Paracord Hammock

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

well folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school what I thought we would do today is make a paracord hammock and honestly I had to come out here and make an example of this for an upcoming class anyway so I just thought while I was doing it I might as well film it so it's more content to the channel and more knowledge out there I did a similar video at us many many years ago probably at least eight years ago maybe seven years ago that's probably still on my channel but this will become an updated situation now you're going to need a couple hundred feet of paracord to do this so weight is not a reason to do this because it's gonna be fairly heavy it's gonna weigh what two bundles of paracord would weigh the advantage of something like this is it's something that you can a skill that you can understand how to do so that you can make it with any type of strong cordage if you have access to it you don't have a way to get yourself up off the ground you can utilize this method to make yourself a hammock you can also use the same method to make any type of cargo netting or hold down netting up to and including traps and things like that that are made of net and this is a very simple netting method it's not the needle engaged woven method it's just a simple method of overhand knots so we've started at the top of our line with just a larks head type knot when we put a girth hitch over the line and pull two lines through it what's important to understand is how big this thing needs to be because that's gonna dictate how much paracord you use I chose to start with mine at a width up to my neck standing up here above the line that's gonna give me plenty of width in his hammock and I made my lines about almost half again that width understanding knots are going to take up part of that line as far as length goes I'm using four inch meshes and I used my knife to measure those meshes I'll show you that in a minute on the top of my line and I'm going to use four inch messages throughout so if I got a four inch mesh that means I have two times how many messages I need by four inches I want an 8-foot hammock so to get that 96 inches divided by four I had to have 24 I believe

was mesh's so I've got to have 24 spaces here in between everything that dictates how many down lines you have to put on your cross line so let's get a closer look at this real quick and then we'll begin so I made some of these block and some of these orange just so you could see better what I was doing when I tie the knots and a girth hitch is very simple all you're going to do is you're going to take your line and divide it at the halfway point come up here to that loop that you've created or that bite pull that bite over the line in one direction of the other and pull your lines through it now if I do it this way it's going to put the girth hitch on the wrong side because I'm trying to keep all of my knots uniform so if I pull it through this way it puts that girth hitch on this side of the line which matches everything else then I just took my knife blade because I'm trying to get a four inch mesh and my knife blade is four and a quarter so I just measured from the beginning of the blade to the center of the next knot and that gives me that four and a quarter all the way down or four all the way down considering the thickness of my cordage it's an approximate it's not perfect and then to measure my mesh is going down I'm just going to use four fingers to assume that's four inches so that when I start tying my knots I'll tie them right the base of four fingers and that'll give me a four inch mesh when I have a complete square I should have a four inch mesh there okay so as we start to make our meshes in our rope here we want to try to keep them the same size the easiest way to do that when you're making Nets the old-fashioned way is to use some type of gauge and we're going to use our fingers for a gauge and we really want this first row of meshes to be about two inches or as close to two inches as we could get it because our mesh that we make a full mesh this is a half mesh when we make our full mesh coming down here we want it to be four fingers or four inches so we have to make the first one two inches up here with a half mesh I hope that didn't confuse you now to make these meshes the same size we can stick our fingers in here to gauge everything but it's hard to do that and keep everything in the right place and then try to tie a knot so overhand knots while they're the easiest or not the best as far as keeping your message uniform what I find to be the best is just a reef knot or square knot so I go right over left and I can pull that mesh to the size I need it to match the one behind it and then left over right and then like you kind of dress things up to get those mush is exactly the same size before I crank down on it and I just use a series of brief knots going all the way across you can see I tied that one the opposite direction I tied this one I went left over right right over left in opposite directions here that's why your top lines here on that one your top lines here on that one you wanted to make it uniform you'd want to go the same way every time so we'll do it this one as well undo that one we'll try to get ourselves in a rhythm here I'm kind of dyslexic on top of all of that so I think the last time we went right left over right we're going to right over left on the first one pull our mesh to the right size and then go left over right and that is easy to adjust here and here before we tighten things down that's going to give us better uniformity of everything as we go we can stick our fingers in there to gauge things if it's a little bit tight that reef knot it's really easy to loosen up to pull it down just a little bit if you're using overhand knots in there that it's not going to be so easy just to undo that to adjust your mesh size then we go to the next one and again we'll start right over left pull it down get our mesh what about where we want it left over right pull it in kind of get our finger in there to gauge it tighten it down and we'll just keep going until we get all the half meshes across the top done first and we left the very first string hanging we'll come back to that and catch a half nest going down this side which will create a full mesh here we get to the third row okay when we get back and we've done all of the top meshes and remember those are two fingers are two inches because we're trying to make four inch mesh this first side mesh is going to have to be the full four inches so we're going to do the same knot we're gonna go right over left pull it down and then left over right and we're going to get that adjusted to the four inch mark so that when it lays it's leaning at the four inch mark just like this so we get four fingers not two fingers in here now when we come in here to tie this one this one's going to be a full four inches because you're going to have your first mess right there and it's going to pull out from here because you're going here next but now we're going to come here and we do the same thing right over left pull up remember we want four fingers in there and this will be the one that will gauge everything else against and it should be the same height as this one and then left over right snug it up check our distance make sure we're right make sure everything looks uniform and go to the next one right over left pull it up left over right again using our fingers for a gauge so we know if we have to loosen it up a little bit get everything uniform and tighten it up I really like the reef not for this because it's very easily adjusted if I don't think my mesh is exactly right I can always go back real easily and move it because until I put a lot of force on it it's easy enough to just manipulate it up or down to get where I want to be to get my message even okay I found the knot right here in my meshes that's not correct this is the time to go back and fix that I expect my row after I get it done

