My Autumn Bushcraft & Wilderness Camping Kit, LK35 Mods and Weight

hey guys it's Mike here and welcome back to another video on the channel if you watch the last video me and monster acting overnight camp in the wilderness together and in that video I kind of just showed you the processes of which I go through when I'm out while camping and I don't really want to leave a trace and I want to bring in all my own equipment in this video what we're gonna do because I had so many questions about what kind of weight I'm running and the kind of changes I've made to my gear I'm gonna detail my kit how it's changed what I'm running this time of year how much it always and kind of talk about how it's gonna change I'm gonna need a new sleep system that goes down to at least minus twenty five Comfort so things do have to change a bit but I'll show you how that all works so let's get into it those of you who follow the channel you'll be really familiar with the elkay and there's a lot of people out there use it as I say all the time I'm not the first person to start using it I just started using it I really liked it it cost very little and it's just continued to be modified it's a great pack and as a frame pack it's very versatile as I've talked about the load bearing capability of it how it works and I get asked really why don't replace these shoulder straps oh that's because they don't bear any weight they just keep the pack close to my center of gravity and all the weight is on this lumbar belt here which sits just above your bum so all the weight when you're hiking is in is essentially just on the lower part of your body you feel the pain in your in your legs you feel the pain in your bum you know why you're hiking along with your going up and down hill and you can really hike like that for for a very long time and that's the beauty of a frame pack really but let's weigh it because it's gonna be interesting for me I brought my little thing here see what happens so there we go 16 16 kilos thirty-six pounds I wasn't far off I was kilo off actually that it's quite a lot of weight so looking at 16 kilos before we get into the pack obviously I carry some items on my person I dress accordingly for the weather but I always pack extra clothing usually t-shirt underwear and some bed socks as well as a bigger jacket to go over the top of myself given the kind of fluctuation in temperatures between day and night at the moment for my person I would usually carry my gloves and I normally clipped on my side when the packs in storage they hang on the d-ring at the front there my hat normally goes in the pack too and so does the gear I've got on my belt you've seen what I've worked worn on my belt kit before I have my knife which is a field master our WL 34 knife made by Li from OB custom knives hopefully is resting in peace and it's a lovely knife I really like it and it just goes like that underneath my clothing I have my ferrocerium rod on my belt as well one I made for myself and I obviously make these for other people too I have a a class thought I clip things on to sometimes my AK sheath goes on there my gloves but my gloves do you have a carabiner on as well allowing me to just clip those on a belt too and the other side I have a clip and that clip allows me to put my silky zubats on there so when I move away from camp I've got my sword on me I've got my tools on me I've got my gloves on me and sometimes I have my med kit on me which I'll show you in a bit but that's a pretty new addition so I haven't had that luxury just yet so down the side of the pack here I keep a silky Zubat nice saw done a saw video we've talked all about the kind of saws and what they do and and what the the blades are designed for I carry the zoo back at the moment and that's kind of just what I roll with if I get on quite well with it it cuts fast it cuts aggressively processes hard wood here that's frozen in the winds are nice and quick and I really like it you can see the other side here I've got my axe and this is a hultafors classic hunter but I mentioned a little while ago on Instagram I actually lengthened the handle on it to a 26 inch handle it was originally a twenty-one it required a new handle it had been used on bushcraft courses and led to students for many years it been quite badly abused and around here there was a lot of damage not the leather but underneath the leather in the wood grain where people have been over striking it a bit like this axe here you can kind of see the damage on there from over strikes man eventually you know water gets in the grain gets compromised and the head starts to wobble around a bit so I put a bigger handle on and I wanted a bigger handle because of where we live in Scandinavia in well I say the north a space it is but it's the lower part of the North South Lapland but in the winter the wood gets hard you know it's very frozen it's nice to have a bit of extra power behind that two pound head I mean it really does help but I've connected it to the pack in a quite an interesting way I'll give you a bit of a close-up of that at the top we have some thick straps that just go around a fork in the frame just to stop it coming out but at the bottom is really where it connects with an m8 bolt that goes through the aluminium frame and it's also what secures this add-on piece I've put here at the bottom too at the frame and you just have a knob that you twist on that's just threaded for m8 just as a brass insert in it you