Seminar by Dave Canterbury at the 2015 NPS Expo in Louisville, Kentucky

let's still I don't have a fancy slideshow or any that business because I'm not sophisticated that somebody's guys are but that's okay to what I want to do is I want to have a discussion with you guys today a little bit about you know this is a prepper show and it's about being prepared for things and to me in my mind I don't see myself as a prepper because I was always taught to be ready for emergency situations before they happen and I don't consider that being a prepper I consider that being smart so we can't control when the next winter storm is going to come through and knock the power out for a week we can't control when the next evolution of a depression is going to come around the dollars not going to be worth anything we have no control over that so we have to understand what the mentality of that is going to be if and when it does happen and be prepared to take care of our family in that event no matter what and I like to think that I'm prepared to do that I like to think that I have enough of what it's going to take to be able to care for my family bring money into my household and bring food and other things into my household without going overboard about it and having four years worth of food in the closet because I don't think that's necessary okay I don't think it's necessary to have four hundred thousand rounds of ammunition in my closet I just don't think that's a necessity and there's reasons I don't think it's a necessity a lot of people would disagree with my mentality but I think that in the long run for me I'd be honestly it's a whole lot easier to say food than it is to go out try to trap a raccoon because if something like that happens what's going to be everywhere dogs cats right I mean hey it's food right so if it gets to that point I don't have to worry the food's gonna be around because you can't afford to feed your dog internal loose thanks you just gave me an MRE I appreciate that but to be prepared to feed your family you should understand how to grow certain crops you should understand how to farm you should understand how to do permaculture you should understand how to bucket garden you should understand how to trap food because trapping is much more effective than hunting because it's passive and I see a lot of obviously I read a lot of things I read a lot of books I read a lot of magazines I look at people's articles I look at what people are saying I look at sites and boards and discussions and it seems to me that a lot of the people that are preparing are doing it with the wrong mentality in the many ways ok when I say wrong mentality are you storing 400 thousand rounds of ammunition because you're afraid somebody's going to try and take your guns or you storm four thousand rounds of ammunition because you're gonna go out and hunt food with it because if you're planning to go out and hunt food with it that ain't me this is not gonna last very long because most people ain't a very good shot anyway unless you shoot shotgun shells and it's a whole lot harder to store a lot of them than it is 22s all right we'll get to that in a minute but I think that trapping is a skill that every person should be absolutely familiar with live trapping snaring leg-hold trapping Conibear trapping those things are something that you should have a very good handle on that skill and be ready to utilize if you have to because that will provide you food much faster than hunting much more passively than hunting if you're worried about somebody knowing you got a gun but you're going to take it out in the woods and shoot squirrels with it four or five or six or ten a day to try to feed your family one I just have traps somewhere that nobody even knows they're even there they don't make any noise they don't make any sound and when you catch food nobody else is going to know you got it that just makes sense to me so trapping to me is a much more preferable skill than trying to be necessarily a hunter and there's no reason not to combine them both but I think that we as people who consider ourselves prepared concentrate much more on hunting and food gathering like that than we do on something that's much more effective and timeless like trapping which is a skill that's been practiced for hundreds and hundreds of years we haven't been hunting with guns for of near as long as we've been trapping food with traps okay traps are more effective fishing is more effective than hunting is it's easier to do it's easier to master and it's easier to catch food because it's all in one spot I don't have to chase that one deer over 25 acres if I got a whole pond full of forints bluegill they're all right there waiting on me right that makes it easy so I need to learn how to fish I need to learn how to make Nets I need to learn how to make fish traps I need to concern myself with understanding the ins and outs of trapping both live traps and killing traps why live traps because the live food never spoils all right if it's alive and I don't kill it I love to eat it right now well I get it feed it no big deal possums eat anything raccoons eat anything right they're easy to feed and they don't they live a long time in a big box trap so it's not like I got to worry about putting them in a pin somewhere already got it all I can just put them in and put them in the barn keep giving them food and water till I'm ready to eat them so those are the things that I think about when I think about being prepared the other thing I think about is when you look at and this goes back to my mentality of always traveling tool heavy if you look at the things that you may have to do let's say that we're having depression tomorrow and we can't afford to buy our own electricity because it's too expensive because we don't have a job anymore now we have to go back to that 1800s Amish mentality of no power tools no gasoline what am I going to have to do in that event to be able to take care of my homestead my house my camp wherever I'm at and that I'm living whether it's by myself or with my family and what skills am I going to have to be able to understand and what more importantly what tools am I going to have to have to affect that