy happy to be alive so that's why I like practicing these things you know the knowledge I gained and also I just really be out in the forest and enjoy myself so now I want to do is I want to even thin this up a little bit more try to keep it consistent you want to try to keep it consistent as possible basically width so you're not really getting it too much of a thin spot in your mccord edge that you're going to make which I keep this as consistent as possible not always possible but you want to try try your best that's all you can ever ask okay figure out which one I want to use check that peace out just peace out put this one aside let's go for this piece a few rough spots in here Markstrom bar cuz I don't want that in there this is a little bit of rough you can see it stronger a coarser course your texture take that out so here's my length double over on itself give you an idea how much we can make off of this and clean up some of this end or fall summit last it's got a little bit too thin and before I start before I start wrapping this what I want to do is break this up a little bit and because right now it looks like just one piece but it's really made up of tons of little fibers not tons would have made a Bilal fiber so I'm going to do is I want to go through and break this up and pull these fibers apart is it will allow for a tighter sort of wrap on itself and make it stronger and like i said this wintertime is not the ideal time especially sitting out on the cold not being warm my hands being really dry and a lot of moisture in the air it's pretty dry as holders factors really don't make this the most ideal condition to do this in click my hands a little bit so I can actually get some grip on this now going a lot quicker and I'm just going to work my way this entire length and break this up you can see what I'm doing and how its opening up these fibers now as i'm sore just rolling it in my hands not being too rough with it because this I don't think it's the best condition to be making quarters but does whole sake of this video's finding basically workable usable cordage in the winter so that's what we're doing I'm going to do this the entire length and once i finish this will start the actual reverse trap process

see that plane look like for props on that puppy still trying to braid this and break it up a little bit better all right almost ready okay I'm feeling pretty confident with this so like the basic principles of making cordage kind of half it on itself and you want to stagger the lengths you kind of want to have it to a degree and then stagger the ends you know here are the ends I don't want to have them meet up I want them to stagger like this so that one if I do splice piece of material in here to add length to this that these ends don't meet up so the splices are in the same exact place which is a weak point once I establish that here's my starting point I'm just going to twist this and twist until it gets super tight and once the King can bind on itself and pop up there again

so back to what we were doing another might buy that same plane and flew back to back over us kind of slightly distracting it's sold out but ok so I'm twisting this twisting that's twisting this until I feel like that you know doesn't want to go anymore super tight and I put it together BAM now rolled on itself basically once I'm there I'm just going to do a couple do a couple wraps sort of normal reverse wrap as you would to get myself that little bit of starting point just something to hold on to so this method I'm going to use today it's supposed to be a little bit quicker and it is quicker actually if conditions dictate so what I want to do basically is make sure these strands are separated that they're not over top of each other here's my holding point so I'm pinching down here my left hand see my thumb doing the work down there and it helps sometimes I have your hands wet and basically I'm going to take this hold this and start rolling this one itself twisting that try to get as tight as I can

and as I roll before a little bit hold it push it back down roll hold okay and once I feel confident of a decent enough section we say it's about four inches maybe ten centimeters I'm going to hold that here put this back here and hold it with this hand keeping the tension on this be with my other strand and do the same thing second strands in my hand rolling that up now the tighter you do this and the more tension it's under and you keep it under tension as best you can the stronger in theory it should be see it's pretty good okay so once i get that had a good stopping point and roughly about the same length as the first 1i twisted i'm going to hold this again hold that tension pull my second one out now my right hand hold it spread these two out keep away from each other and keep them under tension and as i do this use my left hand now and then roll them together

keep it under tension say about nine centimeters already and do the same process make sure where I pick up where I swear I end it I want to make sure I give that little twist and make sure that's sitting good on itself as I have the tendency to let that get a little bit loose when I start that started again the second time so I just make sure you know give it a couple rolls to tighten those up pinch it and start the process over again and keep in mind that everything I do on camera takes so much longer because I'm explaining it I'm talking through it so just keep in mind if you're going to try this for yourself you can do this so much faster usually the one I'm doing it on camera once you get in a groove you're not talking trying to explain it this is still a nice activity to sit around with some friends do it in you know shoot the breeze if you will but you can get a nice groove and start making this stuff pretty quick again keep them under tension

just wasn't happy with the way the it was rolling on my leg and the condition material so I kind of just switched from that initial method I was showing you it's just more of the traditional I guess I don't even OTT take that back i'm not saying traditional but the method of just holding it sort of floating in the air twisting it away from you underneath alright i'm at one of my ends and yeah what the heck I'll splice in a little bit it's breaking up some of the additional length of the splice it feels a little bit coarser than the stuff i was using but see how it goes here's the tail end of that splice I was put in there definitely noticeably thicker right there of this place was but totally all there's to it for for putting this place in there basically just wrap it around it and continue going on and through the tension of twisting the fibers and then twisting again the wrap on the second strand it makes it a pretty strong pretty strong joinery if you will all right now nearly call this Good figure out some way to test the strength of this besides just trying to rip it apart like Hawk all right I'm calling that good there's my length it's about two feet roughly then take long at all let me figure out a way to the test of strength in yeah and we'll test it and try to break it okay so try to figure it out maybe one way to test this besides just trying to break it and first before I do that I want to cut off the little tail end of that splice I put in there just to make a little bit cleaner booboo bottom and wrap this around the tree put my weight on it lean back see what happens and see our broke not the strongest not the strongest I knew there were some weak spots in there that wasn't as tight splice hell does looks like it was down is down towards the beginning down towards the beginning we're broke now this was the superfine the finest I guess the inner strands of the of the bark that I took apart so maybe i'll come back and test that and try different sections of the bark now let me try this feels like a lot stronger section down here let me try to break this just the old-fashioned way so you stole that last strand break pretty darn easy and that was just the finest sort of section or layer of that bark i could get so i wasn't happy with that strength wise and it wasn't surprised that broke on me that easy but what you see here is probably i think it might be the outermost section of bark maybe one other layer definitely coarser definitely a much coarser feel than this original which I have right here original here and this is almost probably twice as thick so granted it should be that much stronger but you can just maybe see it too this is a much coarser because of the different against consistency of bark that I used for this as opposed to the original which broke super easy so we're going to do is finish this still a little bit more wrapping with this and then go try to break it again our initial idea for trying to break this was I was going to going to teach my brother the art of piano wire

secondary feel it's that much coarser than the original how it doesn't want to really make us easy not as the other one did but it is thicker so I guess I'll keep that in mind too okay any predictions so it's about twice as thick and coarser material so all my weight oh yeah alright well I didn't break it all let's try the old fashioned way ah much stronger cool well you know I'm pretty impressed d pretty impressed without strong you know this is considering i hope the video was helpful shed some light on a you know some of the resources that you see a lot in pennsylvania you like it give us a thumbs up to the next video it's creek black out later turtles