Tulip Poplar Knife Sheath

Description

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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

afternoon folks I'm Dave Canterbury with sufferer Alliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do today is we would take a piece of tulip poplar bark and create a knife sheath for this Mora fishing knife from the 70s it's got a jagged spine on it for scaling fish other than that it's pretty much like a classic number one type profile with a plastic sheet that we're gonna make a bark sheet for that we're going to use the same traditional manner that you would use to make a birch bark sheath but we're going to use the materials available to us in the Eastern woodlands which is tulip poplar bark so the first thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that doesn't bark has been soaked and I've had this soaking overnight but it's going to dry out very very quickly so I need to get the inner bark separated from the outer bark for the pieces that I'm going to use and then we can soak that inner bark further in water to keep it hydrated well while we're working with this sheath so let's talk about that first we need to figure out how long we need this and we need it in theory if we're just going to cover the blade four times the length of our blade if we're going to have a belt loop we need to add about four inches for that so if our blade is four inches long then we're gonna need 16 and if four more is 20 inches of length here we've got way more than now we've got a 32 inch piece to work with here so we're gonna slide this out and keeping this wet is important because once it starts to dry it we didn't want to crack on you you want to find the area that's the freest of knots to work with and that 24 inches and then you want to cut your first piece a little bit wider than your knife blade is on both sides so we're just going to take a steel yardstick here and basically lay it on the material a little bit wider than our knife blade and we can kind of guesstimate it that doesn't have to be absolutely perfect what we do want is we want a nice even cut down this bark though so we're gonna kind I bought this we had a couple people to hold this down it would be even better we're gonna take our knife out kind of stay in this slot where there's table is if we can come down through here and cut that bar that's best we can keeping this as even as we can all the way down and release that piece okay now we only need 24 inches of this piece but we're also going to need another piece for lacings maybe even two pieces for lacings so I'm gonna go ahead while this bark is still wet and I'm gonna cut a couple pieces off for lasing material as well so I'm gonna cut something that's fairly wide then I can split my lacings out of when the time comes and I'm gonna do the same same basic principle here of cutting through the outer bark on this side just like this

now with a wide piece of bark is difficult to do a true ribbing process and try to you get rid of the outer bark so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my knife against a flat stop here and remove the outer bark with my knife this way a little lot of time just like this to get down to that inner bark and I'm going to rip this down with my knife fairly thin and then I'll just come up to another spot here try to hold my knife still at the angle and pull for the piece toward me just like this a little lot of time it's important that this sheath be fairly uniform in thickness when we're done this piece of bark so I'm kind of concentrating and looking at this thing up and down this thickness to make sure that they're pretty close as I go we're not gonna need this area down here it's got the knot in it I already know that from measuring it okay should get us about down to where we need to be now we can soak this start to fold it and figure out exactly what we need for the length and we can do some trimming then we can work on our lacing and now we have trimmed us down to where we've got inner bark only the Lorcan the theory okay so now I'm going to take the piece that I'm using for lacing and I'm going to cut it down to about half of the width that I really wanted to be in the end

and again I should be able to bend that over to separate it easy enough just like that my knife didn't cut all the way through just like that and the best thing for me to do now is to soak the piece that I'm not using so we'll put it back over here and then we'll start working with this piece now we need to take this outer bark off and be left with inner bark so the best way for us to do that is to rip it down so we're going to get it started with our knife as senators we can get it and then we'll start the ribbing process by hand I'm gonna try to show you this from this side so what we want to do is we want to use one side of this the inner bark sides gonna be our lacing we're going to split down even further but we've got to get this outer bark off so as we're pulling this you're going to get one side that becomes thicker than the other as it begins to run off and you're going to want to put more pressure to bend to that side to pull it back to the center so you can see I'm torquing on this side and that's to keep that thing ribbing to the center because it's wanting to run off toward the inner bark side so to keep that inner bark in one piece and keep this or keep the outer bark in one piece I should say and I've got a knot right there to contend with I don't know that I can get around that but I'm trying

