This Wilderness Technique will Blow Your Mind: Bushcraft Gadgets, Survival Tools, Primitive Pulley

So today we're going to do something a little bit different. One of those projects that you might not use all the time, maybe you'll never use, but I think it's definitely a worthwhile thing to give a shot. Because it's going to be fun, it's going to give you something exciting to do through the day, and at the end you have this really cool looking thing that is actually functional. Now you probably think, come on you stop pulling our leg. Well we're going to be pulling a pulley. We're going to take this and we're going to make a pulley. And then you can elaborate on that and make more. But let's get the pulley started. So what you need, well run the intro. Okay so what you're going to need for the pulley to start is you're going to need some type of round. The larger this is, the larger your pulley itself is going to be. I just picked something that is probably about three inches in diameter. It doesn't have to be perfectly round. The rounder the better though. You don't want to pick square wood. Those square trees just don't, they don't work too good. You know somebody's crushing the comments right now saying there's no such thing as a square tree. You get my point. Rounder the better. Now once you have that, you're going to have to decide are you going to drill or are you going to bow drill. You can do either one. I'm going to show you the bow drill and how we actually would do that. It's a little bit more pain in the butt, but definitely a way to get the job done. You saw me use hand drills a thousand times. Who wants to me do that again? Okay so think of a bow drill friction fire. Okay we make our board. We make our spindle. We drive our spindle down into our board. So it's going to be the same concept, but we're not trying to get an ember. We really don't care about that at all. All we're trying to do is drill that hole. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a piece of wood. In this case we can just use a branch that we think is sized correctly. I'm still going to do a little bit of carving to it. I'm still going to point one end around the other end like a pencil eraser. I'm going to take off this bark and then I'm going to get spinning. We're going to get this thing spinning down into that first piece of wood that I showed you. Okay so here's what we got happening. I made myself a bow just like a bow drill fire. I made myself a bearing block and I made myself my spindle. Now my spindle, I went back since the last scene by looking at it. I thought I need to make it a little bit longer. It's going to make my life a little bit easier. And then I have my piece of wood here that we are going to be using. So I just found this tree that's down here with the Y. I can stick it in. It's going to make my life a little bit simpler. Again this is going to be a simplistic version of spinning a bow drill spindle. The purpose of this is just to burn down through our bigger block of wood. Okay so really simple here. So let me get myself set up. I'm going to start burning in. It's going to take a little bit of time. If you had a drill of course a lot faster. But we'll get it done. Now what you're going to notice is this is long. I'm going to burn this down until I get two or three or four inches in. Okay ultimately I want my pulley about three inches. So I'm going to have to burn beyond three inches here. And then I'll cut it. Okay it's the same as when you drill something out then you cut it and you have a nice clean drill hole. That's what I'm looking for. So I'm going to start this in. I'm going to drill in. Then I'll cut it and then I'll have part of my pulley ready to go. Alright so what we're going to do now is get in a position that we can get some downward pressure to start drilling down and keep that larger piece of wood stable. It's quite difficult to get this in a good position so you honestly have to just play around with it. If you have a second person they can hold on to it. If you find a dead standing tree you can just cut that tree and then just drill down into it and cut it that way too. So that would work. I have a piece though so I'm just going to have to make do with it. So I can use my body in a different position here than I normally would with a friction fire and just start drilling. Alright so here's where we're at. Burnt hole, spindle that was carved a few times. We're going in about two and a half to three inches. Very tiring. It'll wear you out. You've got to carve your spindle a few times, fix your bearing block a few times, but you can't get the job done. So you can't get that hole burned in there. Now what you're going to do is you're going to take your saw and you are going to cut this. So we're going to cut this and we're going to be left with a piece of wood that has a hole in it. So what I'm doing right now is cleaning up both sides of my spindle. Now depending on how beat up your spindle is and how much is shortened as you had to continue to carve it is going to depend if you need to get a new spindle or not. But in my case it's a little bit large yet so that's good. Okay I'm going to trim it down but I can put that on there and you can see what direction we're headed right now. So we have this thing spinning on here nice and freely. I'm going to find the section of this spindle that it seems to work best on, okay, which is probably right in about the middle there. So I'm going to cut these two edges