can buy these off eBay really cheap I just got that off some piece of junk I found in the garage basically but it works really well and it keeps the axe really secure the only downside is is when you take it off you have to immediately screw it back on a bit so you don't misplace it and ice it will just disappear but it's a nice little adaption and what I might do is just have a lanyard going to the knob so if I unscrew it and it falls lease it doesn't drop off on this side of my pack I have my cook kit there just behind there slipped in where this pockets been stitched on I have a mil bank bank and a mil bank bag is a type of water filter and it's really just used for taking the turbidity out of water so particles of soil for example it's very good for that but in the top here is my brew kit this is just tea powdered milk basically in tea bags sometimes I put a bit of tracker in there if I find it made some charity when I was i camping the other day with mom it's a real nice thing to have in the top as well you've got a spork titanium spork never really used anything else for years and also have a fish math spreader and the fish mouth spreader as good at it as it is for spreading a Pike's mouth open so it doesn't take your fingers off it's really good for hanging pots and you may have seen that on the video I usually use that to hang my Pathfinder paws over the fire put in here 1.3 liters of water roughly I think this is a really good wide mouth system the UM the Pathfinder developed I really like it this is built for me as a gift actually you can obviously then hang that over the fire and in the winter obviously do you get issues with it freezing but you know put it over a fire for a little bit of time and it's generally melts in the very bottom we've got the lid for this as well so this is usually what I cook my meals in usually cook oats rice pasta and then I mix that with other things that I just cook over the open flame as you've seen like meat and fish but I'll show you the food a little while but this isn't the original Pathfinder canteen this is one I picked up off ebay the reason being is the Pathfinder mug has kind of like some sharp things that stick out the back and it was really damaging the pouch and it was a bit of a tight fit so I got this and the handle sits much flatter against the mug and stops it damaging the pocket and it fits great too so that's my cooking system is very simple good for solo not so great for groups though that has to be said this side has my food but it's also the side that the Zubat sits on TV just a convenient place for the zoo but it has nothing to do with food really in here I carry a range of things I'll get everything and this is kind of what I carried the other day I was camping it's generally why I carry a lot of the time when I'm just out hiking there's one thing missing from this food setup here and that's normally trail mix which is nuts and berries and other dried fruits and the reason I carry that is because it's a really useful thing to mix with my breakfast and with soups and even with your dinner as well if you like that kind of thing in your dinner which I do sometimes and this is the thing that I try to do when I carry food is I want things that mix together say for example I carry some rice I carry a bit of sausage here this isn't the nicest sausage that I normally carry and I think normally eat this kind of thing at home it's more of something I carry when I'm camping because it has a lot of fat in it it gives you a lot of energy and it can essentially just be chopped and cooked over a fire then sliced and then added to something like rice or added to something like pasta or even polenta and you could even add it totes if you wanted to but I don't think it would go too well and that's kind of where the trail mix comes in so normally what I would say is this is two meals this rice here and put a line down here and in this liter bag you can carry about four servings of rice that's what I normally would do you can cut this in half and you can have that as one meal and that's the other meal or even divide it if you wanted smaller meals you could divide it into three which is probably a lot less greedy so you've got potentially three meals in that here you've got about well you've got about three breakfasts out of that small breakfasts two big breakfasts if you add trail mix to that you can pack it out even more you got a little bit of soup here I mean this is not something I carry very often these soups a Shaye's but I tend to drink tea most of the time if I'm honest with you but you know it's a little bit of it some calories and it's some flavor and it's surprising what that will do for morale around the fire corny big sore trail bars this is just the cheapest one I can find in Sweden they don't have many options here where I am in all solar but I carry about three of these and there's just something to snack on when let's say you just get a bit package peckish it's not quite time for dinner yet you can just eat one of these then carry on with preparing the fire and waiting and then you know get your dinner on tins of fish you can add fish to rice too or you can have this for lunch with some rice if you're going out in the wilderness if you're cutting down trees you're carrying them by hand and you're building a shelter food is gonna be something you want to consider and this probably will not be enough I can assure you if you're working extremely hard if you're