and that's the most important thing that I think people miss nowadays is they don't understand everybody's worried about this big giant bug out bag beside their front door so they can run out and grab that 50-pound sack and head to the wood for what for how long what are you gonna do with 50 pounds of gear for very long I could put 50 pounds of traps in that pack and it wouldn't last me for you know it ain't gonna feed my family very long I want a hundred pounds of traps I want to feed them for the long term so I have to think long term when I think long term I think about things like the traps are gonna last forever steel traps not snares snares are a one-time shot 95% of the snares are gonna catch one animal in there junk so having 12 snares of my bug-out bag means I just put 12 meals in there after that it's over times time to find something else now I'm back to hunting again steel traps lasts forever they're steel traps and Tom cars museum that are 350 years old and they're still as good today as they were the day they were hand forged in Europe okay and they'll still catch animals just to get today as they did then and you can buy those old steel traps not like those but old steel Victor's and things like that Dukes at antique malls at flea markets at yard sales and they're pretty cheap as long as people don't know what they have they're not proud of them that's the problem you get into an antique mall and they got a trap that's got rust on it all sudden it's an antique thing that's probably made four years ago and just rust it out because they didn't take care of it but they think it's worth 20 bucks because it's an antique now it's got a little rust on it so you have to watch out for that but you can find that stuff fairly cheap if you know where to look but traps are gonna last you a lot longer than anything else for bringing food and they're gonna last long term you you're not going to run out of a trap you're gonna run out of ammunition you might break fishing line you might break a fishing pole the odds are you breaking a steel trap are pretty slim but if you did break it can you fix it that goes into our next discussion back to the tools again okay what things am I gonna have to do to be able to take care of all the things that I need well what did they need along the American frontier every town every pop-up settlement every village and every city had one thing in common and he was one of the most prominent individuals in the whole town and he was the blacksmith all right that is one of the top two skills that you better have to be prepared for the future all right as you better understand rudimentary what I would call utility blacksmithing you don't have to know how to make a Damascus knife that's worth $1,000 but you better know how to fix the hinge on your gate you better know how to forge weld an axe back together you better understand how to make a chisel from an old file those types of things you need to understand there are five things that you have to do with wood and wood and steel have a direct relationship we'll talk more about that in a second - there's five things that you need to be able to do with wood you need to crosscut the grain split it with the grain you need to be able to hollow it out you need to build a board through it and you build a shape it so the tools that you have should do those five things it's very easy to carry those five tools in a backpack if you have an axe you can split the wood if you have a saw you can cut the wood if you have a fro you can split the wood a big knife is a throw with a handle one with a straight and set it up and down okay but it's got to be heavy duty a draw knife that with folding handles like this doesn't weigh very much but it will shape the wood boring tools depending on what you decide you're gonna carry obviously the best boring tool is going to be some type of auger if you're trying to use wood but you can also use something as simple as a tall it's made out of rebar or an awl on your knife tube or small holes and barks and things like that but when you start getting serious you're going to want to bore some serious holes you're not going to be able to carry a two-inch cross auger with you with a tee Anolon it but it's real simple to carry augers up to an inch and a half like this that you can find out at flea market for a buck apiece so now what do I do for a handle on this thing well you can carry a bit and brace if you want to they're pretty bulky they're a little bit of a pain in the butt to carry around so I'm going to show you a trick this is a piece of blah kanpai alright three-quarter inch ID it's got a half inch reducer in it that is quarter-inch ID all I did was throw this thing into fire heated it up completely took a trashy auger and stuck it in a vise put that on top of it and beat the crap out of it with a hammer until it formed around that auger now I can put any auger bit in here and I can cut any piece of wood for this now I have a t-handle auger that cost me about two bucks and it's easy to carry so now I can carry multiple bits by one two or have multiple bits with me or around and I can use them and I can have the auger the bigger augers I can have the the braces are less tough in my shed at my house but if I'm building a bag in case I have to go somewhere else and I'm trying to carry some of this stuff with me to be able to effectively do all the things that I know I'm going to need to do to wood in smaller scale and that's what's important you have to understand the scale of what you're going to do trust me if you're bugging out you're doing nothing in large scale you can't carry enough to do it in large scale so everything becomes small scale at that point but you still may have to do exactly the same things in small scale if I'm gonna have a draw knife in my shed I want one of these big bad boys that really will do the job take bark off a trees and things like that then I can actually make dimensional lumber but if I'm going to travel with it something like this will do just fine this thing came from flea market for 20 bucks that's worth it to me to have that it's a good steel blade it's a knife blade in emergency it will form any piece of what I need to form and the