A Survival Item From Tree Bark? - The American Frontier

[Music] we're here in the woods today with a Danville wack wilderness skills instructor we're talking about cordage and the kind of resources that we'll find here in the woods tell me about cordage and what you're gonna use it for so cordage is very valuable anytime you're around camp everything from making bundles of gear to shelter setups to different cook systems so if we don't bring cordage with us or we only have a minimal amount of cordage how are we gonna use the resources around us to make cordage the cordage you have there is made from inner bark a tulip poplar tree it's a very good strong cordage so we can take a look at actually how you process that and then make the cordage let's go find some Tula bark to make in the cordage so right here we have some tulip poplar there's actually a small patch of it if you look to identify tulip poplar tree do you see how it looks almost like a cantaloupe and it has these chevron shapes up it and what this actually is is as the trees growing it wants to get up above the rest of the trees around it so it's dropping its branches off so that's an easy way to identify but we have this piece here that's already starting to die off and is gonna fall over anyway so we can very easily collect this bark in this situation all that we need to do is just pull it right off the tree see how these long strips come off right so we can take this back to camp and process this down and once we have this process down we can use this cordage for anything from hanging kettles to lashing tripods to making other cook systems even tying up any type of bundles of gear that we have so it is a good multi-purpose item to be able to make for things that we don't have out here so we want the inner part of bark not the outer part when you're correct correct so once you start to work with this a little bit you'll see that that outer bark starts to fall right off right so that outer bark is no good just that inner bark is all that we're looking for what other kinds of trees can we use basswood is another good choice so anything that has long fibrous inner bark is gonna work idly really well and this has this died off is green gonna work green well yes green will work just well if it's very dry it doesn't break down as easily to be able to get these long strands so you actually want to re-wet that and it gives it some more moisture in it and then you can work with it a little bit more so I imagine the green might be a little tougher to peel and something like this it's already yes if you can find this it's just saving energy and saving resources and we just go ahead with this take this back to camp and work it up okay so how do we turn this strip bark into cordage well it's a very simple process we can take this inner bark and you see it's already breaking down the numerous strands so we just pull these strands apart I can hand you some and I'll keep some myself now initially we want to start to twist this but we don't want to twist dead-center we want to offset it and that comes into play a little bit later on so one third of the way in yeah just one third away and just start to twist it over anything toward the long end of the short end any way you want because we're gonna be using both so you just start twisting and you're gonna twist this until the cordage itself the future cordage starts to turn on itself now to make this two-ply reverse wrap cordage we want to turn one of these strands in one single direction so in my case being right handed I'm turning this inward yeah my natural inclination is go to the opposite direction yes so okay so once you get them twisted and they look around like this at that point then you're gonna rotate both of them the opposite direction so I was twisting to the left we're gonna twist both of them to the right so is it kind of good that our bark has already sort of broken down because it's a purpose or an age has been sitting on the forest floor and it's wet does that help what's really gonna help because that's gonna give it more pliability mm-hmm if it was really dry you would want to wet it anyway so you're gonna get a pot of water and just dip it in and let it get some moisture in it and that's gonna allow us to twist this down - nice cordage so we need to splice in more pieces and this is always going to happen throughout your entire cordage making process because we can't get an infinity piece of inner bark so we could try at some point we're gonna run short so what we want to do is take the shorter end of the two and that's why we offset that at the beginning because now we have a shorter in the splice so if it is twisted we want to untwist it and make it nice and flat and lay our second new piece right up against that just like this and now we're gonna continue our same process so I'm gonna continue twisting and spinning so those two are just gonna get twisted they're gonna gather and then they're gonna get twisted together with the other side and that will splice that up price it in okay once you get going with it your muscle memory really kicks in and you just get a good rhythm with it and then you're just grabbing your new piece adding it in and going along with it now to vary your your thickness of your cordage that you're making you just vary the thickness of the material you're using so if any a thicker piece or a thinner piece depending on whatever project you're making it for ya would depend on how much of the inner bark you actually gather so if you ever tried doing it with three ply or yeah so there's different techniques you can use with three ply that are a little bit more advanced but majority time two ply is gonna be more than strong enough as you can tell right for anything that we would need from tripod lashings to bundling up any kind of animal pelts to tying out gear alright and