TIPI SERIES: How to Conserve Cordage when Lashing (Part 1) | Gray Bearded Green Beret

It'll lock everything in place nice and tight this won't fall and you know the beauty of this kind of thing is one it conserves a lot of cordage but cordage recovery is a lot easier when I want to take these down. If I grab the long tail of that arbor knot and pull it tight it's going to get more and more tight. There's definitely something to be said for sustainable harvesting when you're harvesting things off the landscape. When you do harvest it you know take the time to to not only you know to only harvest what you need but also to use that and to use that for as long as you can. This is essentially nature's lumber resource and while you know you wouldn't throw away perfectly good two by fours or dimensional lumber that you got at the lumber yard or the big box store you know think of the forest that way. So like this particular area is overgrown with a bunch of maples they're just in here really tight. So this is where I like to go whenever I need poles to make tripods or what have you just to kind of thin this out to give some of the trees a better chance of actually you know growing to their full capacity. So this is a bunch of broomstick size maples that's easy for me to come in and grab what I need. I can't even tell that you put a dent in the forest just cut the stump all the way down to the ground if you can and basically you know all you could need right here in this little patch you know just a 100 foot by 100 foot square of just overgrown maples. And this happens quite a bit in this area of the Adirondacks and in a lot of other places as well. So this is a better choice for harvesting resources and again use those resources for as long as you possibly can. It may not be dimensional lumber but it's just as valuable and it came from the same kind of thing. So something to think about. You should really have a gimbal for this but you can see that maple stand in the back there and I harvested one super long, super long, super long pole that I can make a tripod out of. A little bushcrafted saw horse and I'll keep using that until it rots away. I'll take the bark off of it eventually so it dries nicely. Be nice and seasoned. It'll last a very, very long time. So everything comes from the forest. Take care of your mother earth. She'll take care of you. So I'm making these tripods for my teepee poles so that I can treat those real quick. I want to show you a couple handy little kind of tricks and tips or tricks that I use for conserving cordage when I'm making lashings that are not meant for mountaineering. You know I'm not hanging my body weight off of these. I'm just using them kind of structurally. I'd be comfortable laying on this type of a lash with my body weight but you know never hang your hammock higher than you're willing to fall kind of thing. But anyway I'm going to join these three poles together into a tripod and I could do a traditional tripod lash which takes a lot of cordage. I could do a three pole sheer lash which is a little quicker to tie but still takes a lot of cordage or I could do just a simple cordage conservation lash for a tripod and that starts with basically enough line, enough cordage to go around the poles twice and then I'll tie a fisherman's loop in there. All right so basically with your fishermen's you just basically you're tying two opposing overhands so I cross them over take one tail and tie an overhand around the opposite leg. So make a loop, continue that loop around back through and pull it tight. I've basically tied an overhand around the opposite leg. Then I'll flip the whole thing around, take the other tail, tie that overhand around the opposite leg. So I'll make a loop and continue on around the same direction back through the loop. Now I've got my opposing overhands. This is also known as the necklace knot because you can tighten that up if you needed to. But that's just an overhand, sorry, a fisherman's loop and it's two times as big as it needs to be to go around these poles. So I'll double it over like that, slide that over the poles. I'll bring it down about eight to ten inches or so and then what I like to do is take that to kind of take some of the slack out. I'll tighten that necklace knot by pulling the tails opposite each other. I've taken a lot of the slack out already with that. Then I'll stand those back up, kind of hold it in place. Once you have this at the height you want it, you're just going to either spin both outside poles once or just spin the center pole once. You're going to kind of hold that steady. It gets a little tricky to manage but it's pretty simple. And then I've got it part of the way there and I just take it the rest of the way over. That tightens all that lashing and then you've got a pretty decent tripod going there. If your fisherman's knot starts to loosen back up then you just continue to spin it until you take all that slack out. But usually what happens is it gets captured and it's perfectly tight for what we need it for. All right, I'll set that up and that's a pretty solid tripod right there. Now for the rest of the sawhorse, because I'm going to be doing teepee poles on this, I'll set that inside and straighten this one back out to get the right height. Now for this, because my daughters like to play on this and hang on this and I'm going to have some weight on this, I don't want this to actually come off but I typically would have to use like a diagonal lash here. But a cordage conservation lash that I can use for this type of situation is just to use an arbor knot with an extra turn. So really all that is is again an overhand but this time I'm doing an overhand stopper knot. I'm going to go around these two. I'm going to go around a second time. If I was just doing an arbor knot I would go around once and tighten that up. Arbor knot is also known as a jam knot, sometimes referred to as a Canadian jam knot. But if I come around a second time I've kind of put a couple of wraps on there. Then I take the end with the overhand stopper and just tie an overhand knot around the other leg kind of like I did on the fisherman's knot. Except that I've got an overhand stopper to keep it from coming back through. Now when I tighten that up it'll pull those wraps tight and that stopper will lock on itself. Especially if you're using a bank line instead of the more slick paracord. But that makes a pretty solid junction right there for what I need. It keeps it from slipping off. I'll do the same thing over here real quick. I tie my overhand in first just to put the stopper there. That kind of marks the end that I need to tie my other overhand on. Come around whatever I'm trying to twice. You could do more than that if you wanted. Then I'm going to take the end, the short end with the stopper knot in it already. I'm going to tie an overhand around the other leg. Come around, come back through. Stopper knot is fairly close to the end there. Then I can tighten that down and it'll lock everything in place nice and tight. This won't fall and you know the beauty of this kind of thing is one, it conserves a lot of cordage, but cordage recovery is a lot easier when I want to take these down. If I grab the long tail of that arbor knot and pull it tight it's going to get more and more tight. If I grab the opposite tail, which would have been the short end where the overhand was, I can loosen this and recover the cordage in no time. But I want this tight because I'm going to use this for my teepee poles. But that's some cordage conservation lashes that you can use to replace the tripod lash or the three pole sheer lash and in this case a diagonal lash when you don't really need to use all that cordage. It's not something that you're going to be hanging body weight off the side of a mountain on. So a good way to conserve your cordage. A really quick way to tie a lot of things together quickly.