Ray Mears Bushcraft Paddle Video

Ontario Tourism is running a contest this summer involving a canoe package worth $10 000. The winner will get an all-expenses paid trip to Wabakimi Provinicial Park and paddle with some outdoor legends. The host guides are Ray Mears and Becky Mason. Here are some of the details from the official contest page

• Round-trip airfare from anywhere in Canada or continental United States to Thunder Bay, Ontario where the adventure begins and ends
• An 8-day fully outfitted trip including:
• Floatplane into Wabakimi Provincial Park for 5 days of guided wilderness camping, paddling, bushcraft and wildlife observation with Ray Mears and his team
• One night at Wabakimi Wilderness Eco-Lodge
• Tour of Fort William Historical Park
• All meals
• Plus $2,000 in outdoor gear from SAIL

There is a promotional video making the rounds that shows brief footage of Mears making a bush paddle with an axe and crooked knife. Here is the screenshot at the 1:36 mark. Beauty!

In the summer of 2014, Ray visited Wabakimi for his own excursion. His blog post about the journey is filled with lovely text and photos. Here's one of Ray making a paddle on that trip:

Photo Courtesy: The Ray Mears & Woodlore Blog
Original Link

Over on the CanoeTripping.net forums, a member began a thread about the minimal tools required to make an emergency paddle in the wilderness. Most respondents (myself included) mentioned the use of an a saw, axe and crooked knife as ideal, but the original poster correctly points out that few folks trip with an axe anymore and the crooked knife is even more rare. A few folks have come up with ideas for an emergency paddle including using duct tape and barrel lid. Creative!

Another Crooked Knife Project

Over the winter, I've been working on another smaller project...another attempt at a crooked knife from a file. My first attempt is still very functional, but prolonged use like in carving the bushcraft spruce paddle from the summer left my wrist quite sore. Many crooked knives I've seen have dramatically angled blades (nearly 45 degrees to the plane of the handle) and this seems to ease wrist strain while allowing for the skewing cut of the knife to delicately shave off wood. Below are some examples I had pulled from the net somewhere.


While back in Turkey visiting family in '09, I had stumbled across a perfect crook in an Olive Tree branch from my Great Uncle's abandoned property. It seemed to match my hand perfectly and even had an indent for the thumb-rest from a healed branch wound. The piece was cutoff and brought home and gradually shaped into a a leaner handle.


A broken branch crook; Fit my hand nicely


Shaping the handle
The blade was made from another old file (this time with an angle grinder and cutting disk) and after a little amateur blacksmithing, an offset tang was bent into shape. For this one, I decided not to bend the tip of the blade up as my intentions for this knife are for softwood shaving for paddle blades and cedar canoe ribs & sheathing.


The Blade
A slot was carved into the top of the handle to fit the tang. This was all trial and error until it sat nicely in the wood.


Tang slot carved
The handle was whipped tightly with waxed linen thread and everything is nice and secure. For the decoration, I wanted to leave as much of the handle bare as there were some nice grain patterns in the olive wood. Along the edges of the thumbrest, I burned a chip carved pattern.


Decoration Burned
Here is the completed knife all oiled up and ready to go...

Bushcraft Paddle Attempt: Take 2

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadian visitors. Had some time today to upload some more paddlemaking pics from this summer. After my pitiful attempt at a bushcraft paddle back in 2009, I decided to take another try at making a paddle with just an axe and crooked knife. This time around, rather than harvest the wood from a downed tree, I ended up using a left over scrap from splitting the 2x10 spruce board for the canoe pole project.


Split spruce chunk
This piece of spruce had a nice, straight grain for the shaft area (if I avoided the conspicuous knot) and at 5" wide was perfect to try another design. I wanted to try a straight sided Eastern Cree paddle like the kind I posted on here and are illustrated below:


Fresh spruce paddles hung to limit warpage
This style of paddle also feature prominantly in the NFB film, Cree Hunters of the Mistassini and I've posted a screenshot of Sam Blacksmith using such a paddle on a previous post. Apart from the obvious green paint, this one has a distinct spine to add some rigidity to the narrow blade design.


