Hello, you are welcome to Ireland, and you
are welcome to Vinnie's day of.
Today I am going to build a survival shelter using this
small folding knife and the contents of my pockets.
Why am I doing this? Well, I'm not
a bush crafter as seen on you tube, neither
am I a survivalist as seen on you tube. I'm
just a country guy who likes the outdoors,
but, a certain amount of bush craft is useful
and a certain knowledge of survival is prudent,
for an outdoors person. So I watch videos
and I poke around on the forums.
Every now and again the question comes up, 'can you
use a folding knife as a survival knife?',
and the answer is always the same, 'no, because
it will fail at the joint , and anyway, it
will close on your fingers.' Now I've always
found this unfair, and it's always gotten under my skin.
I've been using mainly inexpensive
folding knives all my life , since I was seven
years old, and I've never yet seen one to
fail at the joint. Also, even though I've
done many stupid things in my life I've never
managed to close the knife on my fingers.
Can it close on your fingers? Yes, if you're
drilling with the knife it certainly can close
on your finger so you need to choke up and
keep your fingers out of the way,or if you
are clumsy , don't drill at all. Also if you
try to puncture or stab something hard, like
plastic, yes it can certainly close on your
fingers then. But if you use the knife as
it was meant to be used, to cut with, the
cutting action forces the blade open, and
as I say I've never managed to close it on my
fingers.
So I've decided to do this test.I'm going to carry out some survival actions.
I think this will manage, if I'm wrong it'll
fail at the joint and I'll look foolish or
it'll close on my fingers and that should
make you very happy. Lets see how we get on
guys.
Okay this is the contents of my pockets. I have a pair of light working gloves, I have
a good share of baling twine. If you want
to see my video where I discuss baling twine
click on the link.I have a piece of light rope
, some garden twine, and my first aid
kit. Which is just a wound pad, some band
aids, and a couple of survival blankets. This
is my little knife, the main blade cutting
edge is one and three quarters inches. The
smaller blade, which I call the crappy blade
, is just over one and a half inches. It's
a small old knife, and if anything is going to fail at the joint, this will
.Okay guys,
so here we are, here's my little knife if you can see it.
. I'm going to make an A frame
shelter, and I want this for the main ridgepole.
I need a pole about ten feet long and this
fits the bill. This is a piece of willow.
So to cut this I'm going to put a bit of a
bend on it. And cut it here at the base.
There we go , can you see that. Great little knife.
To cut the top off, it's fairly simple, it's reasonably light. I can just slice through
that with my little knife. Excellent, that's the ridge pole.
Okay so I'm going to show
you how I cut the poles to length. This is
one of the lighter ones and I need to cut
it maybe here just around this knot. So all
you do is make a series of cuts right around
your pole. And then you just bend it. Thus.
I'll show ye now on a heavier one. So around
here. So the same process.
Gone a little off line here. I'll just make a second slightly
deeper cut. That's my little knife.
That might be enough, we'll try that. No problem, and
that's reasonably thick.
Okay guys, just in case you think I'm going around killing
a load of trees I'm not.
All these poles I'm cutting are willow, and when you cut willow
it's almost impossible to kill the stuff.
It just shoots out a load of branches and
grows again. That's a, what you are looking
at there now, is a stump that was cut. It's
growing under some power lines so it get's
cut down on a regular basis. And as you see
it it just sends out a load of shoots and
keeps growing. It's an extremely vigorous
plant. Also, I've peeled the bark from the
bottom of the poles because when you stick
it in the ground it's highly likely that it'll
take root and grow. So to stop it, it's so
vigorous, to stop it growing I've peeled the bark off, okay?
To form the roof of my shelter
I'm going to fall back on my Irish heritage,
all of the houses around here in the olden
times were thatched, usually with oaten straw.
But if they didn't have oaten straw, or couldn't
afford it,maybe, they would use rushes like these.
So I'm going to cut bundles of these
and use these to thatch my shelter.
No problem
Okay, so I've had to crack on with the shelter or
else this video would be about two days long.
So I've got it tacked together. basically.Just
a few points, some of my heaviest stakes,
when I got them back, I realized they were
too short, so the old, the two old sayings,
measure twice and cut once, and you can always
take a bit off but you can't put it back on.
They hold true. So I had to hustle for a few
more stakes. These are a little lighter, but
it's still perfectly strong, perfectly strong
little shelter. Also the reason I wear these gloves. I'm not one of these guys that have
to put gloves on every time they pock up a knife.
but this little knife is quite slim,
and if you are doing a lot of powerful cutting,
it's quite hard on the hands, you will end
up with a hand full pf blisters, believe me,
I know. Anyway I'm not the greatest expert
at building shelters. The whole purpose of
this is to make a point about folding knives.
Right, let's crack on
Okay guys, so here's the finished product, and here comes the rain
just on time. This is the other side , as
you can see I just bent the rushes over the
top and I clipped them in place with a hazel pole.
This is the front of it, this is my
door section, to be honest there is much brouhaha
on you tube about cutting and what have you,
cutting the poles was the easiest part of
this. It was a lot more work than I thought,
and I couldn't believe the amount of rushes
I needed. That was my biggest job. I'd say
it must have taken at least four hours just
going around picking the best, and getting
them back here. This little shelter also used
quite a lot of twine. It's just as well baling
twine is cheap and I have lots and lots of it.
So guys do I think I can cut poles and
build a shelter like this using just a small knife?
I'm not being cheeky or pompous, I
don't think it I know I can do it. These little
knives can do more than you think, and so
far it hasn't failed at the joint or closed
on my finger. Hope you enjoyed it guys, thanks
for watching, bye bye.