important thing to understand is any tool that you're carrying or any tool that you have should have a metal handle I mean a wood handle but doesn't have a wood handle you're not gonna go replace it very easy it's got a wood handle I don't have to carry the handle I carry the head and that's exactly what the Pioneers did they carried the tool heads and made the handles when they got there okay so looking at that and understanding that we need to understand a blacksmithing be woodworking those are the two big things that we need to think about is what it what how do manipulate wood and how about manipulate metal because there's nothing that doesn't take gasoline that you can't make or fabricate from one of those two things nothing anything that you would need in life for the rest of your life other than food one of those two things will make and one of those two things will make the apparatus to get food and that's the important thing to understand so if you understand woodworking at least rudimentary and you understand metallurgy and metalworking at least rudimentary you can get by with a whole lot more with a sack full of tools then these guys got a sack full ammunition I guarantee it although he could come up to you and take your stuff I guess because he's got the gun but the point is for mentality of thinking long term I'd rather have the tools than anything else because with the tools and the knowledge I can make anything I want now I think that as bush crafters we have lost our minds when it comes to primitive skills why in the world would I concentrate so hard on learning how to do things with rocks and bone and glass and stone when my ancestors didn't do it all right we had metal in Europe 400 years before European contact in the u.s. we were making fires of flint and steel we were making fires of fire locks and match locks we're making fires and sticks because it's not reliable and it's not repeatable if you've got the skill and I do I'm pretty confident I can walk out any piece of woods and make a bow-drill fire but can I do it when I'm tired when I'm hungry when I'm sweating when I'm cold when I've had any food for four or five days when I just fell out of my canoe and it's 40 degrees outside and I'm soaking wet when it's pouring down rain or it's snowing how reliable is that going to be it's easy for me to do it with a class full of people when it's 60 degrees outside we're walking into a familiar piece of woods and I'm like oh there's a tulip poplar let's pull this off let's do this carve it out make a bow drill Sutton here you go thank you very much how great am i it's not raining it's not snowing not hungry I'm not thirsty I'm not tired it's optimal conditions okay so what I have to think about is what can I use or carry or make that's going to give me the optimal chance to do the things I need to do in less than optimal conditions and that's where we have to become tool heavy minded to carry tools and make tools instead of worrying about things like rocks and sticks sticks are for making shelters sticks are for making tool handles all right metal is for making knives and files and saws and axes and fire Steel's and traps okay and we need to understand that mentality you cannot effectively work wood without metal you can't make metal or foreign metal without wood because you need the coal or at least you need the hardwood embers so the two are just like this and you got to understand them both inside now you should understand the tree species what the trees can do for you the trees don't get me started um everybody worries about edible plants everybody worries about medicinal plants two seasons three seasons maximum okay what's gonna happen to me when I'm looking for mowing and I got a head cold there's five feet of snow on the ground that ain't happening guess I'm just gonna suffer with the cold no trees are a four-season resource if I understand what trees are medicinal I don't have to worry about looking for plants because the trees are always going to be there it would take a dramatic catastrophe in this world to get rid of every tree we have in every piece of metal on this planet there's just so much metal here think about it as soon as European contact happened the Native Americans look at that metal and said this is the deal right here what do you want for that there's a reason for that it's longevity they didn't have to sharpen it as much they'd have to remake it as much it didn't find her carving tasks than they could do with stone and bone so we need to learn from that and understand that carrying that stuff I mean I hear people all the time say I say well why do you want to learn bow drill fire so bad well what if I lose everything somebody gonna steal your pants I can put a Ferro rod and five lighters in my pocket so unless I'm naked and afraid sorry Jay sorry Clint I'm gonna have something to start a fire with in my pocket and if it's wet it doesn't matter I can make a wet lighter work in 30 seconds I can make a wet fire forever rod work right now so they're not susceptible to water as much as people act like they are so what's going to happen to keep me from having fire right here probably nothing what's gonna stop me from having a knife right here on my belt if I'm wearing a good leather heavy belt how am I gonna lose that thing if my knife sheath is made right okay am I not gonna come out of it it's at least three-quarters our way down this sheath and I got a good tight fit on that thing works Kydex and it's got a locking mechanism on it like blind horse knives developed with the slide lock how am I gonna lose that thing I don't need to worry about making a knife out of a rock I'm never gonna lose the one I got right that's the mentality we need to have because what happens is we get so caught up in the things that we really shouldn't be that worried about that we forget about the things we should be worried about I know a lot of guys that can make a bow-drill fire just like that but if you if you hit up a 220 counter Barry said go catch a raccoon with this they'd be like how's that work it works all the time and it's a killing trap it works as soon as you stick your face in there or your hands so why not use it why do I need to make this spring