Sam Blacksmith paddling his paddle
Once the blade shape was roughly hewned with the axe, a series of cuts were made in the shaft area with my homemade bucksaw. More axe work and the shaft region was taking shape which was later cleaned up with the crooked knife.


Saw cuts in shaft area; shaft roughly hewn out
After a while, my little one came over with his toy dump truck and started collecting shavings to transport down to the beach, dumping each load in the sand and then returning for more. This continued every few minutes for about 2 hours. Definitely distracting, but it kept him quiet and occupied him at least.


Collecting shavings dump truck game
By the next day, I had progressed to working down the blade and was beginning to shape the handle.


Crooked knife work; Starting to take shape
At this stage, I had started carving a simple roll style grip, but later changed my mind to form a more roundish, flat style which seems to be more consistent with these Eastern Cree Designs in the Canadian Museum of Civilization collection.


Blade Closeup; Grip Photo
I've read of craftsmen using the crooked knife with such skill as to carve a paddle perfectly smooth, leaving no tool marks and requiring no sanding. It'll be a while before my skills progress to that level, but I'm still happy with the relative smooth results I got with this spruce attempt. Still some tool marks on the blade and the shaft isn't perfect, but overall it's a functional paddle that was made lazily over a weekend, and could probably be done in a rush in a few hours of concentrated work.


A weekend's project
Don't think I'll be burning decorations on this one as spruce doesn't take pyrography very well. Maybe I'll dabble in a painted decoration over the winter.

July 23, 2011: UPDATE - Paddle has been decorated. See the final post here

Orien Blade Crooked Knife

A while back while working on my first crooked knife blade from an old file, I got discouraged with the speed of progress without power tools. In a moment of self-doubt about whether I could finish the project, I ended up ordering a crooked knife blade from Orien MacDonald after coming across his page on Etsy. I liked look of his blade, especially the fact that it was offset from the tang allowing for a greater and more comfortable angle for carving. Here is the blade he made for me with a traditional, bent tang.


New Crooked Knife Blade
When working out ideas of the handle, I had collected some pieces that were promising options. For this knife, I decided on the yellow birch handle (2nd from top) in the photo below:


Handle choices
It was shaped with some rasps and a spoon carving knife to hollow out the thumb rest area. I decided the decorate the birch with some basic woodburning patterns to mimic the chip-carving I've seen on various knives. Here's one angle of the completed knife handle.


Decorated Handle
The bottom was chiseled out to fit the tang and the blade secured with leather lace. Here's the finished knife below showing off the offset angle of the blade from the handle as well as the curving angle of the blade from the horizontal view.


Offset from handle's axis


View from the horizontal plane
Here's a comparison shot of the new "Orien Crooked Knife" and the homemade Olive Crooked Knife. The homemade blade is longer, thinner, and flat and I can see it working well when shaping canoe ribs and larger surfaces like a paddle blade. For all around carving though, the Orien Knife would look to be more versatile to carve out paddle grips, the shaft, spoons, bowls, and other bushcraft items.


The budding crooked knife collection

Crooked Knife Refurb

While sharpening the homemade crooked knife and practicing on some scrap cedar a while back, the lashed blade began to jiggle and loosen. I quickly realized that the knife needed to be more secure if I was going to use it as a serious carving tool.

One thing I had forgotten to do when originally assembling the knife was bend the tang of the blade at a sharp angle to hook onto the handle wood and prevent movement. After quickly heating up the tang in the cottage fireplace, I bent it up slightly to conform to the angular shape of the handle then bent a sharp hook at the end. The piece of wood selected for the knife had a knot right at the bottom and by sculpting out a hole (with an awl), the hook fit securely into place. The original waxed thread whipping was replaced with flat leather lace I had on hand...much more comfortable. Even though the bottom of the knife looks ugly, the whole thing is amazingly secure with this change.


Bent tang in place


Hook end inserted into carved hole
I had also decided to decorate the handle by burning on a sort of chip-carving motif. The whole decoration was first sketched using pencil and that's what you see in the pics.