off. I'm not going to do that right now super super fast because I want to do some other things here and then I can decide if I need to shorten these sides out or not. Okay so what we're going to do next is we're going to make a reference line dead center of our larger piece of wood. Now the reason that I like to do this, this is a step that you don't need but I like to do it for the simple fact that it's going to give you a guide of where to make your remaining cuts and that's a little bit important. If you don't care that much I don't make the cut but I would suggest to make it. Once you make that reference line all the way around what you're going to do then is either with your knife or in my case I'm going to just use my saw because I have one with me is I'm going to make angled cuts. So we're creating a v-notch basically around the entire circumference of the wooden spool that we made. This my friends is what you're going to come up with. Okay so you can see my notch all the way down through and now I can put my spindle back through. So we're creating that pulley. This is going to allow our rope not to slide and then this is the axis point in which it's going to spin. Pretty cool right? So it's not as perfect as you'd buy at Home Depot but we're bushcrafting. It's fun and it should be something exciting to do. So the next thing that we need to do is we need to put something in place here to be able to hang this pulley so then we can put our rope through it and have at it. Okay so the option that I'm going to show you is I'm going to just use some of this sisal rope. Again I'm not putting hundreds of pounds onto this pulley so you would have to of course decide what type of rope is going to work for your application but in my case I can split this sisal open. Okay I want to make sure when I do this I leave enough of a tag end on there and I'm just going to slide my spindle spool through there. Okay just like that. Really easy. I'm going to then not lose my pieces and decide what height I want this to be able to connect to something. I'm going to then come to the other side of my rope, open that up just by unspinning it and then I'm simply going to place it over the other end and give it a little twist back down. So now what I'm creating is something that can hang this okay. The chances that you're going to unspin all of this are slim to none so it's going to be nice and strong this way. At least for our application we're going to do maybe just pulling an animal up into a tree or lifting something that we can't just lift on our own that we need to wedge or something. So this is where we're at. So I'm going to cut this free on this side and then what I'm going to do with these ends is I'm going to open one side back up again and I'm going to put it back over. So like think a double treble okay and what this is going to do is give me more strength here and it's going to keep this end from getting tied up with the rope. So I'm going to flip this to the other side and we're going to do the exact same thing again. I'm just going to slide this up towards the end, I'm going to open this line up a little bit, get a tight bite over it, flip it over and now my pulley system is almost complete. If I wanted to I can go ahead and tie off these two sides and trim that rope down which I'm going to do here in a second. But this is generally what we're looking at for our pulley. Our pulley is going to spin on the inside as our rope lies through there and we'll be able to hang this thing up. So let's give it a shot here. Let me get these ends tied up first though. All right so let's go hang this thing and see how it actually works. I think it's going to work awesome. It's going to be great. All right so this should be pretty good testing here. I'm going to put it right there. I'm going to use some line through it. You can see it's rolling really nice now. Okay so let's see how it works once we load some weight on there. All right pulley's working. We get a little bit of stickage. It's on a nail there. We get a little bit on the pulley itself in some certain spots where it starts to bind up a little bit but otherwise it's rolling fine and looks good. I like it. So I hope you enjoyed our wild pulley project although like I said at the beginning of the video this might be something that you never really need out here. Okay but it's a good skill to understand and know. There's a lot of good factors that we had to put into play here in order to make this thing happen. We had to cut notches. We had a determined size of wood. We got to practice our bow drill a lot. We learned something about rope. A mechanical advantage type situation. So a lot of good things for a bushcrafter to know overall and literally just a fun project. We're going to hang this thing in a cabin. It just looks cool overall and then you can always add on more of these. It would just take more work. You can make a block and tackle system out of this to gain that mechanical advantage for larger type moving situations. So definitely something worthwhile and fun to do. So give it a shot. Tell me if you make them. If you make it and you post it somewhere definitely tag me. I want to check out your invention but that's it. So fun day out in the woods with Dan. What else can you ask for other than you being in the woods? So you go stay in the woods. Check out our website. All classes, school, merchandise, all that good stuff. And until next video stay in the woods. That's twice I got to say it.