Rain, Shelter, Shovel and Fire - UK Bushcraft / Survival

Hello there, thanks for tuning in, and welcome back. This video is going to be quite long, and I'm going to split it into three parts, and each one of those parts will have a timestamp, so if you look in the video description, if you want to watch all of it, just start from the beginning, go right through to the end. If you only want to watch certain parts, go to the video description, click the timestamp, and it'll jump straight there. Basically what this video is about is firstly building a shelter. Second section is going to be showing this little emergency spade close up on a tabletop. It is not a tabletop review though. I really don't like those things. I like to see the things being used. And that's what you're going to get in the first section. You're going to get this being used to create a shelter. Third section will be just a short video from a friend of mine who was inspired by one of my earlier videos and he tried to light a fire with a fire steel using a tinder fungus. So if all that sounds good to you, by all means, keep watching. But if that doesn't sound good to you, say you can't be bothered to watch the shelter building video, you're a master of building shelters, you don't need to learn anything, skip through. If you want to find out about this. You want to see my friend Craig lighting a fire for the first time with a fire steel? Flick forward to the third section. Hope you enjoy this video. I'll thank you in advance for watching but I'll no doubt thank you again at the end. Check it out. Okay in order to test this shovel I've traveled out in less than perfect conditions because let's face it, they are the best conditions to practice in. It's chucking it down with rain, it's very cold, it's very dull, everything's wet but see the shovel just hanging in the tree there? I'm actually just going to make a simple shelter there. The ground drops away, both sides. It's a good vantage point down there. We've got the river, we've got a stream coming in. So if you're going to have a shelter, it would be a very good place to actually build one. To be honest, this video is more about testing the gear than it is about building a shelter. But hopefully I can throw a few tips in about shelter building as well. And you might just learn something, so stick around. Hopefully you can see that there. It's 12.22. So it's just afternoon. I'm going to give myself two hours. Two hours is hopefully a reasonable amount of time to build a good shelter, a good weatherproof shelter. It may take a little bit longer than that if you're not used to shelter building, but let's see what we can do in two hours with the Chafon emergency shovel. First thing I'm going to do is take my big, heavy, knitted woolen jumper off, try and keep it quite dry so it's going to be tucked away underneath an overhanging tree or something. Hopefully I can keep these blooming water spots off the camera. It's absolutely chucking down. I need a big, strong ridge to go in here. There's a cleft of a tree here where two branches come out. I'm going to put a solid piece of wood in here and then build off that just like this. That'll do. That looks alright. This side here is going to be our entrance. Basically what we're looking to do is just fit branches across here and also off the side of here. Cover it with vegetation, make it weatherproof, hopefully give ourselves a nice little shelter. I would like to dig this out to give us a flat bed but I'm going to leave that till last because at the moment everything on top is soaking wet. If I clear all that off where I'm going to be lying is going to be soaking wet as well, so I'm not clearing that off yet. I'm going to be trying to use this as an axe as well, seems pretty sharp. Hopefully it'll be solid enough to be up to the task, not at that point yet. What I need to do is just look around the place, gather up loose branches like this, lay them all on, and then get this fella into action. A reasonable amount of sticks there, there's not enough, but I'll just basically show you how to put them onto your central ridge. Obviously some are longer than others, just snap them to length and lay them on. Right, we're going to have this little bit as our entrance. When I get nearer completion I'll pan around so you can see it. I'm going to come in here, sit in there, nice. If need be, we can bring the fire inside. Use this as a heat deflector, keep the heat on us and hopefully let the smoke out, not make it into a little smoke lodge. All these little bits I'm snapping off will be good for firewood, I'll keep those close at hand. Now the ones near the top of the ridge, I always like to hang them over a little bit because when we cover this with vegetation it'll give the doorway just that little bit more protection from the weather. Now don't worry if some of these are look a little bit spindly and aren't very strong. When they're combined they will give good strength which will allow you to put plenty of material on top of here to make it weatherproof. Let's go and get some more sticks. Just a little tip you notice how that's bowed