10 Advanced Bushcraft and Survival Skills with a Swiss Army Knife

Welcome back to Range of Survival and Fieldcraft. I'm Andrew and what I have for you today are 10 bushcraft skills using our Swiss Army knife, that sack, as well as a few other odds and ends from our survival kit to provide for our most basic needs and give us a lot to work with out in the field. Stand by. Now for our first task, we're gonna do the bamboo fire saw. This is a technique that a jungle instructor showed me a long time ago and I've only done it a couple of times, but I know some tips and tricks to make this a lot easier to accomplish, especially for someone who may actually have to use this in a survival scenario. Now, what we need is two different pieces of bamboo, one that we're gonna saw into and then one we're gonna saw on. And with these two pieces, we can create fire by friction. Now, a couple of techniques that are gonna make this a lot easier. We employ ground stakes, four of them to lock that saw into place on the ground. So we're basically inverting this bamboo fire saw. Then once it's locked in place, we're gonna take the piece, the hearth board that we're actually going to saw with and we're gonna create just a simple notch using our Swiss army knife. With the saw, we cut that notch and then with the tip of our blade, we can actually open up just a small hole in that notch to give us a starting point for the dust for our ember to collect as we saw. Now you'll notice that the sawing portion of the board that's locked into place with the stakes is somewhat off center. Those ground stakes give us the ability to lock that saw board into place, given its angle without the need to shave it down using our knife. One of the tricks that we can employ with this method as well is placement of our tinder. We don't wanna place the tinder directly over the hole we created with our notch. What we wanna do is separate that tinder into two different bundles and then place it to the left and right hand side of that notch on the inside of the bamboo, forming a nice trough. We can then take a small broken stick, hold it over top and begin sawing. Just like any primitive fire, we saw until we see smoke. The more smoke, the harder and faster we saw until that tinder or that ember is smoking by itself, add it to a tinder bundle, blow it into flame and we have our survival fire using the bamboo fire saw method. Now for this next skill, we're gonna use aluminum foil. This is a great tip to know, especially if we pack aluminum foil as part of our survival kit. We could use it for cooking, but we can also use it to make an improvised cup to boil water over a fire safely to make that water safe to drink so we don't get sick and we can remain hydrated. Now with this aluminum foil, we need a section that's about two foot by one foot. The reason is we're gonna fold this origami style and create that cup. We can use our Swiss army knife to cut this aluminum foil down if we pack a lot of it into the field and we don't have that cutter that's on the box to actually cut this section out. Now with this section of aluminum foil, we just fold it in half lengthwise and then we have a crease already made from folding it corner to corner. We can fold along that crease to form a triangle. From here, we take corner across the aluminum foil, each side left and right, open up the middle and now we have a cup, simply fill it with water and we can place it over the fire now. It will hold that water, boil that water, making it safe to drink and we can even grab this aluminum foil with our fingers while it's in the fire because it'll remain cool, remove it from the fire, let the water cool and now we have a safe water source to drink from. Now if you're anything like me and you're carrying a Swiss army knife, chances are you're a fan of MacGyver and you've seen every episode and know every trick in the book. So we're gonna employ a couple of tricks that we can pull from other items in our pockets and put those to use for survival to get a fire started and this is a great technique to know, especially if you carry gum in your pocket, a very commonplace item that we could carry with us because we can use that gum and the wrapper itself to get a fire going if we have some other items with us. If we're out in the wilderness, we may have a GPS with us or a headlamp, something with batteries, combine that battery with the wrapper from our gum and we have a way to start fire. What we wanna do is take out that Swiss army knife, remove the gum from the wrapper, go ahead and chew on that and then with the wrapper itself, we're gonna cut a small strip. I can usually get three strips out of a single gum wrapper to give us three attempts to start fire. With that strip, we're gonna take our scissors and we're gonna start at the folded end and cut toward the open end to give us a very small bow tie looking fold of our gum wrapper strip. We're gonna take that gum wrapper, invert it, silver side down, touch both ends, one to the negative and positive of our battery from our GPS, the heat and the current from that battery will ignite to the gum wrapper, apply it to our tinder bundle and we've got fire. Now in survival, it's not just enough to know how to start fire and boil water to make it safe to drink or even build a shelter, but we also need to know how to feed ourselves in the wild. Luckily, this time of year is great for going after wild edibles because they are plentiful and they're growing up out of the ground because it's springtime. Now we can make a simple dig stick with our Swiss army knife to give us an advantage to dig out those plants, get underneath the roots and that dig stick is roughly an arm's length. It's got a rounded or trimmed end up top for a handhold and then it's also got a spade or spear point end on the other end that we can use to dig in the earth and get underneath those roots. We can also use that spear tip on the stick for vampires. Yep, you guessed it, vampires. Now we're gonna harvest several different plants today. The first plant is wild onions. They have long shoots sticking up out of the ground and when you pull them up, you'll find the bulbs. Smell them. If they smell like onions, that's wild onion. It's a dead