and I'm really just trying to rib another piece off of there to get that split the way I want to but I'm putting the most pressure on the thicker side and then just kind of riding down with my thumb on the other side you can see we got past that not an area right there and we have a fairly even thickness of material here that will ribbing off and that's what we're looking for and then we can split that down further into lacings once we get the outer bark ribbed off of this and the reason I'm not doing this with my knife is because this will give me a better result in the end I'm more even thickness then I could get by ripping it off with my knife like I did on the sheath portion where it's not as critical with smaller pieces like this and I'm trying to make lacings out of I want them to be pretty uniform in thickness or if I've got a couple small humps and bumps in the knife sheath itself it's not going to matter just going to wrap it with the lacings but I don't want lacings becoming weak because they're thicker or thinner in certain areas so we'll just continue to do this all the way down through here until we've got this ribbed off into one solid piece and then we'll split it down at least one more time this direction with our knife probably to be able to make two laces out of this now I've actually decided that after folding this up and looking at it this bark is still teeth thick so I'm basically going to rip off one more thickness of inner bark off this whole sheath to make it just that much more pliable and you can see it's not hard to do that it's just time consuming I think one pretty good shape with that we want to make sure of is that we only have one slot the knife goes into so everything else is an m2 the inside with our belt loop at the top before we started wrapping everything all right so we basically have an M shape here going in and we just folded this one back on itself here and come over the top so there's one spot for a knife blade to sit in here when we're done just like that that's what we want we're finished now we're going to take these lace things we got cut and we're gonna rip them down one more time between the outer bark and there Barker between the inner two layers or multiple layers of inner bark I should say we already separated the outer bark now we're just working on making these thinner lacing so they'll be more pliable for us and again this is just something that takes time it's the same process pulling and putting more pressure on the thicker side to bring it back to Center okay there's a hundred ways you can lace this thing up but what I'm gonna do is I'm going to start with this thing pretty much centered as far as this lace goes and I'm going to come up and I'm going to cross it over on the outside and then I'm going to go to the back side here I'm going to take it inside this front in between here not inside the sheath portion which is here but in between here and I'm gonna put it inside there like that and the same thing on the other side just like this to bring those over and across at the top just like this get some torque on that thing then I'm going to come around the backside the sheath here do the exact same thing on this backside here and come up across here again and again through this backside of the sheath here which ties everything together just like this to get a cross on there oops so to come up there and through here I knew I was getting confused there some of us give myself a nice cross pattern here it's tighten everything down as tight as I can get it just like that so I've got two crossovers there now when I come over this side this time I'm gonna come around connect it together here connecting the whole sheath and then come back in between this top part right here and some of this is kind of tedious to do you might want to bodkin for some of this so you can open this stuff up because now I've got to get through this inner layer right here which is still outside the sheath and I need to get that to go all the way through there and opening that up with a bodkin would make that a lot easier so let me just grab a sharp stick and we'll shove it in there yeah I picked kind of a pithy stick here if that's okay I just need to open this up to be able to shove this all the way through it and figure out where that's at come in and drop this right on the side just like that pull that down nice and tight draw everything in we'll go around this side and come up and do exactly the same thing coming out this side so I'll have another cross on the back of the sheet the second cross on the back like we have on the front we have two crosses on the back lefty crosses and our finish will be right here on the top and this is where the pliability of this cordage really comes into play is right here to get this where you needed to be so you really need to have this as thin as you can get it so that you can get that ply ability to shove that in if that cord was just a little bit longer or I could grab the tail of it I'd be a lot happier coming off this other side just right there's the tail I could get ahold of that was something I'd be a lot happier but that's okay because that would allow me to grab that thing and really pull it tight remember that all of that stuff's gonna shrink up on you a little at a time as it dries out you're probably better off to leave this thing a little bit long in the beginning these tags so that you can't pull up any slack that you might get but as this thing dries it's also going to harden up on you're quite a bit so now let's take a look and see what we got here there we go

there's our knife sheath and it's got a belt loop on it we can put on our belt again it's a simple crossing pattern if we had more lacing we could have went in out and out and out and wrapped all the way around it would kind of look like this with every other one of these on the outside but there's nothing wrong with this for a quick makeshift sheath this thing will definitely hold its own there's no question about that and it's not going to go anywhere if I wanted to go around here this way right at the top and tuck this piece into here I could do that as well just to give myself a little finished look right there at the top and I may do that yet I may shove that thing right down inside there get my bodkin encounter push that inside there just like this this box really really tough so you don't have to worry too much about put too much stress on it tail tucked in there a little bit then I can push it in there the end of this bodkin and again you know a better metal bakken would have done a better job there for sure but that tightens that up really good gives me a more finished look on the outside of the sheath here as well

and the only end I'll get a tag tag I've got to trim off the end will be this one sticking out right here that gives me a pretty decent little knife sheath that was quick and dirty but it's definitely going to be a serviceable knife sheath made out of to a public park