Knives and Processing Wood

Good morning friends, I'm Dave Cadabra at Pathfinder School. What I want to do today is continue our video series that we talked about yesterday, my humble opinion on

knives

and I want to talk a little bit more and expand on some of those things that we talked about yesterday and we showed you some techniques and we also talked again about some prohibitions for the use of

knives

. One of the things we talked a lot about yesterday was using a cane with your knife and basically a cane is just a piece of hard

wood

and Again I like mine.

You know about the length of the arm from my armpit to where the curve of my wrist is and it should be made from a piece of hard

wood

that you can make contact with the back of your knife to create a better cutting tool. Take out your knife and give it more strength if you don't have an ax and you need to cut something that you can't just go through with the knife, obviously you don't want to cut with that knife, we talked about that, so this becomes what you move and the knife moves becomes a solid point of contact that becomes a blade for cutting, so this is an extension of your knife, if you don't have an ax now, if you have a saw, you may still need a staff, but if you have an axe, you don't need either.

The problem is that you are not always going to have an ax in every situation and that is why you need to learn or understand the limitations and capabilities of using your knife so that we can use any size. tlc knife we ​​talked about yesterday up to and including, like the Pathfinder scout with a large six inch staff blade, we can use the morse if need be, but again I tend to stay away from staff knives that are not Full Tang by fear that they will break on the rat tail and you can go years without breaking a rat tail knife, but the time you need it most is usually when your equipment fails and I'm not going to accept that. opportunity and that's why we talk about full tang knives, so what we're going to talk about today is a little bit of the do's and don'ts of your knife, how to use your knife correctly with a cane, how not to use your knife correctly, obviously.

We talked about how you never use your knife to swing like an ax because it's too uncontrollable, it's too unsafe, and you don't get the most out of that blade. I can get much more use out of that blade as a cutting surface by using it with a stick that I can hold by moving it with my hand. The other thing I would never do with my knife is tie it to the end of a stick and make a spear and I had a couple of questions about that. People asked me about it before, why don't the knives I use have the ability to bolt onto something else like a spear?

If your knife is your only tool, why would you want to attach it to a stick that it could possibly come off and now? you've lost your only tool go back to my same knife throwing mentality why would I ever want to throw a knife and throw away the only tool I have? I would never do that, so I'm not going to use it for a moment. throws at the same time brandishing it like something like an axe. I risk harming that knife or myself, that's unnecessary if I can better control the way that knife cuts using a cane and that's what we're going to do.

To talk a lot today stay with me guys okay so what I have in front of me is I have a hickory sapling and this sapling is about three inches in diameter at the bottom it would be something I can use as a ridge post or a building part of my shelter, if I were to build something primitive, it's a pretty tall tree, it's probably over 20 feet tall, it has a lot of branches, it has like I said a three inch base, so let's talk about how to do it. we would do. Use our knife to process this tree depending on what we are trying to do.

Okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is bend this tree and decide how much of this tree I don't need because I'm not going to need the top of this tree for shelter, although I can use the branches and things like that, so we're going to limit , but I'm not going to use the crooked top of this for a building element of my shelter, so I need to get rid of some of it, okay, so, like I said, we're going to have to prune this tree a little, there's no reason for us to use our knife necessarily unless it's necessary if I already have a cane.

You can probably rip off a lot of those limbs by punching them down and just ripping them off. If they don't come off that way, I'll use my knife with the stick, but I want to save that. knife as much as I can remember first that in a situation where you are really stuck on a tool and that tool is your cutting blade, it is your most important asset so the less you have to use it the better off you will be so I have one here that doesn't want to come off, what I'm going to do is straddle this tree and I'm just going to cut it with my knife, the best way for me to do it effectively. which now that I have it torn is just put my knife on it and hit it like this and cut it now if I have an area where I can't remove the limb for some reason with my cane, I will choose to put my knife through that limb and we'll talk about that next, it's okay, yes I have a limb like this and it would come off just by hitting it with this cane, but for the sake of this. demonstration we're going to use our knife what I'm going to do is put my knife in the crotch of that branch like this, coming down from the tree I'm going to use this area of ​​my knife and Again, most of what you do is going to be used with this part of your blade, so I'm going to get that thing as close to the bottom as I can and I'm just going to cut it like this with my knife, if I get to that point I'm fine, it didn't take more than a couple of little hits to get it done and it wasn't swinging and waving my knife around like some kind of ax and that's the point, okay?

