A Simple Trick Everyone Who Carries a Hatchet Should Know! Axe, Survival, Bushcraft, Woodworking

so what are you going to think to yourself and i say this axe is going to split this log probably not going to happen right this log's just too big and it's not going to work my axe isn't large enough it's not really a splitting type axe or mall so how are we going to do that what if we had to split out even a larger log something like this what if we had to split that out we don't have metal wedges and um we just need that split out we need to make boards or we want to make something we don't have our bigger ax it's definitely doable it's not ideal but it's doable i'm going to show you right now so just to put this into context i think it's important um because there's going to be a couple questions asked about this number one why would you have to split bigger logs out well maybe you're working on a project or you realize when you backpacked into camp that you didn't want to carry that big axe and then you want to make a bench and you think it would be cool or whatever the reason or in my case recently i was out on a scout and i got to an area that i want to make a fire and there was a ton of cut up wood because they were logging an area but they were large logs that i just could not split my small ax and i thought ah this stuff would be great to stockpile so how can i split it out and that's what we're going to look at all right so step one we're just going to make some gluts aka wooden wedges now that our gluts are made we're going to go ahead and we're going to examine the wood we're going to check if there is any checks or cracks in the wood that we can utilize to expose its weakness in this case nothing okay absolutely nothing the other thing that we also want to look at for this technique is the wood itself so i am using a smaller piece here for a demo but if i was using something larger like i had at the beginning of the video i want to make sure that it's not all gnarly and grainy and twisted we want to try to get nice straight grain wood for this so depending what you find okay out in the woods or something that you pre-cut up and realize that you didn't bring your bigger axe in the split um you're going to have to maybe avoid this process but if you have nice straight green wood you're going to be good to go so step one is that we are going to take our axe and we're going to start to baton it across the face of this piece of wood this is going to create a score line that we are going to utilize here in a little bit now one thing not to be afraid is to go back and forth a few times on this score line that is going to be somewhat important we need to make a good deep score line in order to get those wooden wedges started okay so you can see i made my score line which is nice and deep at this point once i knew it was deep enough and i felt that it was good enough i'm going to come to the edge of the piece of wood and i'm going to start to hammer my axe in there what that's going to do is that's going to start to open up that score line a little bit more okay this is the process now that you have to watch and listen what's happening so as i begin to drive my axe down into the side you're going to hear it start to open up this line a little bit more all right as these checks start to open up what we're going to do is we're going to start to put our wooden wedge in place now this is going to take a little bit of patience and a little bit of muscle to get that thing started okay so what i did now was i found another log out here in the woods and i place this on top so this bottom log is acting like an anvil just because the ground's muddy so as i put a lot of force on here it's going to drive the bigger log down in the ground if we can avoid that all the better take my baton and start to work this big wooden glut down inside okay as i do that i'm also going to work my ax in a little bit further this should start to open up my score line more and more at this point though i realized everything's starting to get jammed up a little bit so i'm going to remove my axe and then play place my next glut where my axe was now i'm going to come to the other side of the log again same as this side and i'm going to start to work my ax bit in [Music] so and just like that that piece of wood is split out perfectly just where i would want it so honestly who would have thought that little trapper's hatchet was going to split out a big log like that definitely doable and definitely a skill you're going to want for your toolbox maybe you'll never use it maybe you'll use it all the time but either way now you have it thanks to cool cracker so i hope everybody enjoyed this video again add it to your toolbox you'll be good to go also check us out at coldcrackerbushcraft.com for all our school merchandise blog all that good stuff and until next video stay in the woods with your little hatchet doing all your big work you

Channel: Coalcracker Bushcraft

Views: 2,037,605

Rating: 4.9122863 out of 5

Keywords: Coalcracker Bushcraft, Dan Wowak, Appalachian Bushman School, Camping, Hiking, Survival, Bushcraft, Survival Skills, Bushcraft Skills, outdoorlifestyle, survivalinstructor

Id: DZ6NKPIezsA

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 10 2020