pole snare with a stick when I got this 220 pounds per square inch right here in my hand that weighs about 16 ounces that'll kill stuff for the rest of my life because it's never gonna wear out long as I take care of it I'm never gonna break it it's not gonna run out of ammunition right that's that's the way I think okay so tool heavy mentality is what I always think about and I want something that's going to be able to do all the things I need to do with wood all the time a small scale if I'm traveling small scale with a backpack a large scale if I have conveyance I mean how much do we hear nowadays about bug vehicles let's plug out trailers in here okay if I got enough room to bug out with that my god I'm taking the woodshed all right I'm taking every tool my granddaddy had and everything I've collected over the last ten years because that stuff is gonna pay big dividends in the end because when you got food and I need it I'll fix your tool for you I'll repair your house or your Hut for you I'll make you a new grass mat if you need it on my loom Oh you know my wife can make your wife a new scarf out of the loom that we got over here and you can give me some food trade and barter is gonna be where it's at sooner or later just like it was in the 30s it's gonna happen again history always repeats itself and I'm not talking about the government's gonna take everything we got I'm not talking about the end of the world I'm talking about history I'm talking about normal things I'm not conspiracy theories and paranoia and UFOs and Bigfoot I could care less about that crap I'll be straight up honest with you what I care about is history history repeats itself sooner or later we're gonna be in a position where we're not gonna have the money we have now we as a human race right now have money like a floodgate more than we've ever had in the history of the u.s. sooner or later that's going to change it has to there's no question about it when it does we're gonna have to go back to doing things the hard way and when I talk to guys and they come to my school or they come to me and they say I want to be an instructor for you or I want to work with you listen to the lady young ladies out here first thing I do is look at your hands shake my hand I want to see what your hands look like buddy because if they don't look like mine I don't even wanna talk to you if they look like you've been sitting punching Keys all day long and never done anything else I got nothing for you I want to know that you spent time out there in the dirt and you did what it takes and you're not afraid of work that's what I want to know if you're not afraid of work you can always make money if you're afraid to work you'll never make money it's that simple but to be able to learn to do the things that we need to learn to do you got to spend time in the woods to do it and dirt times what it's all about videos won't teach it to you they'll help you books won't teach it to you they'll help you going to schools won't teach it to you they'll help you I can teach how to make a bow-drill fire today you're not gonna own it you're not gonna own it until you've done it 150 times then you're gonna own it you're not gonna come to my school and run three navigates of course in a weekend and own it you're gonna have to go practice it because six weeks from now you're gonna forget it all skills are perishable I can tell myself just being honest with myself if I stop blacksmithing and don't pick up a hammer for a couple three weeks and go back to pound the metal again it's not as easy as it was when I stopped doing it I can still do it I understand how to do it I know what I'm doing but it's harder I get winded faster my arm gets tired faster I can't fall into metal is good I can't do things in one heat that I could do when I put the hammer down the last time so all of the skills have to be practiced hunting fishing trapping woodworking metalworking growing crops taking care of livestock those are the important things in life it doesn't matter how much stuff I am mass in my house how much food I've got how much ammunition I've got how many hundreds of guns I've got in the closet can only carry so much if you have to leave and you can only take care of so much at a time when the time comes all right so let's talk about my mentality for a minute on firearms just in case you haven't heard it all right if something were to happen tomorrow and I had to find ammunition every henhouse outhouse trap house and farm house gonna have two things 22 and 12-gauge Dems of guns I want okay 12-gauge will kill anything in North America period from a bear to a rat okay 22s are good conservation guns they're good close range easy taking animals down in traps if I need to get a large coyote a trap that thinks he's a little bit bigger than I am 22s easy and convenient take care of that those are the two firearms I believe everyone should own a lot of people would disagree with that but that's the way I feel because number one I can get adapters for that 12 gauge to fit almost every other straight wall cartridge on the market today 22:38 nine millimeter 45 acp 45 long colt 40 Smith & Wesson 32 I get adapters for all that stuff it's a lot easier to have 15 adapters at 15 guns right there not eating anything not spending any groceries on them they're just sitting in a drawer but when I got him I need them I don't know where you guys live but I live in this area I live in Ohio southern Ohio and he's shot over a hundred yards a pipedream okay I don't need anything that's gonna shoot 500 yards flat I'm never gonna get a shot like that a game at game Dave's talking about shooting game here okay I'm never gonna get a shot like that it's gonna be 50 yards or less 95% of the time so I want something that's accurate at that range that's repeatable for me and that's what's important with every skill that you have and with everything that you do I have engineering mentality because I was an engineer by trade so when I teach my students is that everything boils down to y equals f of X and that's a complicated term for every output is affected by the variability within the inputs so let that sink in for a minute because everything that you do from starting fire to