We are at the point where we are going to remove the top of this tree. The best way to do this is to bend the cup towards us and push down. What that does is it puts tension on the curve right here one time. We have that tight curve, so we can safely cut it and as long as we're standing on it, it's going to move out of our way, so we'll just take our knife and push into the material, like this. and we're just beavers chewing like this with our knife and sooner or later, even on a live walnut tree, we'll get it out of there now that we have no top on this tree, all we have is this point, I'm We'll make that a little less dangerous and we'll round it off a little bit and then let the tree come back up, okay, this is a very good example, this live walnut tree that we're working on now is a very good example of something that you would use as a spring post, you'll have You have to get rid of all the foliage on this tree because it will cause resistance when it tries to jump up, but a sapling like this that is nice, big, nice and tall, this thing is still like 15 feet tall and it has a lot of pressure, that's what which you will have to have if you are going to try to do a primitive trap because something like this will lift an animal off the ground, remember if you are using a primitive trap. methods to catch, you have to lift the animal off the ground, something like this will do it, so it's a very good technique to remove the top of a tree, remove some of the branches from the tree or the sapling so that you can then use it to pull of the spring.

Well, again, this is our post right now. This is a sturdy pole. I'm going to pull this down and let it jump one more time on where it would be if it was a device to stimulate a trap and you can see how sturdy that piece of walnut is that produces a big spring pull. You're going to need something the size of that if you plan on doing a primitive capture, okay, so let's look at this pole as If we've decided that we need to carry everything with us now maybe let's use this as a structural pole for a shelter or a cart or some kind of device to drag someone out of the woods if we needed to. like a stretcher of some kind that we can drag in three directions or we're going to use this whole thing as a spring pole, but we weren't lucky enough to get this big spring pole right where we want it. to set our trap, so we have to carry this with us to lock it somewhere else in a log jam or bury it partially in the ground or leverage it somehow to make it work the way we want it to work in any case when we cut .

This down we don't want to leave it, you know, a three foot stump sticking out here will be a lethal device if someone trips, okay, all we're going to do with this tree is take out our knife. Try to figure out which side of the tree I need to climb on so you can see this better. We're going to go down to a low level of the tree and we're going to make a V notch. This tree is at a little bit of an angle and I want to cut it there with the belly of my knife or right behind the belly and then I want to go in and cut that notch like this like so and if I'm halfway through the tree at that point I should be able to bend this sapling and it should break, if that doesn't happen then I'll move a little bit and cut a bigger piece to one side like this again trying to get through half the tree trying to control this and let you guys see it at the same time there's a little bit of homework but okay now it's going to go straight through now I can take my knife and cut it like this and if I get a little bit of stubborn bark I'll just I'll go over it and go straight down to it and now that the tree is done I just chewed it up with a beaver until I could push it out and then I cut it down, I did it all with my cane, the first two thirds of my knife I never had to swing anything except this, which is much more controllable and less sharp than swinging this, okay, so let's take a smaller tree in this example of something we're going to harvest we have a triple triple coming out of the ground right here everything we're going to do is to bend this down and find our curve and then we're going to chew it with our knife if we don't we have a big enough knife so we can hit it or we're a little wary of hitting our knife we ​​can always chew this and I'll show you how do it right now, okay, so maybe the knife we ​​have is not optimal for whipping, but it's still pretty sharp, that's going to dictate a little bit what size trees we can choose, but we can still get the job done, just We have to find out where this tree is flexing you.

I can see it flexing right there and that's where we're going to use our knife, we're going to take advantage of that curve and we're going to start cutting into that curve like this, you see how it flexed. and I got busted with just a couple of cuts once I've done that, I can chew with a beaver until I cut it all the way through like this, okay, again we'll go back to our little knife for a minute and say we want. to process this to a certain length, we will use it as a tripod, whatever the case may be, we can't sit here and cut this for half an hour with our knife, try to cut it or we can. just take our cane and make a V cut here in the middle of this side, turn it over and do the exact same thing on the back.

I'm having trouble delaying it the way I want because I didn't get through it first. Well, another advantage of topping the tree beforehand is it's easier to control and then you can see that I just cut it to size with two cuts, broke it very easily and that thing was cut to size. I didn't have to move my knife as much as I had to. Doing it was very controlled and using my stick is very simple, okay, while we're sitting here with this stick in our hand, let's talk about another reason or another way we can use our knife now that we know we have a 90 degree spine on it. that knife. again we'll go back to the smaller knife, the trap line companion and if I want to process this thing, maybe it's a dead limb and I want to process this bark to use as a tinder packet.

I can scrape the bark off with my knife just like that on the back or I just want to remove the bark all the way to the inner bark or all the way to the sapwood. I can do it very easily with the back of this knife and I don't have to sacrifice my blade to try to do it. things like removing the bark, I can do it with the spine of my knife like this and you can see how well that 90 degree spine removes the bark. If I want thin shavings I can get those too and this will work the same for the dead ones. wood like it does with green wood that 90 degree column allows me to get very very fine chips if I need them and that's exactly what happens with your cerium rod just when you scrape it you're taking those fine chips of magnesium and other materials. and when you remove them, they spontaneously combust with oxygen and ignite, and one of the things I talked about yesterday in my video was about not worrying about carrying a don rod because you wear out the magnetic bird, you wear out the ferro rod a lot sooner. you're going to wear away the magnesium and what a lot of people don't understand is that these rods have so much magnesium in them that you can't always just scrape the rod to get a bunch of chips and those chips are going to wear away. be highly combustible you just have to be careful not to create sparks and then you'll get the same thing you get with magnesium so I wouldn't use the don bar becauseIt has magnesium.