in a really cold climate this foods not gonna be enough you know I add more food in in the winter but I have to really think about where you're getting your calories from and really buy the right food essentially if you want to carry extra you can just put it inside the pack and that's what I've normally done and I've not had a problem of space because the sleep system can come outside onto the top of the pack but obviously I put up a tarp I'm going out with equipment I'm camping in an area that I'm leaving and I'm not leaving a trace that's the way I like to do things so I don't need to carry masses of calories to support a big building operation that's gonna happen out in the wilderness and my pack works really well with my body with the weight and I can carry it very comfortably and not feel that way too much because of the frame system so I'd say it's energy efficient it's what I'm trying to say my system is for me represents energy efficiency so these two side pouches on the L K are not standard they're British military the type of pouch is I can't tell you I've tried to look for them so many times and the original sailor just doesn't have them in stock anymore but you can find a lot of pouches that you can stitch on to the LK or even add male on to it for example the other pouch is on the front there is the medical pouch and that's probably one of the most important pouches on the outside so in order to take a look at that we just take fronts of the paint shop and you'll be able to see that there's two straps that come off the top of the frame a knife stitch those on to the actual med kit and the reason being is that comes off the actual pack and then you connect these together with a carabiner and you swing that over your shoulder so you can carry a med kit away from the elkay if you need to the pouch is made by mill tack I think it's a really really nice little pouch actually and this had talked here was that she originally megan's it's just a a cheap one but the thing I liked about as it charges up so you don't change the batteries in it in the g5 obviously got all the charging gear so if I'm driving out to somewhere and I forgot to charge it you can charge in the car or charge it with solar if you're out for a long period of time fire in the pack up it's not a big med kit but it's it's a good little personal med kit for me you'll see a number of things in an Israeli compression bandage just here which is quite important and that's a really big bandage I think I'll handle up to one point which is quite a lot of blood but I got another big med kit in the Jeep as well and one in the house and the one in the Jeep has a torniquet in there and that's something I want to get for this too because I have done my first stage for work and various things and they trained us on using torna case and it's something I think you really need out here this is just some basic hygiene stuff so we've got a toothbrush we've got some tick removal stuff auctioning you don't get many ticks up here in the north some tweezers and also a mirror as well I think a mirror is quite underrated I mean you could use it for signaling of course but you know if you damage your eye you've got an injury on the face it's nice to be able to test have a look at it and remove something if you've got a thorn in there and be able to see it I've got some clamps as to normally I use that for fishing but I just have it in there because it's a quite a useful thing I've got some fabric scissors have a repair kit for my therm-a-rest bag it's just the label in here just some smaller bandages for lighter work some toilet roll in the form of a pack of tissues I do like to use a bit of moss as well I'd be honest to be not everyone's cup of tea Snow's good as well we've got some soothe burn gel no I was really not thinking this was any good but a friend of mine put it on to me and I've used the other sachet my god does it make a difference really nice we've got three little two actually two containers here some zip locks have got some pills things like apps print things if you have an allergic reaction we've also got some band-aids or plasters as you call them back home and some other type of types of Gauls as well that you can use for various I mean this is what gets you ears the most to be honest with you so that's just my personal med kit there could be other things added to that like a torniquet there may be some other - equipment like I have actually have something else in there that I use for hygiene sake which I'll show you in a bit but it's just a very basic little med kit but this really just leaves us - what's inside of the backpack know what I had the other day at the top was my winter jacket this is just a really warm winter jacket but I actually picked this up brand-new a secondhand shop for 11 pounds it's actually a snowboarding jacket it's made by did Rick since that's what it's called D ID Rick sans it's just a snowboarding jacket basically but for me it's essentially all I've got right now and underneath that I'd wear something like this base layer and in fact even over this is ye lay some sort of down GLA just to provide extra insulation because when it's like minus 20 even what I've got on now including this it's nowhere near enough unless you've got a heat source like a decent fire going but other than that I have my fishing rods just here I've shown you that the other day it's just a basic telescopic fishing rod that I use for for general