growing crops to catching food to building a house to forging metal to making a wooden box all has those things in common it all has inputs every input has variation and the variation changes the output so I have to be able to control the variation within the input to get the same output every time and that's repeatability and reproducibility of the process that is process capability and engineering terms so what I strive for is and everything I do I want it to be a capable process am i confident that I can take 12 traps and not 50 and catch food with it the only way I'm going to know is if I try and test it so I go out and I trap for a couple seasons to get used to what I'm doing to understand exactly what I'm doing and how I'm doing it what I'm doing wrong what I'm doing right you understand all the variation then I take twelve traps I go to an area I set those twelve traps out for 30 days and see what I catch 43 animals personal 43 animals two years ago twelve traps 30 days that's enough to feed me that's enough to feed my family they never had to fire a shot other than the ones that were in the trap because I wanted the fur I didn't want to just go over and whack him in the head I wanted to make sure they got put down humanely and quickly okay in a real scenario what are you gonna do you know you're not gonna waste a bullet obviously okay but so it can be done and it can be done in a rural area and I say rural area I live in the country but I say rule cuz there's only six eight miles from town that's rural okay that's not out in the middle of nowhere so in a rural area you can catch that kind of you can catch that many animals I know lots of guys that are professional trappers and nuisance trappers that catch 50 Coons in a week in people's yards under their houses in their attics okay those wild animals are moving into our area because they have no choice we're squeezing them out of their own territory by building so many houses and by encroaching on their territory so we're bringing them to us it's not their fault it's our fault but we can exploit it in the long run if we have to because we know they're there I don't mind the possum than my garbage can that's just an MRE it doesn't bother me any I don't mind the Coons getting to my shed that's an MRE it's okay with me so understanding those things to me is important having that type mentality is important I want long-term mentality but it has to have common sense long-term mentality it to me is not I'm gonna go make a bow drill set I'm gonna keep that thing dry I'm gonna dry it by the fire in my cave to make sure it works every time I'm going to build another bow drill set before that one goes bad and try it to cave by the fire I've been telling to me is I'm gonna have a drawer 500 lighters in it and 15 Ferro rods that's good mentality to me because then things ain't never wearing out in my lifetime you take a six inch by half inch Ferro rod man you're gonna it's gonna take a long time to wear that dude out especially if you understand the input variables and the process for using that Ferro rod so that instead of striking at 48 times to get a fire you're striking it twice or once now it last that much longer and conservation of resources is a huge part of long-term survival mentality conservation of the resources that you have around you conservation of the resources you have on you and conservation of the resources that you have available to you those things are things that we don't think about I don't think as Preppers we don't think enough about that khoka Singh how many people understand what the term Copa Singh means I don't see one hand I see one hand okay if I know that over the next 10 years I'm gonna make 400 willow baskets I'm going out to the Willows on my property and I'm gonna start back trimming those willows so that I have a nursery tree that's going to grow straight shoots all the time every year it's not going to grow one it's gonna grow ten this year twenty next year thirty to you after that 40 to go after that pretty soon I got to grow the size of this room of straight willow shoes to make baskets with that's what Coppa Singh is that's conservation of resources okay I know that most people in here if they have a mindset of being prepared probably have a piece of land of some kind whether it's five acres or 500 acres you've got a piece of property you have to manage that property okay one of the best trees in the Eastern woodlands one of my top five trees I talk about trees a lot because I have tree mentality because I don't like plants it's not that I don't like them it's just I don't think they're useful its tulip poplar yellow poplar it's not a poplar to magnolias it's called poplar Daniel Boone's canoe was made out of it was the first tree ever exported live to Europe because of his carving qualities one of the most prolific trees in Eastern woodlands grows 135 feet tall and it grows like a weed all right like a weed you can cut them things down and there'll be five more right there the next year off that stump that's what Coppa Singh is all about okay cultivate that stuff because you may need it don't worry about cutting trees down people think conservation of resources means I'm never gonna cut a tree down that's not what it means that means I'm going to strategically cut trees down and strategically harvest resources to create a more sustainable resource all right that's what it means there's a reason they burn acres and acres of forest on purpose every year it's so that the force comes back thicker and more lush than it was before not because they're pyromaniacs okay so we need to think about those things for long term mentality not how much stuff can I shove in this sack and put it beside my door not how much ammunition ammo cans gonna stick in my closet how many gun safes do I need in the basement that's good mentality for certain things but if you're talking about real long-term mentality you got to think about the big picture and the big picture involves working metalworking wood trapping game growing crops processing things and utilizing resources and conserving those resources for a later date making those resources work for you instead of you working for the resource alright because