Just bring an extra ferro rod, okay, real quick, let's talk about wood churning as it relates to firewood

processing

. Now this log is approximately four inches in diameter. If I have a saw, I can cut those logs, but I'll be here all day trying. do this to make it much easier for me to take command of this if I don't have an ax if I have an ax I can give up all that if I don't have an ax because I'm down you know, I just carried a saw and a knife because that's all I thought I was going to need or all I have is you know what I have so maybe I have to churn wood and that's it so there are ways you can do it. logs like this correctly and there are ways to do it improperly or unsafely and one thing I want you to remember is like I said, this is a four inch diameter log and that is one of the reasons why the length of this knife is okay and this is actually about a five inch log, so it's barely sticking out from the edge of this log, so when I put this knife here, if this log hasn't split for some reason, I still have something to hit. with my staff plus the back of my knife or the back of my hand, that's the reason for the length of the blade, if I have a four inch blade and I have a blog that big, once I get to the center , now I'm hitting the back of my hand or I'm hitting the handle and I don't want to do that, so that's another reason for the five to six inch blade length because a four inch log is a good size for fuel and It is also a good size for shelter building material that should never have to process anything larger than four inches in diameter in a woodland emergency or wilderness emergency scenario.

You should never have to process anything larger than that, so big helicopters and things like that in the eastern woods are not necessary, really not necessary. so what we're going to do is we're going to put our knife on the log and I like to split the center first and if you want, you never want to do this, you don't want the belly of your knife or the tip of your knife going into this piece of wood, remember that this area will be used for skinning tasks, fine carving tasks and all that type of stuff and it's also the most difficult to re-sharpen that area in the field, that's the important thing.

You have to remember that some people don't realize that a straight, long, flat edge like this is much easier to sharpen than a curved edge right here, even in a controlled environment, that's the part that most people fight, so in the forest it's going to be really a problem, so I need to conserve that area of ​​my blade as best I can, so I'm going to push my knife no matter how big my log is to the edge of that sheet, now this happens to be wide enough that it's going to take up some of that area that I don't want to use, but I don't have a choice with this record, if I had the choice, I wouldn't do it, so I'm going to hit, I'm going to hold the handle a little to move it, make sure my hand is completely out of the way and I'm going to tap it to sit up.

I'm going to make sure the knife is seated there and then I'm going to take a harder hit if my knife twists, I'm going to move to the side a little bit and continue now, you can see I went down through this log and didn't split it. completely, part of that is a blade sharpening issue if This was a Scandinavian grinder. It was wedge-shaped. It would split much better. This is a flat grind that is narrow. It is a completely flat grind that is a narrow wedge. Not so good for splitting wood, much better for

processing

meat and game again.

If I had the Pathfinder knife on this thing, it would have split wide open, so now I'm at the mercy of hitting this tip, but if this tip wasn't here, what would I do? try to break it and shake my knife or I would have to try to get it out of there and start over or I would be hitting my handles again, so by having that little length of blade out there I could effectively split that log if I cut it into quarters, it will be more than enough for fuel, it will be enough to cut that material to produce fuel, this is a long burning fuel, if it is hardwood, if it is pine, it will burn much faster.

If I'm trying to make fire starting material, like a pile of firewood, then I'm going to have to divide this up considerably more because for me firewood is something the size of a pencil or less, so now I'm going to have to do that. divide that again into eights, then I'll have to go down and divide it into sixteenths crosswise, then I'll divide it into 30 seconds, I don't have to get out of control with this, these pieces here are going to be a good lumberjack, that's an important thing to understand , especially if you are in a wet weather situation, you can't find dry material, often breaking inside a log will give you the driest material, now you can choose to go down a step further.

This is not a problem, if you were in really wet conditions, you wanted to ensure a lot of surface area, you could break it up a little bit more into things like this and that's going to be more fuel now if you were really worried. my fire and I had really extremely wet conditions, so I could take a stick the size of this one that was going to be lit and I could take it and use it to make a feather stick and again I'm just using my thumb for guidance here, this is hard wood, so it won't shave as well as a piece of softwood, but I can still dramatically increase its surface area by placing some thin shavings around this piece of wood like this.

Take them away, they don't do me much good, they really need to stay there. Part of that is a function of this wood being dry, but these curls are going to give me more surface area for the flames and, again, you know this. It's a pretty good sized knife, this is not a mora, this is a large butcher knife that we are using, but it won't do the job as well as the amora, but it will definitely do the job and that's what counts, alright folks. I hope you enjoyed this video today a little more about knives.

My thoughts on knives. What you can do with your knife if you have the right skill level. How to use your knife to process different types of wood and things like that you may need. What to do in the forest and the safest way to do it. I appreciate your time, your support, your insights, everything you do for me, my school, and my family. I'll be back with another video as soon as I can, thanks guys.