have it so that the bow is facing up over that gives you more room inside and also gives the structure more strength once you start packing it. Now at this point you're probably thinking to yourself that guy's a total arse he hasn't shown anything of that shovel yet. Well, bear with me. For most structures like this, you don't actually need any tools. What I'm going to do with that tool, though, is make the structure a lot more livable and a lot more weatherproof. So, bear with me. I'm going to be using this fella as an axe or a machete. See what we can do. Not bad. Got to make sure that it's screwed in, though. You can't let it unscrew, otherwise it's probably knacker it. That's not bad. I would imagine it would work the same in fir trees. Chop the branches off fir trees, they make an excellent cover. Unfortunately I'm in a deciduous woodland, no fir trees anywhere, so we're gonna have to make do with holly. I'm gonna put the bare minimum on then I'm gonna get on to the next stage because I've given myself a two hour window and I'm eating into that. Hopefully you can see that that's got quite a lot of leaves on and if I put those on upside down that's going to shed the water very well. We could basically just make up a big mat of that And then hold it down with sticks. But I'm just going to put a few on and I'm going to hold it down with something else. None of the deciduous trees are in leaf yet, hence I'm using the holly. There you go. You can see it's starting to green up now. With a little bit more time, we could pretty much get it weatherproof just with the holly. Although I think it would be about this thick. Let's get on to something else. Right, out the front here, we want somewhere where we can have a fire. So instead of just digging a hole, I'm actually going to strip this top layer off. And this top layer has got woodrush growing all over the forest floor. I'm going to basically lift it up a little bit like a carpet and I'm going to use that to cover the shelter. It gives excellent insulation and it also makes it weatherproof as well. There you go, we've got a lovely carpet, it's almost like a tile and we're going to cover the entire structure with this which will take a long time but it's going to make it awesomely warm and very waterproof as well. We'll basically start from the bottom and work our way up. There's a good one, seems to work okay. Right I'm down to the clay there, that's good enough. Put a few rocks around, good place for a fire. Let's get the carpet dug up. Now unfortunately when I was adjusting this from being a flat spade-like shovel to being a pick, I jammed my finger in here whilst I folded it up and underneath all that muck there there's quite a deep cut but it's all part of the learning curve, it's the sort of thing that happens and it doesn't bother me. Obviously it's going to get full of muck, I'll just give it a good wash when I get home. Talking of muck, this thing is up to the eyes in muck. I think before I try out any of the gear inside of here, I need to give it a damn good wash. So I'm going to find the nearest stream after I've made the shelter. Just a quick note, keep your hands well away from the business end of this because it's damn sharp. If you're hanging on like that, you're stabbed straight into your hand, chances are you'd lose a finger. Keep them well out of the way. You know, have them up here whilst you're working. There you go. Awesome coverage for our shelter. Well this is a very good tool for digging up a carpet of woodrush. Obviously if the forest you're in hasn't got woodrush you can dig up turf, you can cover it with leaves and then use branches to keep the leaves down. You can use branches from trees if they've got leaves on or if they're from a coniferous wood, pine wood. Numerous ways you can build this shelter. So far so good. That's looking good but there's not much space in there. I'm going to do the same trick as I did when I stripped the carpet off Inside of here. Now that this is more or less covered over, anything I strip out of here, what's underneath it should remain dry. So that's why I'm doing it this way. It makes it a lot more restrictive, with minimal space in here. Makes it more difficult, but it keeps the inside dry. I'm going to pull off the surface skin here, which is made up of the woodrush, dig down a little bit, and make myself a livable sort of a space in here. Well, not livable. Sleepable. Something that I can sleep in. It's obviously, it's not a house. It's a shelter. And I'm actually using the saw blade part of here just to saw up the sides and then I'm going in with the shovel to lift out the wood rush. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now before it gets too dark to see in there, I'll just show you what I've done inside with the little shovel. Maybe it's too dark to see. But I've basically levelled all that lot out. It was reasonably easy, although it was very restricted. I'll put the rest of the wood rush on the top of here. Then that'll be our shelter just about done, then we can maybe see about lighting a fire. I think I'll need a good wash up first before I even attempt to pull that thing apart though. We've got a fire steel in the bag, at the moment we've got the little knife in the handle but we unscrew this, put the fire steel in and hopefully we'll be able to light a fire with just what is provided. Let's get the shelter finished first though. Two quick notes about what I'm doing here, I'm basically just stripping off the plant matter from the top. So there's very little soil in there. It's mostly roots and plants. Therefore, if it rains really heavily, there's not going to be loads of soil dripping down inside the shelter. That's pretty important. And also, this stuff that I'm stripping off, woodbrush, repopulates very, very quickly. There's a huge bare patch here. By the end of this year, it'll be just like this. Full of plants. Don't worry about that at all. Damn good stuff. Okay, that's the shelter done. See how long it's taken, less than two hours, 13:54 there so that's, what's that, an hour and a half? That gives me a spare half hour to get cleaned up, to get this little lad cleaned up and hopefully make a fire within our time limit. Let's get going. Yep that's steeper than it looks. Good looks. Now because it's still chucking down with rain I'm going to try and light the fire in here where it's sheltered. Now whilst I was gathering the wood I've got this piece which is rotten, obviously the outside of it's wet but the inside of it should be dry. I should be able to light a fire with this, hopefully. I'm going to take the knife off and put the fire steel in. These aren't ideal conditions for lighting a fire, everything is absolutely saturated but I'm going to try and do it au naturel to keep it real as it were. Let's see yeah we might get something out of that. I'm using the end of the knife which is a fish disgorger. And I'm just roughing this up, basically just making it into loads of little bits that should take a spark. Don't really want to use that knife because it's nice and sharp. I'll use that. I think it's too wet. I'm gonna try and find some birch bark. Everything's soaking wet. Wet. Well, I would call that a win. 14.09. So about 10 minutes, 15 minutes within our allotted two hour time limit. Get it man. Within the two hour time limit with the aid of this fella. We managed to build a nice shelter and we also managed to make fire. I would definitely call that a successful mission. Okay so this is our shelter. See the overhanging bit there that I was talking about before just to give the entrance a little bit extra protection. Probably do with another bit of carpet up on top of there but um it's looking all right. Got a big enough entrance there. I haven't got a base to sleep in yet but um I think I might come back to this shelter. Just outside here, that's where I'm going to have the fire. I haven't even put the stones around there yet. That was not part of the mission. And this is standing on the top of the hill, looking down. There's our shelter. Pretty well camouflaged, eh? Not bad. I like that. Well, this fella helped immeasurably. Seems very, very well made. I didn't manage to break anything, which was a major bonus, because I did use it as an axe. I used it as a shovel. I used it as a pick. I didn't use the knife part, oh yes I did, I used the knife part to rough up the birch bark and I used the fire steel to actually light the fire. I didn't use the wire cutters, I had no need for that. I didn't use these little hexi bolt removers either, no need for that. I didn't use the scale, I didn't use the saw, oh I did, I used the saw on here to saw through the ground in here to make removing the wood rush easy. So I used quite a few features on this and I am impressed. I like it and the good thing is after all that work it's still as good as new and I didn't break anything. I'm really pleased because I managed to build this weatherproof shelter from scratch and also light the fire within a two hour time limit. Two hours might sound like a long time but it isn't. It really isn't a long time to build a shelter especially Especially when you're by yourself, if you're with other people. Knock one up in half an hour, 40 minutes or so, everybody is assigned different tasks, everybody mucks in and helps, but when you're by yourself, you're doing it all by yourself. So if you can have a tool, the likes of this, to help you, it makes the job a lot easier. Now if I've made this shelter in a coniferous forest, that's like a pine wood, Obviously there wouldn't have been the woodrush all over the floor, so I wouldn't have covered the shelter with woodrush. I probably would have used pine branches because they're an evergreen, in which case I would have probably used either the saw, although I don't think it's very sharp, especially not since I've been sawing through the ground with it. I would have used the saw or possibly the sharp edge of this spade to actually hack through the branches and then lay them on to cover the shelter. Pleased with the way it went though. I'm obviously up to the eyes in muck, soaking and I'm starting to get cold but I do have a dry jumper sitting in a secret place. I'm going to get this whipped off, dry jumper put on, get