Some crafts etc.

Springtime have been very busy as always, a lot to do around house and my woodsproperty. Also I have spent quite a lot of time with Bushcraft Finland Forum which I moved to commercial operator from free service cause free server had a lot of problems and downtime. Now everything works well and we have very active finnish group there and not so active international side, which we hope to get more chatters in the future.

Knife

I have been long time wanted to make very simple knife commonly called "maasepän puukko" in finnish. Idea of that knife was that blade is hand forged (this time I got it readymade), handle simple carved with knife without bolsters and no modern glues used. Only electric tool was a drill cause I simply don´t have any hand drills yet. I´m curious to see how this thing will last of fair use (not abuse, but normal knife use), cause trend seems to be that bushcraft knives should be overbuilt-fulltang-jack-of-all-trades-workhorses. :)

So here we go:

First step was to get some wood just from the woodshed and start to shape it after drilling hole and shaping it with saw-bit.

Blade and piece of wood. That piece of brass was not used on project. And tang was shortened around 7cm long.

Rough shaping with knife that I made earlier here. Blade is just pounded into woodstick, no glues.

Work continues..

Oh, wood cracked a bit when it dried on warm garage. :(

But I´m still going to continue despite of crack.

I decided to weave some strong line around the crack and made same other end too just for more nice look (maybe it strengthen the handle too)

Now handle is ready and fits my hand perfectly.

I thought to make birch bark sheath for my knife so next thing is to make wooden insert (lesta). I´m going to make rectangular insert to fit better on birchbark weaved sheath (let´s see if I can get it done, cause my weaving skills are not so good and also birch bark pieces I have are bit small..)

I draw blade lines on woodpiece with sharp knife.

Used chisel and knife to hollow area for blade.

When it fits perfectly I made coverpiece and hollowed that a bit too.

I thought that I want to without commercial glues so I thought to make some "pine pitch glue". I will need some pine resin and fine ash atleast. I went to collect resin I found it from spruce nearby and make mix.

spruce resin collected into tincan.

I cooked it on fire carefully (don´t let it to combust) and added some ash and coal, quite sticky stuff and good smell..

When got glue ready I tried to glue wooden insert halves together, but mix was not quite right, glue dried very fast and glass hard, so it didn´t make strong seam at all...I abandoned that idea and thought to experiment with thist stuff more later. Have to solve that problem some other way.

Solution was use same strong line and I just weaved parts together. Suppose to be OK, It will be inside of birch-bark sheath anyway.

So that´s it. Part II "the sheath" will follow later...


Awl

Another small project I thought to make is awl for leatherworking. I found some very old awl-blades so got the idea to make my own. Here we go:

First I shaped handle with knife using same wood that on my knife project.

After shaping I treated it with old school tar oil which gives nice color and smell.

Handle fits into my hand very well and I strengthen it a bit with same method that  on my knife-project.

Awl ready to use, I kind of like this kind of rough carved finish instead of vey smooth sanded finish. Like that it have much more characteristics, don´t you think so?

Nordic Knives

I just found great blog about nordic knives and knifemakers. Primary focus is on puukkos from Finland. Be sure to check that out, great info about smiths behind their works:

Nordiska Knivar

Woodsworking tools: billhook (vesuri in finnish)

Billhook is traditional clearing tool in Finland and typical model have around 20cm blade which ends into hook that works also like small scythe (pull cut). Mostly I use that hook for moving cut branches away and it also protects blade when you cut near ground (hook hits ground when blade is untouched).
There´s one and two handled model and it´s very handy for clearing saplings and even small trees aswell as general purpose bladed tool for all kind of heavy woodcutting. Novadays Fiskars made some 95% of billhooks in Finland and it´s modern glassfibrereinforced plastic handled with teflon coated blade. It´s great and strong tool, but not so traditional. There´s still makers of traditional billhooks and here are few:
Härmän Taonta
YP-taonta
Metallituote Saarela Oy

You can also find often very good old handforged billhooks from fleamarkets, huuto.net (like ebay). Here´s one I just got for 15€:

Seller said that it´s from 1930-1940 and maker unknown. Overall length is 55cm and cutting edge around 23cm, blade 5mm thick. It´s little heavier side and can be used one or two handed (barely). Blade is very good condition and ready to work. Handle is roughly carved (replacement I think) and have bit leuku like poll. It´s attached into blade with two flathead screws. I think I´m going to make new bit longer handle at some point. Tip: Billhooks could be very good low cost alternative for heavy leuku when you just cut hook off to get like sheepfoot style tip. (it´s known to be used like that among reindeer herders of Lappland, where axe have mostly no use cause there´s no big trees).

