Dear Parents and Carers:
During the next few weeks we intend to pursue traditional Scoutcraft, teaching our Scouts about axemanship, bush saws and knives.
We will teach good-practice dos and don'ts and use of woodcraft tools, encouraging responsibility and safety. We know this will be challenging for our Scouts, but we believe it will help develop responsibility and maturity.
Should you wish that your Scout not participate in an activity involving knives and axes, please make us aware of your wishes. You may choose to keep your Scout at home on those days. We will, of course, support your decision.
Please note that even after a Scout earns the Knife Badge, Scouting regulations prohibit the carrying of a knife under any circumstances without the express permission of the Scout Leader, and even then only when the Scout is in camp or is directly supervised.
Many thanks,
Your Scout Leaders
[That isn't a work of pessimistic fiction -- it's typical of letters sent to parents and "carers" of Scouts in the U.K. these days.]
As a kid I played with Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and an Erector Set. (Alas, no Legos.) The experience, which I suspect that many readers share, taught me how to envision something cool, beautiful or functional rising from a pile of parts.
Apparently the lessons stuck.
Tuesday morning, on my own advice, I surfed over to Wyoming Knife to order a spare bolt-and-wingnut for my Wyoming Saw I. It seemed inefficient, somehow, to drop just 80 cents (plus shipping), so I scanned down the list of parts -- and that's when it hit me.
I spent another $8.95, paid with PayPal and hoped that my Erector Set intuition hadn't misled me.
Here's the deal: Wyoming Knife doesn't promote the building-block design of its three collapsible bow saws, but descriptions and diagrams suggested to me that two additional parts might transform an 11-inch Wyoming Saw I into an 18-inch Wyoming Saw II. I decided that nine bucks was a reasonable price to pay for confirming a hunch.
The package arrived yesterday. Here's my original saw, pictured with the newly acquired frame tube and longer wood blade:
Adding the frame tube and swapping blades gives me this:
Ain't modularity great?
Like I said on Monday, there are times when "a longer blade...would make things go faster." And although the Wyoming Saw I will remain as-is in our emergency kit, the 18-inch version will be another handy tool for dispatching backyard woodpile chores.
Incidentally, just in case anyone is wondering about converting either of those saws to the mid-size Wyoming Saw III, all it takes is a replacement frame tube, a 14-inch blade and $7.49 (plus shipping).
In closing, I want to give the folks at Wyoming Knife "props" for quick shipping -- Colorado to Ohio in two days via USPS First Class Mail is damned impressive. Also, to my surprise, they enclosed a nifty-looking little knife at no additional charge.
I'm not sure what I'll do with the made-in-USA Wyoming Camp Knife (MSRP $4.95). Its double-grind recurve blade is three inches long, made of some sort of stainless at RC 66-70 (so stated). The exposed tang, secured by two brass pins, extends roughly halfway into the handle, which is laminated wood.
The recurve makes it a slicer, obviously, and it feels like a decent food-prep knife. Once I've put my personal touch on the edge, I think it'll find a home in our camp kitchen.
Our holiday haul came with a gift card, which we split among us. I used my share to buy a saw for our family preparedness kit.
The US-made Wyoming Saw I is the smallest of three collapsible bow saws offered by Wyoming Knife Corporation (which is headquartered, oddly enough, in Colorado). I judged this one to be best for our purposes -- 11-inch blade, 16 ounces, nylon case, $43.35 MSRP.
The Wyoming breaks down into six bits: two stainless-steel frame pieces, cast-aluminum handle, bolt, wingnut and blade. It's supplied with both a wood blade and a bone blade; a hacksaw blade also is available. Everything nests neatly and securely in the case, making for a very compact package.
Any time I try out a new saw, especially a collapsible bow, I can't help but compare it to the well-loved Sven Saw I've been using since the late 1970s. Since many KintlaLake Blog readers probably are familiar with the Sven, for scale I've included it in a few of the photos.
That said, it'd be neither fair nor useful to pit the smallest Wyoming against the bigger Sven in a head-to-head cutting contest, so I won't.
The Wyoming Saw I assembles quickly and cuts well for a short-stroker. This morning I ran it through some frozen ash from my woodpile and it did exactly what it's designed to do, with no drama whatsoever. A longer blade -- like the 14-inch Wyoming Saw III, the 18-inch Wyoming Saw II or the 21-inch Sven Saw -- would make things go faster, of course.