Chip-carved motif on handle
This was my first time burning on olive wood and sure enough, the naturally oily material gave off a slightly sizzling aroma. Unfortunately, it also burned unevenly and required constant cleaning of the metal nibs. In the end the pattern turned out too blotchy and I ended up sanding the whole thing off in frustration at the poor quality of the image. Here's the plain, refurbish version ready for some carving...


Resanded to remove the intended pyrographic decoration


Perfect fit for the one-and-only user

Bushcraft Style Cedar Paddle - Lessons Learned

Last summer I attempted a bushcraft style paddle hewn from a log with an axe and shaped with a crooked knife. It was a mini paddle meant as practice and it turned out to be a nice little toy for the boy. Earlier this year, I endeavoured to make a full sized one to go with the bark canoe. I wasn't going to post about this attempt due to the fact it ended being an utter failure, but figured maybe the lessons learned could be useful to someone attempting the same thing. So here goes...

Sourcing out the cedar proved to be a hassle again as most of the cedar in my area grows on very uneven terrain and tends to have a pronounced twist. I managed to find some downed trees at the top of cliff-face and decided to try and cut out a log from the knot free section of the tree in the foreground.


Tumbled cedar mess


Cutting with the one-handed crosscut
The terrain was quite hilly and with diffult footing I managed to cut the portion out with a 32" one handed crosscut saw, albeit on an angle. I figured I could clean up the ends after the log had been removed to more secure ground. A giant boulder behind the scenes served as a perfect area to support the log for various extra cuts and splitting the wood. At one point, I climbed up on top of the rock and then could easily split the log with old axe heads and a froe. Despite the pronounced twist on one side, 4 planks were salvaged that seemed to usuable to work with.


Splitting by the boulder; 4 usable pieces
The most suited piece was selected and roughly hewn into a paddle shape with a distinct blade and shaft area (piece of the far left of the photo above). I wanted to "freehand" this paddle to end up with a cedar replica of the Attikamekw paddle I've grown quite fond off. After sufficient axework in the bush, it was brought back to the cottage lakeside to finish off with my newly made Olive Wood crooked knife to do the final shaping. The knife worked great and the whole thing was evenly shaped very quickly.


Shaping with the crooked knife
A tripper-style grip with a mushroom head design was selected and shaped quite easily with a knife and rasp. Although as it was worked more and more, large chunks split off resulting in a thinner and smaller grip than intentioned. Despite being from the lower end of the tree, there were large internal knots to contend with which weren't visible when the log was being cut. Fortunately, I arranged these into the blade and grip areas.


Blade worked down; Blade closeup with knot; Final shape
I excitely took the paddle out to try with bark canoe and it worked well enough. Cedar is a springy, ultralight wood and it felt great using it with boat. I thought the blade could've been thinned out a little more however, since it didn't have the flex I desired. Once back in the garage, I tried flexing it to get a feel for it and SNAP...the blade ripped off right below the throat.


Snap, Crackle, POP!
The cruel fact is that I should've been more selective about the original cedar log. The pronounced twist in the grain resulted in a bowed, uneven shaft and the knots would've certainly weakened the wood. Perhaps leaving the whole thing thicker than usual would've prevented the breakage. In any event (I'm trying to be more positive lately), it was a fun way to spend the afternoon, some lessons were learned, and a fantasticly aromatic, cedar fire was had that night. But I haven't given up on making a bush paddle yet.

Crooked Knife Project - Birchbark Sheath

Came across some forgotten photos from the summer (on a different memory card that had been misplaced) of the birchbark sheath I had made for the Olive Wood crooked knife. Pinewood Forge has a nice little page documented the steps of a wrapped sheath for a small carving knife. I also found this set of instructions on Wilderness Rythyms which show a larger sheath for a knife. Here are some pics and my own instructions for anyone wishing to replicate this sheath.

1. Cut a strip of bark aproximately double the width of your blade and 4 times as long. Best to cut the strip from a thicker piece with the eyes of the bark parallel to the blade or they may crack open. For my knife, this meant cutting the strip from a large piece of bark left over from the canoe build. It had a natural split in it so I just continued the cut and cleaned up the edges with the sharp crooked knife.