if I cut one tulip hopper down I'm going to get five more you have the want to cut down might have been 60 feet tall and I'm only gonna get so much use out of that but the five that are gonna grow I got tulip poplars at my house right now around my blacksmith shed you if you watch my videos then things are taller then my overhang and they're only two years old I just didn't cut them down because I like tulip poplars it's my favorite tree so I let them grow I want cutting them down but then things grow so fast and they're a tulip poplar carving wood for it would medicine it's highly astringent cordage baskets fire tender rope I can keep going it's the most useful tree in the Eastern woodlands okay that's the other thing that we have to understand how many people out here could walk out to the woods in a winter time and say this sapling is a tulip poplar this sapling is a hickory this sapling is sassafras if you don't understand that quit buying ammo and go go study trees okay because I can tell you now that stuff's important ammo is important don't get me wrong I don't anybody here to think that I'm saying don't store ammo or don't buy any ammo know what I'm saying I'm using that as an example because it's excess in my mind it's something that we dwell on more than we should it's not that we shouldn't be doing it is that we dwell on it more than we should and my mind primitive skills are right up there we dwell on them more than we should because there's so many other things that are just as important or more important that we don't even think about all right and one of them is what can I do with the resources I have around me like the trees and the metal so let's go to the metal for a minute okay how many people think we got a shortage of metal in this country then to a scrapyard lately it's everywhere okay and it would take a hell of a catastrophe to wipe out all the metal we got I know in the 4000 acres of woods that is adjacent to my property there's at least four vehicles that have been there who knows how long but they're full of leaf springs they're full of engine blocks I think used for anvils they're full of tool steel they're full of resources and they're there okay we're not gonna lose the metal we have so what we need to understand is how do we exploit that metal when we need it what do I need to make this tool if I want to recreate this what can I do that with if I need to recreate this what can I do that with all right a metal tool should last you forever what if Johnny next door comes up to you since I caught four possums last night I really need a good knife oh no problem come back in an hour I got something for you all right understanding what we need to do to make that stuff happen is important and those are the things that I think we should be conserving conserving okay so what types of metal or what kind of metal and why there's two tools that are absolutely the hardest things to remake with a forged in an amp or with a for example and Hammer who knows what they are no a file and a saw those are the two things that are the hardest to make okay that's why there was no saws in this country to speak of until the 1830s they had them just to have very many of them if you were on a homestead along the Appalachians what you generally had was in your family cabin you probably had an axe you probably had a carving knife he probably had a fro if you were lucky you might add some type of a smaller hatchet in a draw knife if you had a saw for bucking the wood down you were high living because there wasn't that many of them all right but by the 1830s saws whirring common production in the u.s. before that most of them came from Europe because we didn't make them here because they were painting the but at least they were before the Industrial Revolution okay so saw blades are hard to recreate what's the good news they're prolific they're cheap and they don't take up much room a bow saw blade like this one ah a both a blade like this one don't take up any room at all I can get a bow saw blade in this length that will fit a metal frame a wood frame or any frame I want to make for it and I can get it in dry wood green wood Hacksaw carcass aww bonesaw I can make everything else I just need the blade I can put thirty of these blades in a stack that high that long these are what I'm looking for I want the tools that I can't make very easily okay files files are difficult to make but files are great for making everything else almost all right because files are one of the hardest Steel's out there so they make great knives make great tools they make great chisels everything you want to cut with including drawing eyes files are great for making that but files are very hard to duplicate so I want all the files I can get give me the files I just got a whole bucket of files the other day and I'll take them as many as I can get because the good ones I'm going to save the ones that are crap I'm going to make other stuff out of all right understanding that is what's important okay if I'm looking for tool steel what do you think the smallest tool is that's made out of tool steel that's probably common in every scrap yard junkyard rummage sale yard sale Estate Sale out there yes anybody allen wrench an allen wrench there common as mud they're made out of tool steel they come in all different sizes from this big to this big okay and there they give them away nobody wants them because for some reason Allen wrenches are one of those things that's like a throwaway tool to most people they use it for what they need it for and they get rid of it most people if you ask them if they got a set of Allen wrenches are like yeah I got a set somewhere but I don't know where they're at because they don't use them very often anymore used to be a lot of machine screws were allen head now we got stars and clusters and I don't know what we do nowadays but we got crazy stuff now so Allen wrenches are kind of out of style so they're easy to find they're prolific they're cheap and they're tool steel so you can make a lot of stuff out of them you can make an auger bit and auger bits not difficult to make on a forge it's not and you can make it out of another bit you can make it out of another drill bit or