Snowcave (lumikammi in finnish)

Snowcave (in finnish lumikammi) is very handy shelter which can save your life in winter. I started to make one in our backyard.
First you collect pile of snow let´s say 2x3m and some 1,5m high. Then wait for few hours so snow becomes harder (you can beat pile with your shovel a bit to make process faster) after that if you want you can push around 30cm stick around pile to avoid thinning it´s walls too much when digging the cave. If you want to make things simple and there´s two guys digging you can do it from opposite directions and close one end of the tunnel at the end. Then you make breathing hole into ceiling with skipole or like and you can leave it there so you can open breathing channel if snowing. You can also make your "bed" higher than cave floor to let cold air go down there. Doorway you simply close with your rucksack for example.

My pile was too short cause there was lack of snow, but right now it´s snowing so I can lenghten it and then sleep on it overnight later. So, to be continued...

Bushcraft Finland - new forum

As someone of you who visit our forum might noticed that it´s old version is not updated anymore. It was free server based and have run ok for few years, but have recently been soo slow and offline from time to time so I decided to move forum for finnish server, which isn´t free anymore though :( With great help of our BCFIN-members we have copied most of the content from old forum very fast (cause free server don´t allow backup databases). We want to keep that forum active and encourage members to share information there actively.


Long live new BCFIN-forum !!

http://www.bcfin.org/forum

ps. there´s international section aswell of all you non finnish speakers.


Here´s two version of same pic. 1st straight from camera and 2nd quite heavily edited. Which one you prefer?

BcFin official badge and almost official BcFin-knife The BushProwler by Ilkka Seikku

Bushcraft Finland meetup, Vihti, July 2012

This summer´s Bushcraft Finland meet was held on Vihti, southern Finland on a very beautiful spot near two small lakes. It was 2 days  happening starting on saturday and ending sunday. I only reachead place on saturday evening cause I was on summer holiday with my family and came back home quite late and needed to drive to Helsinki to pickup TimoA who was new face on our forum and wanted to attend that meet which was open to everybody. We decided to take bicycles into my car and leave car on start of one logging road where´s few kilometers to meeting point. So we did and reached place around 21:00 on evening and it was very easy to follow camp fire smoke and loud laughter to find other guys cooking lunch around campfire. :)

We didn´t had any "official program" there it was just mainly chatting around campfire and getting to know each other cause there was many newbies there. Sure we tried there many things and people learned new skills & tricks.

Akiri made this bucksaw out of fresh birch and after some trial & erros got it working quite nicely. So next one will be even better.

 

 

Time to cook some pasta so first I boiled some lakewater that it´s safe for foodmaking.

Guys showed off their small EDC survival kits so here´s mine on right side. That small knife I have planned to add into my kit, but need to change for bigger container first. On left there´s Rautasarvi´s very small "bare essentials" kit.

My kit opened. Quite typical set of binding materials, fishkit, means for fire, cutting tools, repair items etc.

Soon there was already dark and guys gathered around campfire to tell stories before sleep.

I slept on my Vihe-shelter which is quite unique mix of lean to and tent.

Next morning I tried make to fire from the birch that have cut last night. And it worked well when there was enough thin chips and I have dried some of them by rounding ball from them in my hands. Thanks from this picture goes to TimoA.

After that was time to make breakfast, oatmeal with fresh strawberries.

 

Very simple food but everything tastes good in nature.

Sunday afternoon was time to pack and take one group photo. It was very good time with good friends as always in BCFIN-meetings. And before leaving our tradition "Goodiebag" which idea is that everybody bring something small items into the bag and at the end lottery will tell who wins it´s contents

Rautasarvi was lucky bastard this time :D

...and here the GoodieBag content.

Thank you guys who made this weekend very memorable by being there!
Waiting next meet which I can attend...

Busy times

As you might noticed I haven´t been very active with my blog recently. It´s just cause I have been so busy with my daily life and have had some stuggles so I didn´t had time nor energy to concentrate writing. I still have many stories to tell from last summer and this autumn so you will see some blasts from the past when I´m trying to catch up. So stay tuned!