fishing it's quite a stiff rod actually it's really good for pike it's not so good for small fish I also have like an Ambu Garcia rod the two-part rod which is much nicer than this to fish with but this is great you know for the backpack because you can just pack it away and it's really light inside the pack I have my sleeping bag this is a laminar flame sleep system in an aunt Lieb waterproof 12 litre compression sack and that compresses it down very nicely you don't want to leave it like that or you will destroy the insulation in the bag I've just packed it up like that today for you guys to bring out my gear but this goes down comfortably for me to about minus 1 I start to really feel the cold below that and that's why I need a new sleep system in here I have another piece of my hygiene ashemark scarf I use this to wash my face I use it to wash behind my head I've even used it to wash my body in the summer when I've gone for swimming in lakes so again you know actually quite a valuable thing other things I've gotten there my reel my rod Abu Garcia real I don't always carry my fishing gear on me it really depends what I'm doing but given their Lakes everywhere here in Sweden and 99% of the time I'm camping by a lake or a river because I want water for washing my stuff for hygiene for drinking for cooking you know I take my rod with me because you know you get a permit for the year it covers a massive area and it isn't much to buy a little bit more for another permit to do something else with saying that will obviously do fish carry my fishing gear on me and and this is really what I carry and we'll take a look at that now the rods nothing special so I'm not going to show you that it's just a telescopic rod and you've seen it in the last video and in the video before that I was fishing for pike but inside here if I do go out fishing I just carry a few bits and pieces with me I have some lures in here most of it is for various types of common species you get here in Sweden so you know you have a big Pike ler there it's a floating layer you have a deep diving ler there another good that's good for pike but I've also caught perch on this too you have some other fish here I mean this is really good for for pike as well I've also called perch on it this is quite good for pike and perch as well you know you catch a lot of the same species on different things but this is actually quite good for trout as well as is that there which is nice for trait and this is just a general spinner is useful for pike perch small fish you can catch tre arctic char on this as well even grayling you know eating you can catch grayling on these sort of lures for this lure here is for the reeds and it's got some some prawns some antennae on the bottom stops are getting caught up in the reeds I use that a lot actually and I've caught Pike and perch on that too you've also got other things in here like Pike wire and spare monofilament line and hooks and sinkers for the ice fishing kit in the winter when you go out ice fishing but you also have to carry a huge auger for that as well which which obviously adds a lot of weight to the kit but these are just lures you know fishing with live bait in Sweden is illegal you do fish with maggots in when you're ice fishing in the winter but I carried quite a lot I mean I don't need to carry all this stuff and it isn't really bushcraft but it's it's an avenue to catching fish and when you do catch them and you eat them it's really good to answer your food while you're camping so that's my fishing gear anyway that's generally I just stick with that setup I've got a lot more lures and things and another rod like a two-part rod which is much nicer to fish with but um 90% of the time when I go into the wilderness I have this kit on me because it serves all purposes for me it's the jack of all trades master of none and I can do a bit of everything it's not too much left in the pack now just here we've got some spare clothes this is spare socks spare underwear and the spare t-shirt a synthetic t-shirt and this is really important to carry stuff like this obviously hygiene something you really don't see enough of my finds when I'm out camping with people who just never really see people do much with hygiene with brushing teeth with washing faces and washing all other sorts of parts of your body and changing clothes so having something like this really makes a difference and bad socks I think these are Norwegian socks and they're synthetic I do you prefer wool myself but they're lines they're extremely warm I find what I go to bed having cold feet is the last thing you want when you're all right camping where you will not sleep properly say in the winter months no autumn now early spring things are cool still there carrying a set of bad socks makes a difference but yeah if you start sweating a lot in the winter and you start yet you'll get extremely cold you will free badly so it does help to carry some clothes you can change and dry off and do various other things the last thing you've got now the last main thing anyway is essentially my my bivi bag which is a Dutch army bivi bag and my inflatable sleep map which is a therm-a-rest all-season sv which has got a 4.5 r rating it's a very very good sleep mat and you can use it in extremely local conditions so I don't necessarily need another sleep mat but this system you may have seen me use it my last video and videos before that I just rolled it all up as one sling it I