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A lot of the time people ask me about making their own cordage when they're out in the
wilderness. I can tell you about some traditional cordages which is probably not the first thing
I would recommend, but work really well if you didn't have anything else to go with.
Sinew, which is tendon, you can see a bit of sinew right here in this leg bone, is a
great piece of cordage. There's also sinew that runs along the backbone or spine of animals.
So if you find even a small animal, you can get sinew from that animal.
What makes sinew really nice is that it also glues itself together. So if you wrap something
with sinew, if you want to use it to secure a split in a wood to put a point or knife
blade in, you don't have to tie it. You just wrap it on itself and as it dries, it'll glue
itself and bind. So that's a really nice type of cordage.
Hide from an animal is also cordage. You can use hide from any animal, but one thing that
people don't think about is they're covered in cordage. So if I wanted to get cordage
and I didn't want to find a dead animal or if I didn't want to find a root or grasses
or Dogbane and twist it into cordage, I could just look at what I'm wearing.
Oftentimes people have a hoodie on. There's a string that goes through the hood of your
hoodie and if you pull that out, you have cordage. If you don't have a hoodie on but
you're wearing pants, I would tell folks to start with the hem of their pants and take
your knife blade, stick it in, and cut around once, twice, three times. So my pants the
length of them is about eight inches so you get about 14 inches per time around. You cut
around four times you've got five feet of cordage. Four times around is this much so
if I cut this much off of my pants, I would have five feet of cordage. If I cut this much
off the other side, I'd have ten feet of cordage.
Now just by trimming this much off of my pants, I'm getting a good five feet of cordage. If
you look, there's not that much difference between one side and the other. I still have
as much coverage but I have ten feet of cordage if I trimmed off of both sides.
Other people will tell you you should use your shoelaces as cordage. These will work
as cordage except they're really nice to have to hold your shoes on. So even though a lot
of people don't use shoestrings in their shoes, if you're in the backcountry and you're moving
through rough terrain, it's nice to have shoelaces. If you do have to use your shoelaces, you
can cut them in half rather than using the whole thing and keep the top half tied and
the bottom half loose.
And if you have to make a bow drill, you can use cordage from your pants, you can use shoelaces,
you can use the string from your hoodie. And so cordage is one of the things that you need
to get fire if you're going to make a bow or if you're going to lash anything together.