A perfect ending to my birthday. Wiine, fire, knives, cedar, and of course, Hershey, my stick lovin' coonhound.
It’s the Roamer 305. It’s D2 Steel and is pretty budget-friendly. Very solid camp knife for the price.
My girlfriend got me my favorite pocket knife for my birthday.... again! Hopefully I keep this one for more than 2 years this time
Recently got home from a holiday party and I was still too awake to climb into bed, so I decided to do some shavings practice. It's been a while, but I made some decent piles of shavings, and we'll see about setting them on fire when I can get daylight for easier photos. All of these are on cedar fencepost from the hardware store. BSA Plumb Hatchet Husquavarna Multipurpose Axe Ontario 12" Machete ESEE Junglas ESEE 6 Mora (can't remember the exact model, woops) Fiddleback Forge Field Puukko
This little knife has been a good one! Here is a piece of cedar stump turned feather stick from yesterday. Small pile of shavings fer my resin tin fire kits.
Thank you I appreciate that, I do too. It's my favorite of all of his I have handled. Andras does great work!
Yep a lefty, my buddy brought it back from Germany. You hold it in your left hand ready to use and all the nail grooves are orientated correctly. Love the thing!
You may find this useful and interesting. https://www.sakwiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=Wenger+Left-Handed+Swiss+Army+Knives
Was intended to take a glamour shot of the knife, but messed up the focus depth, so this photo is now of the shavings . Mixture of using the main hollow grind and the secondary (tip segment) convex grind on this tanto. The four-ish longer curls came off of a pine fence post from the hardware store (reinforces the advantages of a long, knotless length of softwood) and I believe the stick is maple of some sort (picked up from a sidewalk in my neighborhood).
New knife to practice shavings... had a hard time getting the curls to come off the knife at an angle... it was working much better with the blade perpendicular to the wood. I had better curls with straight grained cedar. More practice with this knife is in order.
Welcome to BCUSA @warren bond! What knife is that? You might want to share it in this thread: https://bushcraftusa.com/forum/thre...-lagom-and-similar-knives-share-yours.236206/
Tried the @NWPrimate method for the first time. Wood was brittle and usually went flying off the stick instead of forming the feathery cotton candy look he gets. Stuck some bark where the shavings were dropping to make collection easier. It is such a time and energy-efficient way to do curls. Look forward to practicing.
I decided to conduct a bit of an experiment. There's nothing like playing in the snow when other sane folks are keeping warm! I've been curious about how different woods feathered, so I gathered up 8 different kinds. I got sycamore, pine, walnut, cedar, poplar, hickory, maple, and some kind of ornamental tree we have in our front yard that my mom calls a flowering pear. I ended up doing the whole thing twice, because the first time through my feet were blocks of ice and I kind of flew through the feathers. So here's my first feathers, which I couldn't get lit with my ferro rod until I added a secret ingredient... a featherstick I'd had in a bag with some PJCB Here's my second try. I have the exact same woods, but I was determined to be a little more methodical. These first 2 feathersticks are maple and tulip poplar. I love maple - it's very smooth, but hard enough that it kind of helps you not dig too deep. Poplar was pretty easy to do fine feathers with, but it's grainy. That's the only way I can think to describe it. Your knife kind of chunks through it. Then I tried walnut and pine. Pine is much softer, though not quite as soft as cedar. It's also very smooth. Walnut surprised me. I expected it to be hard and grainy, more like the poplar, but as I carved through the heartwood, it was fine and easy to cut. I had a bit of a "hmm" moment with the walnut - could it be that maybe the heartwood is better for feathers than the sapwood? Next up was sycamore and cedar. Cedar is like cutting butter. It's super easy to get through. The only downside is that it's too easy to cut too deep. I'd say it was great to learn on, except for that, although that might a good thing for beginners. The key for me was to slow down and learn to control my cuts. The sycamore pith was like cutting through a rock. Once I got through that, it wasn't too hard. It wasn't my favorite though. It's kind of stringy and tough. I finished up with hickory and flowering pear. The hickory was still pretty green, but it was tough. I got fine feathers out of it, but it wasn't easy. The flowering pear was terrible. It's SUPER grainy and doesn't cut well at all. And the feathers keep breaking and falling off. Here's the whole feathery family! They needed set on fire! My firebuilding was kind of sloppy today, but I got a couple feathersticks going with a piece of charcloth between them (which went out before I could get something else on them) and finally got the whole thing lit with a better tinder bundle and some sticks. It was an education for sure. I'll be trying walnut again, but probably not poplar or hickory. Learning something new every day.
This was awesome! its always an excellent idea to try new types of wood for fire building, you never know what you will have around you when out camping! Also, for the hickory I find that scraping hickory with the spine of your knife, given that its sharp, produces very fine scrapings that ignite very easily. You can make these scrapings when the hickory is green as well, just put the scrapings in your pocket and let your body heat dry it out!