put my sleep bag in it and then any other clothing I need to put in there if I want to store things like a damp towel or other stuff to kind of dry off in the night and it's a good system you know I do like Biffy bags I must say other than all the sleep gear there's a couple of extra things in here they have some 550 always used so I normally keep these two things in my pocket but I've just forgot to take in the moment we've got the sharpening set here or I say a sharpening satis just to keep the knives in check you've got a strop just here and a Spyderco double-stuff stain there say that's useful you know maybe you get a little roll in the blade or something and you you need to sort that out before it turns into a chip something like that really helps out but obviously another model on the LK putting in account Camelbak at the back there that helps for hiking especially in the summer I use this mostly in the summer because when I'm hiking around and I'm losing a lot of moisture in my body it's nice to be able to take a drink here and I'm kind of replenish that but other than that if you have a look in the path you'll see like I put a foam kind of liner inside the pack and that's mainly to keep it its shape I also use this as a changing mat sometimes I can kneel on it for example in the snow I can sit on it it's just something useful in a bit of Fame but it does serve purpose they're giving the pack its shape in keeping some structure which I quite like because I don't like a floppy pack that's just my thing so that's pretty much our 16 kilos but there is one piece of equipment I failed to mention and that's my tarp just here on the bottom of the LK 35 I'm not going to get that out and display it because I have so many video clips of me using it and if you check out the last video even the video specifically about the top you'll see how it works with the ridgeline and me putting the tarp up and it's a really useful system it lives in the dry bag I called it the quick deployment tarp setup and there is a video specifically about that that you can check in the description it's a DD tarp a 3 meter by 3 meter and coyote brain and I really like their tarps I think they're affordable they're lightweight they're strong they're not as heavy as a canvas tarp so they're not as good in the wind they blow around a lot but for where I am in the forest they're perfect well I hope you found this video useful and it shed some light on why was carrying in that video I did the other day with months and just general questions about my kit how much it weighs you know I don't know whether people think that's a heavy pack or not personally I don't think it's too heavy having is fine and you know a little bit heavier a little bit lighter around about that weights good for me I don't have the lightest technology in my kit I mean look at my bivi bag you know it's a pretty bulky bivi bag the sleep mat inside weighs 18 ounces so that's pretty damn good but the bivi bag itself yeah it's fine a heavy the tarp could be a lot lighter lighter you know is a fairly weighty tarp no probably over a kilo that set up here and the rope I use is pretty thick too for my ridgeline so there's a lots of bits of kit here that could be lighter you know a lot people run with titanium I run with stainless steel personally I prefer the longevity and I don't mind the extra weight of gear as long as it serves a good purpose for me I think that's the thing really if you go out camping and I'm in that bivi bag and I'm really warm I've got a lot of space to move and I'm comfortable the bivi bag has done it done its job for me and I want to keep it you know I've used the snug pack bivi bag that the Special Forces one I didn't like it not breathable enough too tight and you can't have a big fat sleep mat in there or she got no lofting space you just kind of compressed into it so there are things that aren't ideal here for everyone but for me this is what I run with and this is what I'm happy with on the don't mind the extra weight provided the equipment makes up for it in its functionality but I will obviously be getting a new sleep system for the winds I'll keep you updated on that and you can join me in months again on another trip out in the wilderness in a couple of days time although that video will be out next Sunday but the youth YouTube notification system is garbage so if you do want to be notified of new videos you can click the bell icon below and it'll keep you notified but other than that sales pitch you don't have to watch if you don't want see I'll still do the thing I want to do out in the woods and you can join me if you want to thanks again for watching guys better go and find the dog he's gone off on a mission on his aims he's bored to death listening to me and I'll see you soon take care Mons

Channel: MCQ Bushcraft & Wilderness Life

Views: 91,917

Rating: 4.9598165 out of 5

Keywords: bushcraft rucksack, bushcraft rucksack kit, bushcraft backpack loadout, bushcraft backpack, lk 35, lk35 mods, swedish lk35, swedish lk35 mods, swedish lk35 backpack, bushcraft kit, bushcraft kit what to carry, bushcraft kit list, bushcraft gear youtube, mcqbushcraft gear, bushcraft gear, mcq bushcraft kit, mcq bushcraft axe, best bushcraft backpack, best bushcraft backpack with axe holder, bushcraft pack setup, bushcraft pack frame, bushcraft survival, mcq bushcraft gear

Id: NtyUVLC8Csg

Length: 29min 44sec (1784 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019