you can make it out of an Allen wrench drill bits or something else is very prolifically found but because they're already cut out to that spiral there are pain to make anything else out of unless you make Damascus out of them and forge all them together into a big block of crap and then make that into something but Allen wrenches are easy to find so when I'm looking at things like what am I going to keep well a I'm going to keep saw blades B I'm going to keep files C I'm going to keep a bucket of Allen wrenches around d I'm going to keep any tool I can find it's already a tool head that's not destroyed even if it doesn't have a handle cuz I can make a handle later axes hammers hammers are hammers are important guys hammers are something that not a lot of people think about that you use almost all the time okay what do you think the other thing that goes with a hammer is that we don't think about that might not be so easy to get one of these days nails nails alright you can walk into a hardware store down by Lyndell as you want in the 1800's you had to make a nail if you wanted to nail where you had to burn the cabin down in Virginia because you were moving out to Oklahoma and you didn't want to buy more nails and hinges so you burnt the cabin down put all that stuff in a box took it with you that's how important nails were in the early 1800s they burnt their house down to get them back ok nails can get back to that point very easily so nails are something important to have because yes you can mortise and tenon joint yes you can pin joint yes you can dovetail joint but nails are easy okay doesn't require chisels and saws and gouges and all that stuff to hammer a nail most Appalachian stick furnitures made with nails all that fancy stuff you see on porches and in antique malls it looks like it's 400 sticks into a chair go look at it they put it together with nails because by the 1800s that's where the term penny nail came from a three penny nail was three pennies for three pennies for a hundred a 16 penny nail was 16 pennies for that's where that term came from okay they ain't that cheap anymore go price nails five pounds of 16s it's damn near a $20 bill okay so nails while they're prolific now you don't find them laying around most of the time and if you do they're been it's not like you walk into a scrap yard and find a bucket of nails you might find a few nails for nail guns on strips I've seen a lot of that but you don't see too many nails you find a lot of files you find a lot of allen wrenches find a lot of wrenches you find a lot of leaf springs coil springs but you don't find very many nails because they're in houses so until they burn how they're gonna be there all right people don't throw nails away so nails are something that you should have a couple of 5-gallon buckets of at least 12 and 16s have nothing else okay let me tell you another little tidbit okay how many people know what a cut nail is okay a couple guys know what cut nails are cut nails look like a horseshoe nail but they use them in concrete guess what case-hardened high carbon steel cut nails are high carbon steel all right not as high a carbon content as a file or 1095 knife blade but they are a high carbon steel okay so there's a understanding just that stuff is what I think we miss it as a peer group as a community as a family that's where we miss it we don't understand the little stuff that is really the big picture because we're too focused on what's important today my buddy told me ammunition is out of supply at Walmart now I better go get me a box 22s before they run out okay that's important but I got 10,000 rounds what's next okay next ain't I got to go get more next is what's the next thing on my list I need to think about that's just as important is that because if I don't have a roof over my head I don't have tools to do things with I don't have an operational firearm what good's the bullets gonna do me if I break the stock on my gun and I can't make another one what gives the gun doing me alright there's a story in seed time on the Cumberland is that a bushcraft knife that a survival knife I guess it is but it's a butcher knife okay it's a butcher knife she said this to be used to carve wood should I be taking this thing out beating it through wood just for the hell of it in today's mentality absolutely so I got it my belt knife my survival knife it's my one tool option this thing's got it I got to be able to do whatever I want with that there's nothing wrong with that mentality to a point okay but what we need to understand again is look at history okay historically this knife would have never been used for anything except meat and food it would have been kept razor sharp right here on my belt and never used for anything like that okay there's a book out there called seed time on the Cumberland it's a documentary history of the settling of the Cumberland Valley in the late 1700s okay there's a story in there of a gentleman who broke his rifle stock running from renegade Indians tripped over something rifle hit the ground busted his rifle stock on his flintlock rifle spent the whole next day whittling a new stock with his jackknife not his belt knife not his butcher knife his folding knife that's what they used to carve with that's what they used acquittal wood with they used that belt knife for food processing for skinning game so they weren't cutting holes in to hide from a dull knife so when they went to slice off a chunk of deer meat it was a nice thin slice it wasn't sitting there five minutes trying to hack off a chunk okay so does that mean that our knife on our hips not our survival knife no it doesn't mean that at all okay that knife needs to be capable of doing a lot things but that doesn't mean that we have to abuse it it means we have to think about all of these things should I be carrying a pocket knife for every day and should I be using that thing to be carving wood with because if I don't use this to carve wood with now what am i doing conserving my resource just because it's my belt knife just because I saw Dave Canterbury smashing this through a piece of maple last week on YouTube doesn't mean I got to do it tomorrow because I might get lost in the way National Forest