Each of the three Wyomings, as well as the Sven, employs a bolt-and-wingnut scheme for drawing the blade taut. That wingnut can go flying into low earth orbit at the most inconvenient moments, usually when assembling or disassembling the saw. (Don't ask me how I know.) It's a good idea to carry a spare.
I've rigged a simple wingnut-retention system, visible in the photo above. (Yeah, it's a Ranger Band.) If that should fail, Wyoming Knife will replace a lost or broken bolt-and-wingnut assembly at no charge -- all I have to do is drop them an e-mail. Nice perk, that.
Bottom line: I like this saw. Used within what I consider reasonable limits, it's a delightfully capable addition to our kit.
It's the perfect winter's morning -- there's snow on the ground, the sun shines from a clear sky and the winds are calm. Bitter as it is, it doesn't feel unpleasantly cold.
The temp hadn't reached 10°F when I headed outside to liberate our American flag, which had hung up on the front-porch gutter and froze fast. As I was putting the ladder away after, I spied my old Estwing carpenter's hatchet hanging on the garage wall and hatched an idea.
Grabbing the hatchet and a folding saw, I walked back to the edge of the woods. I'd had my eye on a dead hardwood, probably an Ohio Buckeye, for a while now. At four inches in diameter and about eight feet long it'd be easy to process. And because it was a "leaner," held off the snow-covered ground by surrounding growth, it was ideally dry.
I used the saw to cut it into three portable sections -- crown, trunk and base -- and hauled it home in one trip. After stripping twigs and smaller limbs, I bucked the trunk (with the saw) into 12-inch lengths.
A carpenter's hatchet may not be my first choice to split kindling, but for this backyard fire I'm using backyard tools. My antique-store Estwing worked just fine cleaving the dry, frozen wood (stubborn knots notwithstanding).
I made one more trip back to the tree line, harvesting a couple of resinous pine stubs to serve as a natural firestarter. Less than 45 leisurely minutes after I began, I had the makings of a respectable fire.
One of the best things about this morning's exercise, I think, was doing the job with less-than-ideal hardware -- a used hatchet and a cheap lawn-and-garden saw. It's a reminder that skills, not tools, matter.
I'm not sure when we'll light our backyard fire -- maybe later today, maybe tomorrow. That'll be Part II.
Our house sits on a postage-stamp lot, a tiny patch of land in a Midwestern village. On its face, it appears to offer little in the way of natural resources.
A closer look reveals what a first glance doesn't.
I believe this post will be the first of a series I'll call "Urban Resources" -- seeking and finding materials often discarded and practices neglected. Today I'll talk about making use of a ridiculously simple source of firewood for our backyard pit or, in a pinch, the indoor fireplace.
There are but four trees on our lot -- two maples, a crabapple and a 60-year-old ash. On township property to the east are a magnificent bur oak and a catalpa, each estimated to be 180 years old, as well as a handful of tall pines and spruces. Our southern neighbor's sweetgum and poplar hang over our driveway.
Because all of those trees are relatively mature, they shed onto our lawn every day -- just how much depends on the weather. I've made an early-morning ritual of collecting fallen wood and carrying it to a semi-tidy pile I've built behind the garage.
It's not all small twigs, either. We had an arborist prune the ash of dead limbs back in May, which added some respectably large rounds, and our decrepit crabapple seems to lose a branch or two every time the wind blows.
Bucking the larger limbs requires nothing more than a pruning saw, although occasionally I resort to using a small chainsaw that operates on rechargeable batteries. I also break out my old Estwing hatchet from time to time. The tool I use most often, however, is a machete.
Specifically, it's 22-inch Collins that I've had for 27 years. The blade is stained and the edge is nicked, and the fractured phenolic handle is wrapped in adhesive tape -- that is, it's just about broken-in. A few minutes' attention with a flat file and a genuine Carborundum stone is all it takes to keep the blade brutally effective.
In four months I've gathered about one-third of a cord of imperfect firewood for my inelegant woodpile. Yes, much of it is kindling and some of it is tinder, but I figure I have enough wood for about a dozen good cooking fires -- so far -- and every bit of it was free.
In the next installment, I'll talk about a surprising source of the ultimate natural firestarter: fatwood. Stay tuned.