this seems real flexible reliable and real stiff how does what's this like when it dries out so it does stiffen up when it dries out it's not extremely hard to the point that you can't still put knots and things and such as that in it so I always tell individuals if you use it let's say to set up a shelter and it starts to dry out you can always pour a little bit of water over that it will soften it back up and you can pull it back out right so what you've got a two or three foot long piece yes and how much do you think it'll weight how much weight you think they'll carry well I would say at least 3040 pounds probably well we got some on here that's maybe I don't know it's probably a little less than 20 okay so I think this will have no problem picking that up yeah nope no problem at all that's they're pretty amazing stuff yeah and if you think about if you're gonna use something like that to support water pod or you have to tie something off against a tree it's more than enough tensile strength to be able to do that and if you really wanted to you could just bundle two people alike you've got twice as much yeah the biggest thing you need to keep in mind is that your splices are gonna be weak points so you want to make sure that you splice enough together not just a little bit that way it's giving it more strength through that splice so you probably want to get as long as strip as you can to be twisting up yeah anyway so you got fewer splices exactly right and if you had three ply you'd have you could spread that splice strength out over a lot of your business - yeah amazing stuff so what's our other option for a simple cordage so there would be a lot of access to hides out on the frontier so if we think about any type of brain Tan buckskin we can use that by making a simple few cuts so what I have here is a piece of brain Tan buckskin and this would be something common not only used for leggings but moccasins so the men out there would have scraps of this at times it's they can also do other things with and we're going to talk about making cordage with this because it's a very viable option if initially you think about just cutting a thin strip that's good but you can see with this scrap piece we can only get short strips and we got to worry about knotting it so another technique that we can use is by setting it down on something I'm taking our knife and cutting a circle it doesn't have to be a perfect circle just something circular okay so once we have our circle piece cut we can set our scrap off to the side and then all that we would need to do now is just begin to cut this in a spiral fashion and that's gonna give us a lot more length than just cutting it in single strips okay so what we want to do is we want to just get in here and start with cutting a small strip open and then it's going to be easiest to hold this and then begin to cut around now depending on how thick we want our cordage depends on how thick we're gonna make this piece [Music] so you could see how much cordage we actually yeah I got from that was just that little circle yeah so you really can make a lot but go ahead and give that a really good pull and see if you can so it's like yeah you can really pull a man there's a lot of strength right what you think to be able to pull that and normally uh what happens with the breaks there is because my knife might have went off a little bit so yeah but but it doesn't have I mean it doesn't really have too much of a grain to it or anything so that even when you cut in a circle it's still gonna be really strong right so even tying out something like leggings like you have some rope there you can use it like that you'll be able to use it to tie up your bedroll you can use it to tie up with your tarp anything like that with what I suppose if you needed more strength you could braid it together you know do you can do a lot to get a really heavy stream and this this is brain ten you could do it with rawhide yes or other other rawhide was traditionally used for bow strings so you would cut the same process cut it the same way with the round circle right spiral and then you would stretch it out while it's wet and twist it and that would give you your bolster amazing strength there yes I mean that's a lot of strength I want to thank Dan for bringing these wonderful skills and techniques to us showing us how to make cordage in the in the back woods in when you don't have what you need and you need to make it this is so much fun and if you're interested in bushcrafting and learning these kinds of skills you need to check out his website cool cracker bushcraft and his YouTube channel I'll make sure to put a link down in the description section to both of those thank you so much Dan thanks [Music]

Channel: Townsends

Views: 275,019

Rating: 4.9758477 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, survival skills, survival knife, wilderness living, survival guide, survival gear, tree bark, wood working, how to, james townsend and son, jas. townsend and son, 18 century cooking, townsend and son, revolutionary war, survival food, jas townsend, historical cooking

Id: TBj3zWf_AkQ

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/meoka2368]

Townsends usually addresses things like cooking and general life in the 18th century US, but occasionally they have wilderness survival episodes like this one.

[u/Ferg_NZ]

This technique also works well with flaxes and spiky grass-like shoots. You can also make loops and twist multiple cordage pieces of cordage together to make thicker cordage. It doesn't take long but it usually best to use dry material.

[u/coffee-bean-]

Is it strong enough for a bow string?

[u/[deleted]]

What kinda broadband speeds can I get off this puppy?

[u/Kazimoon]

That's so neat!

[u/SHOCK_VALUE_USERNAME]

so what do you do if you want to make it longer? How do you weave in more?