next week and I might need that thing for a couple of three days to be razor-sharp so let me use my pocketknife for that whittling task feather sticking making fire playing around fooling out taking spoons all that good stuff okay because this is my one tool option that when it really counts so I want to start with it fresh it's like hydration okay knives are very much like hydration in my mind 95% of people in the United States go to the woods dehydrated every day before the fact before the emergency before the Sun comes out and I can get dehydrated before I've been running around like a chicken my head cut off sweating I'm already dehydrated walking in because I don't drink right anyway okay 95% of people in the US do not drink the proper amount of fluids every day to be hydrated so we're already behind the eight ball when we walk into the woods it's the same thing with our tools if I beat the crap out of this sd6 I'm wearing on my side every single day and then I get lost with it well guess what now it's dull now the edge ain't sharp on it anymore now it's not gonna do what I really needed to do what I needed to do it because I've been busy playing with it it ain't a toy it's a tool does that mean you're not ever supposed to practice with it no you are you got to practice with it but get proficient with the task and then understand it can serve the resource by two axes to beat the crap out of one of them and then set that aside for your extra one and when you're going out take the good one with you in case you need it for something okay this is the things that I think these are things I lay awake at night that my wife says dude go to sleep I lay awake at night thinking about this stuff waking her up iris iris I just had this idea shut up I'm trying to sleep okay because to me what really drives me and all of this TV doesn't drive me money doesn't really drive me what drives me is learning drives me I want to know everything I want to be smarter than you I want to know more than you know not because it makes me better than you but because now I can tell you something you don't know I can teach you something okay because knowledge in life is power okay if I know how to do it and I can tell you how to do it or show you how to do it there may come a time when you need that information they may come a time when the community needs that information there may come a time when the family needs that information and I don't care that you don't know how to start fire and I don't care that you don't want to learn how to start fire because you're too busy playing Minecraft it's okay I got it when the time comes I got it I'll show you when you get when you decide it's important I got it for you okay I'll show you how to do it that's what drives me the learning drives me and it should drive you understanding everything around you is what should drive you not it shouldn't drive you that you're afraid the government's going to collapse next week and she Drive you that what can I do with that tulip poplars in my backyard how many things can I do with that can I eat any of it can I make grope duck and I make cordage of women is it medicine can i car furniture with it can I make a bow drill fire with it I've absolutely had to for some reason what good does that thing do me sitting there in my back yard because looking at it ain't enough for me it's a beautiful tree and I love the way they look that's not enough for me I want to know what I can do with that resource that's why God put it here God put that thing on the earth for me to use as a resource not to look at but to use remember that God put that here for you to use understand how to use it because you owe that to yourself you owe it to your family you owe it to the community and you owe it to God because he gave it to you it's a gift understand it that's what's important in my mind am i over time yet how much time I got left five minutes he'll take me that long to quit talking I got a little bit off track of what I really want to talk about today my real talk today was going to be on operating tool heavy and we've really covered that okay when I think about packing a bag for anything anything whether it is a camping trip a hunting trip an expedition I'm going out to shoot a TV show or just going out to far around the woods for three or four days I always packed tool heavy because tools can do everything else whenever you put something in your bag and I want you guys to think about this okay this is important anything that you put in your bag if it cannot perform three vital to your survival tasks in three ways in passable fashion why are you carrying it it ain't worth the wait if it can't do that anything that you carry that can only do one thing other than something that starts fire because fire does everything else all right you're making fire but the fire is sterilization tool hardening signaling for rescue cooking food making medicine taking care of my disinfectant disinfection of water right I kept burning bowls I can do everything with fire so that's a multifunctional tool to me so if I can't do three things for you don't carry it that's important tools will always be multifunctional no matter what I can do a lot with a tool I can make anything with this you can make with a knife I can make it with this I guarantee it all the way to a bow-drill said it that's what I had to do I can make it with this be familiar with the tools that you have learn the tools that you have learn them to the best of your ability and understand how to use them in multiple locations multiple environments multiple seasons and with the multiple media in other words multiple types of trees okay and then you will truly have a grasp on what becoming self-reliant is all about self-reliance is not about how much stuff do I have in my house self-reliance is how am I gonna use the stuff in my house and stuff in my yard when it counts that's self-reliance okay thanks guys I appreciate it you

Channel: Self Reliance Outfitters

Views: 464,802

Rating: 4.8485322 out of 5

Keywords: Dave Canterbury (TV Personality), The Pathfinder School, Self-Reliance (Book)

Id: PxNGJwXxuZg

Length: 54min 29sec (3269 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2015