home, have a shower and start editing the video. I will come back to this site because I haven't finished this little fireplace off and I want to make it a smokeless fire so I'll show you how to do that. It's simple. Basically just use as rocks, but we'll get that built on the next trip and I'll also put in a bed of some sort Which will probably be woodrush when it's dry. It's no point ripping it up and putting it in when it's soaking wet. Hope you've enjoyed this video check out my other videos There's loads on all different topics including bushcraft and survival and so on. This one was more survival than bushcraft But there's plenty out there, and if you enjoy them, give them a thumbs up, share them anywhere you want. See you next time. Thanks for watching. Oh, before I go, just a quick note. This compass on the top of here actually works. It's not like those ones you used to get on the Rambo knives in the 80s and 90s, where they would just spin, or they would just point different places depending on which angle you were holding it at. This one actually works. Now that makes a pleasant change. Something that actually works. That feels better. That might keep me alive until I get home. Well overall I was very pleased with this. It performed well. There was a few times when I was chopping little branches off, whoops, a few times when I was chopping branches off and I didn't hit them straight. It caused it to loosen a little bit so I had to make sure that it was always kept tight but it fairly went through them. Very sharp Which is great. The saw was good for sawing through the turf and the actual blade of the the spade itself is very sharp so it's just an all-round good if probably a little bit too expensive tool. I bought this as a treat to myself a while back and I haven't had an opportunity to use it so although it was raining I was just glad to get a few hours off and put it to use. Performed very well and I'm very pleased with it. I'll put a link to an Amazon page where you can get this from. I think it's actually only available on Amazon.com at the moment. I got it off Amazon UK, and I've checked that out, and it isn't available. The longer version is, so I'll probably put that in the video description as well. So if you're interested in this little fella, check those links out. Thanks very much for watching. Okay, this is the Chevron Compact Emergency Shovel R866. It comes in quite a nice bag, with a shoulder strap, you've got a spare pocket here, you've also got a belt loop on the back, and this is what we've got inside. That is basically it. So first of all, we've got the blade, this sort of semi-transformer sort of insignia on there, quite a sharp knife here, reasonably sharp edge to it, saw blade, couple of hex-nut holes, and a long screw thread on the back. And there's a little hole here, it's a wire cutter. You feed wire into there. Cut wire. Got a locking nut, mid part to the handle and a top to the handle which has got a compass in. We've also got a little screw in ferro rod there and I'll show you where that goes now. So in the top section here we have a hollow handle with this fella in. Now this isn't fixed, this can be removed but this consists of quite a sharp knife and bottle opener, Fish disgorger and a reasonably sharp saw. We can screw this fella in, which is the ferro rod. Hopefully that should allow us to start a fire with either the blade here or possibly the side of that can opener. Don't really want to use the blade, but we could if necessary. So let's see how this goes together. The top section here with the top part of the handle, screw that in. There's a rubber seal there as well to keep everything waterproof and to give it a really good tight fit. Screw the next one on. This is the mid part of the handle. Again, lovely tight fit. Now this one actually screws on a different way. This one goes anti-clockwise. So we screw the locking nut on, the blade, and then we screw the handle onto that. Also anti-clockwise. So we've got two anti-clockwise, two clockwise. Not sure why it works that way, but hopefully it'll make sense out in the field. And once we've got it put together, we can either have it flat, or we can tighten it up like that to use it as a pick. Just a little detail on the wire cutter there. Wire goes in this hole here, it's cut. These sections are hollow. Well, this one is. This one's got something in, obviously, but the middle section's hollow. No reason why you couldn't put a little survival kit in there. And also, you've got this bag. You can pack that out with stuff as well. You can basically have a full survival kit, plus your emergency shovel, in one place. There you go. All put together and ready for use. So, let's give it some use. I'll just sort of share this video with you. This is what you showed me with your... Your videos, so I've learnt to do this, crimp ball thumpers, which you've told me about. I went out and bought one of them, the Bear Grylls one, I hope this works. So you've seen me do that, there we go, cheers for that dude, probably saved somebody's life one day. Thanks a lot, just wanted to show you that dude, thanks a lot.