giveaway. Another plant that we're gonna go after is dandelions. Dandelions are considered a universal, meaning that they grow all over the place and they're easily gathered and we can eat every part of the dandelion to give ourselves nutrients. Another universal edible that we're gonna collect today is plantain. Similarly, it grows everywhere. Gather the leaves and we can add those to what's gonna be our stew. Now we're gonna gather yarrow, but we're gonna use yarrow for something else later on in the video. We're not gonna eat it and that would ruin the stew because the taste. So we're gonna keep that out for now. And then one of the last plants we're gonna gather is chickweed. Chickweed grows plentiful this time of year. We can gather it up and it's a nice addition to our stew because we're gonna boil our plants over a fire in our canteen cup and we've added some worms for extra protein. And we're gonna turn this into a basic stew. It smells like onions, tastes great. And then that chickweed and the plantains turn into basically boiled spinach and are easily digested and the plants itself help aid in digestion when we eat those first, which is why we eat salads before meals. But this way we've gathered wild edibles for a nice bite to eat. All right, let's make some tools. Now, one of the hardest things to recreate in the wilderness is cordage, especially if you don't have the requisite skills to be able to go after resources, identify those resources, treat them, and then actually turn them into cordage. Luckily, this time of year, tulip poplar bark is gonna be plentiful. It's also gonna be malleable that we can harvest it, get the inner strands, and then actually turn that into very strong cordage for maybe a primitive survival kit. Now, that cordage from the bark, we're gonna harvest and get as much of it as we can because we can overlap a lot of this bark, create a very thick diameter cordage that is gonna be super strong. What we do with our bark is we need to get it wet first, soak it in water, and then start breaking up the strands. We're gonna overlap those strands, and this first technique is called just the twist method. All we're gonna do is start twisting that cordage opposite directions, and then eventually it will start to tighten and then coil around itself, forming just a small little loop or a bite. All we have to do then is just continue twisting, and the coil will begin walking itself up, and we'll start producing cordage. This is a very simple technique. This is the technique that I was taught in Army Survival. Now, the other technique, which is probably just a little bit simpler and faster, but it takes some time to learn, is called the reverse wrap two-ply method. And all we're gonna do is take that coil that we started, and we're gonna start with those two sections. We're gonna take the top section, spin it or turn it away from us, and then using our middle finger, grab the bottom section of that bark and pull it up over top. That top section that was the bottom section is the one now we're gonna grab, twist away from us, grab that bottom section we just twisted, and then pull it back up. And this is the reverse wrap two-ply method. And if we do this long enough and practice it long enough, we'll get really good at this, and we'll be able to produce a lot of cordage in no time at all. But cordage is gonna be one of those tools, and you'll see with our cordage, even that small section, it's enough of tensile strength to actually lift 45 pounds of weight, hold it up, and then put it back down. This is strong stuff we're working with. Trash is everywhere in survival, and we need to take advantage of trash as soon as we find it. Any type of container that's viable, we should pick up as a resource and take it with us because we can use it for a lot of different things. One thing we can find out in the woods that's commonplace, unfortunately, is gonna be glass bottles. Those glass bottles, while trash, can still be used to our advantage to help treat water to make it safe to drink. In this case, we're gonna take this glass bottle, and we're gonna fill it with nasty creek water, and we're gonna place it over a fire using a tripod toggle method, and we're gonna boil the water inside this glass without breaking the container itself. The trick to this is to let the flames lick the glass, but keep it far enough away from the coals that it doesn't shatter or break the glass. We leave it over top of the fire long enough to warm up, and then slowly start bringing up the heat to get that water to boil inside. It will come to a boil. Let it boil for about a minute, and then take it off the fire, let it cool, remove from that tripod, and now we have safe water that we can drink without getting sick, avoiding sickness, and staying hydrated. We're gonna go back to that bark from that tulip poplar and use it with our Swiss Army knife and a little bit of cordage to create an addition for our pack axe. Our pack axe doesn't have a sheath with it, so we need to create something that's gonna go over that axe head or that bit to protect us and protect other people, as well as our gear as we're traveling through the woods. So we're gonna go back to that log, and we're gonna cut a section out of that log from bark, making just a square section, approximately five or six inches by three inches. Now we can use our dig stick as well as our pack axe to cut that section out, and then with our dig stick, we can simply pry up that bark and pop that square piece away from the tree itself, and we have what will be the cover for our axe. Now we're gonna go back to camp, and we're gonna use our Swiss Army knife again in a technique with that reamer or that awl and that small cordage to act as a sewing device to sew that sheath up to make it extra strong, as well as create an envelope or a pocket that's gonna go right over top of that bit to cover our axe. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take that bark, and we're gonna fold it in half. It's gonna fray just a little bit, but with our sewing, it's gonna hold everything together and give us a nice sheath cover. Now with our cordage and the reamer or awl from our Swiss Army knife, we're gonna take that cordage with the reamer with the blade facing away from us and thread the corder through the needle or the eye of the reamer, and then we're gonna punch a hole through both sides of the bark as we have it folded over on itself. We're gonna pull back just a little bit on the reamer to create just a simple loop of that thread. Grab that thread, pull it through, and now we have a standing and running end. We're gonna go ahead and thread another hole, pull back again, and slip the running end through that loop and repeat this process on the top and on the bottom and finish off with a knot to give ourselves a basic thread to hold this sheath cover together so it'll fit nice and tight over the bit of our ax. Too easy. Here's a close-up version of that threading technique using the reamer or the awl from our Swiss Army knife. We're gonna thread the needle, point away from us, we're gonna punch through our bark, we're gonna pull back just a little bit so it creates a loop while still in the reamer, grab that little cord and pull it all the way through, and that'll become our running end. We're gonna pull the reamer out of our first thread and then punch it through our new point on that bark, thread the loop as we pull back on the reamer just a little bit, and then we've created our first stitch and we continue this process until we're done. Now, I'm a big fan of carrying the minimal equipment into the field and then using natural materials to recreate the rest of whatever that tool or that object is, and the slingshot is a perfect opportunity for this because we can simply carry the band and the pocket attached and then form the remainder of our slingshot from natural material using some of the tools that we've already made like our dig stick as well as our Swiss Army knife because we can take that Swiss Army knife after we harvest our Y section that will become the handhold for our slingshot and we can baton into each arm of the slingshot by keeping the sack of the Swiss Army knife bent at a 90 degree angle. If we lock this thing out and then try to baton with it, we could potentially break the lock system or the spring system on that knife, so we keep it bent to baton into the wood. We can even use the screwdriver as a wedge to fit the band. We're gonna tie knots at the end of the band and then fit it and then grab some rocks and do some target practice, and now we have a slingshot that we can use to go after small game. Now, speaking of minimal equipment to take into the field like that slingshot band, we can also take terminal tackle or the basic fishing items with us and recreate everything else we need from materials off the landscape. With the saw from our Swiss Army knife, we can harvest a small stick and in this case create a simple hobo reel. We could also get a larger stick and create a cane pole. We could even use that saw to harvest other sticks to make cane poles or fishing traps, L7 triggers to set along the water's edge, leave them, and eventually a fish will come along to the baited hook and take those and we have fish on the line. But with our basic kit, we can travel with a very small fishing kit into the wilderness and be able to provide for ourselves. We should always fish first in survival because fish, they're not going anywhere in that closed water source and it's the number one source for protein and fat, which we need to survive out in the wilderness. And so what we like to do is carry a small container like this Dramamine container and then put fishing tackle inside. What we have is a sewing bobbin or two with line wrapped around it. This is a very compact, easy, tangle-free way to travel with fishing line and then have it ready to use at a moment's notice. We also have safety pins with hooks on them to stow them in a nice, neat manner. That way we can always find our fishing hooks and they're not tangled up on each other. Now what we can do is harvest our hobo reel. This is a small section. Grab the sewing bobbin with line. We take the line and tie it to the hobo reel further down on the bark after we shave the bark away and create a trimmed or rounded end on one end of that hobo reel to make it easier for casting. Then we take our line and we wrap as much as we need to around the top of that hobo reel until we have enough line. And what I like to do is take weighted bobbers with a clip and clip them on the line so it holds it in place, add a fishing hook, and then now we have a complete hobo reel that we can take with us, find some bait, those worms we found earlier, and then cast out and catch ourselves a fish. Now remember that yarrow we harvested earlier as part of the wild edibles? We're gonna use that now because the sun is going down and the bugs are coming out at evening time and we wanna make ourselves as comfortable as possible. So we're gonna use that yarrow with our canteen cup combined with coals from the fire and some punkwood to give ourselves a smudge pot. This is a super easy technique to give us just natural bug repellent around camp, plus it smells kinda nice. Now what we're gonna do is take our canteen cup and we're gonna fill it up with just a few coals down at the bottom. We wanna grab punkwood because punkwood is gonna create long-lasting ember sources that burn, but it also creates a lot of smoke and heat. And that's enough because we can take our yarrow, after we add the punkwood on top of the coals, place the yarrow on top of that and those burning coals and the punkwood will elicit smoke and cook that yarrow, creating that bug repellent smell and smoke that can waft through our camp and help give us a comfortable night's sleep away from the bugs. All right guys, that does it for this video. A down and dirty video today. 10 bushcraft skills using primarily that Swiss Army knife or that sack, plus a little bit of know-how and some elbow grease. I really hope you liked this video. If you did like this video, hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, leave me a comment in the comment section. I always appreciate your feedback. I wanna thank you guys for everything you do for me, for this channel, for your likes, your views, your subscriptions, your comments, your feedback and your shares. And I'll be back with another video as soon as I can guys. Thanks.