2. Soak the bark in water to soften it and fold in half, then bring the the ends to the centre fold line.



3. Cut another narrower strip about the same length for the wrapping. To prevent cracking, I thinned this piece out by delaminating a couple of layers. This also lightened the colour to add a nice contrast.



4. Now the tricky part. The whole sheath is held with the tension of the wrap agains all these folded layers. Beginning at the bottom of the sheath, insert the wrapping strip on an angle and wrap around the main piece pulling tightly. After a single wrap, insert the end into the opposing folded slot and continue. You should end up with an alternating pattern that places the wrapping strip on the outside of the sheath then on the inner fold. Hopefully the pic shows this clearly



5. Trip the excess bark around the top of the sheath and tuck into the centre fold. Once the bark dries (quite quickly) it'll hold its shape quite nicely.



6. The sheathed knife. If you've selected healthy bark, it should not crack even when dry and have a little bit of springy give when removing the knife, sort of like thick leather.

Crooked Knife Project - Part 3: Carving Handle

Part of the whole fun of making a crooked knife is customizing the handle to perfectly fit your own hand. Allow me to indulge you with a little side story about my knife's handle. During the early summer, our family took a trip back to Turkey to visit our extended family and introduce our boy to his elders, including his 90 year old great grandmother.

She's lived in the same mountainous region all her life and our family made their living working the land and tending to their many small olive orchards dotting the countryside. Her elder brother (my great uncle), known for his physical endurance, was apparently in charge of some of the more rugged orchards that clung to the mountainside. While taking a break from his responsibilities one day, my great uncle went rabbit hunting in the adjacent foothills and suffered a stroke and died. As a sign of mourning, the family decided no longer to tend the orchard in this area and the olive trees simply aged and returned to their unpruned, wild state. Despite the encroaching urbanization of the area, the isolated location of the plot has allowed it to retain its wilderness feel.

With my grandmother's recollected memories of the location, I hiked through this hilly region to find some of the neglected trees in this family plot. The small goat path I followed eventually led me to a cluster of olive trees at the base of the Nif Mountain range's foothills where my great uncle passed away.


The "mourning" orchard - olive trees are the pale green cluster
Olive trees are beautiful and even give off a faint resinous aroma of their precious oil. Near the back of the plot where the old orchard gives way to tall pine trees, I spotted a tree with a curious broken branch whose shape seemed perfect for the crooked knife blade I had been working on back home.


A broken branch crook; Fit my hand nicely
I didn't have any tools with me, so returned back to the village and borrowed a neighbour's saw to cut this piece and a few other branches as samples the next day. Olive wood is a very dense hardwood, with a tight grain that makes it ideal for carving and shaping.

Once back home and continuing with the crooked knife project, I cut out and roughly shaped a few handles from scrap wood to get a feel for the best design. Below are some of the templates I had prepared. A cherry handle, yellow birch, and two olive branches brought back from Turkey. Lots of deliberation and second guessing, but eventually I settled on gently curving olive wood branch (3rd from top) rather than the naturally bent crook that had originally caught my eye as the former seemed to feel the best in terms of weight, shape, and grip comfort - although I flipped it around from the orientation shown in the picture below.


Handle choices
Once I decided on the handle and the blade orientation (angled off the centre line), I proceeded to mark and chisel out a slot for the tang to fit.


Underside of handle with chiselled slot
Using a piece of white birch from a log destined for the firepit, the shim piece was carved to also fit in the carved groove. The tension of these pieces held tightly with waxed whipping thread would hold the blade into position


Carved shim; Nice fit; Beginning whipping
To end the whipping a stitching needle was used to pull the excess line under the whip. The shot below gives you the idea, but I wrapped it several more times.


After a bit more sharpening on some wetstones and honing on a strop, the knife was holding an edge nicely. Here's a picture showing it in action shaving down some scrap cedar.


Action shot
Haven't decided if I'll decorate the handle with some pyrography or leave it as is. But I now have a working crooked knife with a bit of special family history.


The completed crooked knife

UPDATE: April 6/10: A post on improving the crooked knife lashing and securing the blade has been published.