to see where I'm at to fix that I'm gonna have to untie a couple things I'll have to untie this mesh again with these square knots that makes it really easy to do that and I'll have to untie this mesh to fix that this knot right here is actually a slip knot it's not the correct non so I need to get that off in there so I'll just start right here and I'll go okay right over left pull my mouse up left over right pull it down tight that's a two-finger mesh tighten that up now I can come right back here again right over left get that a four-finger mesh left over right make sure I get four fingers in there tighten that dude up this one looks like it's a little bit tight needs to be loosened up just a shade and do that now coming here and retie this one and then I'll be back to the starting point again and all my knots will be nice and uniform and correct inspect your work as you go before you get too far every time I get a row in I go back and look at everything tighten up my nos make sure if they're all exactly the same in uniform you get one of those slip knots in there and you're going to have issues with your hammock okay so now we have our meshes done you can see it takes a lot of paracord to make it very small I'm not a mess I've got a couple measures they're a little bigger than I wanted to be but it's not going to be perfect because you're really doing it by hand without a real gauge and net needle it's okay you're gonna be laying on it's not that big of a thing but understand that I had two lengths of paracord from my chin to the ground doubled over and that's what I used to make these messages I'm still only made a hammock about three feet wide so if you want that thing watering any quite a bit more cords and I've got almost 200 feet of paracord invested in this now okay so what I did was I strung my line through here just to kind of pull things out tight I ran a bottom line just weaved it through these meshes but we really need to get this secured to the line so what we're gonna do is we're gonna untie this last mesh on each one of these and what we're going to do is we're going to use the same method that we've been tying except we're going to put one line behind our messler behind our static line and one line in front so what we did was we went from the right side to the left side come up and around the static line and then we went over the opposite side to tie that same reef knot except now we've tied that reef knot directly to this main line so now we've got a reef knot on this main line and all we're gonna do with that is we're going to come over and figure out which side the lines going toward and we're going to tie a security half hitch on both sides of that just like this and then we will cut those tails off and we'll burn them and that will secure this to this line so each one of these will be tied exactly like that well untie each one of these reef knots that's our last mesh we'll put one in front and one behind we'll go right to left over the top left to right to create the reef knot tie it directly to the line security high pitch in the direction the lines come from on each one of these just like this so those security half inches will be going kind of in opposite directions when you're done and that will still allow it to slide up and down but it'll give you the security of this not coming off it'll give it a static line like you have on the top with your head rope so we're gonna go through and tie all these then trim everything off and burn it over okay put a couple stretcher bars in here does this type a hand the quants to fold up on you pretty bad my buddy Dutch always told me that whenever hang a hammock any higher than willing to fall and I'm not willing to fall too far stuff here see that's not too shabby with the mesh being tight it feels pretty good on your body I would say if you have a sleeping pad or a wool blanket and you'd probably be smoothing it this thing a couple tweaks position wise and height wise yeah ain't nothing wrong with this this is smoothing it right here

all right so what we've done here is we have put a couple spreader bars in because these type of hammocks want to climb in on your really bad and close you up I'm gathering at the end loops and put a piece of one-inch web strapping through that just tubular webbing you can buy off Amazon and tied it up to the trees adjusted to Heights and things for the stretch of the paracord and climbed in this bad boy and I'll tell you what there's nothing wrong with this whatsoever you're talking about a project it takes some time to create no question about that but once you got it I mean it's a cargo net it's a hammock it's whatever you want it to be and it's pretty much permanent until the paracord rots would this be something that I would want to carry with me and sleep in every single night no now we're not getting by a commercial hammock but it's a good skill to understand so get skill to know it shows you an easy way to make Nets again with reef knots to set up overhand knots it's more adjustable that way and easier to get right that way to get your messes fairly even and it makes a dandy hammock if you want to go that route so I just thought I'd share that with you guys today and share that little project with you while I was down there working on it it is a project that they will complete in our Pioneer Scout class they'll have to make a hammock to get themselves up off the ground we change things around in our Pioneer Scout class depending on a seasonality right now it's really hot really muggy really wet lots of ticks lots of bugs lots of snakes so getting yourself off the self up off the ground is important there's a couple ways to do that you can build a raised bed or you can take the three or four hours it takes to weave a hammock carry that thing anywhere you want to go instead of building a raised bed every time of course you could carry that little handy dandy sleeve and make yourself a raised bed that way but again this doesn't require cutting any material but two small sticks to use for spreader bars and you're ready to rock and roll I appreciate your support I appreciate your views I thank you for thinking you for school for family and for business all our sponsors instructors affiliates and friends I hope you enjoyed this video on how to make a paracord hammock I'll be back to another one as soon as I can guys thanks