Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Joy of a $15 Knife

by Woodsbum

I am a big fan of custom knives. When I say, “big fan” I am talking about 6 of them and 3 others on order. My son has 2 that I bought him. Most customs cost around $350 on average, so I have made a substantial investment in cutting instruments. My distrust of production and dedication to custom knives has become so ingrained in my being that I actually have found myself giving a “meh” to everything but a Becker at Cabela’s the other day. That only got a “it’s ok.”

There does seem to be a couple exceptions to this whole custom knife kick I am on. One exception is my EESE’s. For whatever reason, I love these knives. They are simple, tough, and keep an edge like no other production knife I have seen EXCEPT my $15 knife.

My $15 Knife

My $15 Knife

This old Mora Classic 2 has been used, abuse, sharpened with belts, new edge put on with a belt sander, dropped, kicked, drowned, and it still shaves hair with only a little bit of time on a strop or stone. This thing is amazing. If you look closely, you can see how bent the tang/handle are. It is much harder to see in pictures, but is painfully obvious when using this knife. Long story short is that I have used it so much for fuzz and feather sticks that I bent it a bit.

Bent Tang

Bent Tang

Now many of you have already discovered the sharp steel goodness of the Mora line of knives. This was one of my first and the only one from the “old days” that somehow survived. Some were gifted to friends and family. Many more just ended up lost. I did break one while trying to baton a very hard piece of cedar that was borderline fatwood. Here is the final surviver of all the torture dished out upon the batch of Moras I got years ago.

As you can see, this has been slightly modified. I sanded down the bubble of a handle that comes on it for two reasons. One was to mellow out the bubble and the other was to get rid of the red lacquer that covers the birch handle.

Sanded and Grooved Handle

Sanded and Grooved Handle

As noted by several people, this industrial strength coating stinks and is so injected into the wood that there is NO way that it could be anything but harmful to your health. The worst part is that it gets REALLY slick and slimy after living in the PNW’s squishy environment. To help make it less “hazmat on a stick” I sanded the lacquer off and carved in a corkscrew type groove around the entire handle. I found that this made a HUGE difference in making the handle more PNW friendly.

I also had to make a modification to the spine of the blade.

Squared Off Spine

Squared Off Spine

So that I could use the spine of the blade to strike a firesteel, I squared off the back really well with a file. The lightly discolored area between the handle and the “dirt patina” as I call it gets the most use against a firesteel. I have actually used it so much that it is in need of a bit more squaring off and the edges have rounded out a bit.

My last modification to this knife was more for me than the knife. I built myself a sheath and made a matching firesteel. When you get your Mora it does come with a plastic sheath. Mine broke in less than 24 hours during its first camping trip. I also lost a couple knives because it fell out of the original sheath. My suggestion is to make something better immediately after getting your knife. The sheath I made has been waxed and Liquid Wrench is squirted inside the sheath to help keep the blade from rusting. This is very important here in the PNW. It gets so wet over the winter that anything you have used in the field will rust and keep on rusting. By heavily waxing the sheath and squirting oil into it very once in a while you knife will not be as apt to rust.

Mora Neck Knife

Mora Neck Knife

This $15 knife I ordered online has been a great knife for many years. Be aware of the following things that I have mentioned previously:

  • Handle needs detoxed from the red lacquer.
  • Original sheath is crap
  • Square the spine
  • Abuse, but no heavy batoning or it will break

Other than that, this knife is solid and will last you for years. Enjoy!!!!

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US Forest Service, An Axe To Grind

by Woodsbum

I ran across this video a while ago and thought you guys might like it. It is put out by the US Forest Service and is about logging, axes and shows some really amazing old growth video. The great part is that it covers about anything you ever wanted to know about an axe and didn’t know how to ask. This truly is a great instructional video.

Enjoy!!!

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Wyoming In the 1980’s Oil Bust – Part 2

by Woodsbum

My last post talked about what Wyoming was like when I was there in the early 80’s. It was a very difficult time and it caused us to live through what some would consider a SHTF type scenario. I know it really forced me to make changes in my life to cover my family if something like this ever happens again to us. Luckily, we were able to make it through by simply adapting and overcoming things as best we could. Eventually we did have to move to Texas with whatever we could salvage, but lasted for about 5 years before we lost our home. Considering how bad it was, we did pretty well.

This is how our family ended up making it through the ordeal.

Many of our friends were Mormon, which really saved our rear ends. My father would get me from school and take me out to go shoot wild game. I would bag a deer, antelope, rabbits, grouse, or some other wild meat, clean it, bone it, and bring out the meat in garbage bags and a backpack. We would use much of that meat, but would trade what we could to our Morman friends for canned items and other food stuffs. The one year I know I had to have harvested a couple dozen large game animals just myself. This was when I was in my later years of grade school (5th and 6th grade).

We were literally so poor, but still holding on, that I had to make and wear moccasins because we didn’t have the money to buy me new shoes. They were double hide buck skin that I had shot previously and ugly as sin. To this day I have a weird thing where I have to keep several pairs of shoes around me, even in my truck and under my desk at work. It just really messed with me and I still freak out when my kids (now grown) don’t have several pair as backups in case something happens.

At that time there was a bounty on coyotes. My father would get me from school and we would head out during the week to go get enough to make the difference in our house payment or electricity bills. I remember that the bounty was up to $75 per set of ears at one point. We would go out early in the morning and harvest a few rabbits that we would “fillet and release” back into the wild. In another words, we shot them and then spread their entrails around the fields after we cooked up the meat for breakfast. We would then call in the predators and shoot whatever had a bounty. Every once in a while we would get a fox. Those didn’t have a bounty, but we could sell the fur for over $100 if we didn’t mess it up too badly with the rifle.

My father and I would also hire out on farms and ranches to repair different equipment. I was only a kid, but I was very capable and proficient with driving different types of heavy equipment. Since my dad could fix almost anything and was an excellent welder, I would get a few extra dollars for us by running a tractor for such things as haying crews, mowers, etc or crane for scrappers pulling old oil gear. It was bad enough at times that I actually missed a few months of school here and there to help my father out on the road while he did mechanical work or welding.

Now what all did I learn from this 5 years of hell? That is a good question. I can tell you what some of the skills I know possess are and what changes in my life are a direct cause of this time growing up:

  • I know that I can hunt and fish efficiently enough to feed myself. This includes processing, preserving, and even smoking the meat to ensure the supply will last. Many may scoff, but that is how we ate and lived for 3 of those 5 years in Wyoming.
  • It is necessary to buy items that will be eventually used when you have the money. This includes ammunition, food, equipment, etc.
  • Learn from everyone even if you don’t agree with their religion or philosophy. The LDS church is huge on food preps and saving things for a rainy day. Many Asian cultures are also of this mindset. Interestingly enough, they all have their skills that many people “poo-poo” because of whatever reason.
  • Don’t be afraid to trade skills for items you need. I remember helping to process and butcher a moose in exchange for a portion of the animal. We ate on that for several weeks.
  • No situation is cut and dry. It will also change at least daily if not several times over the course of the day. After our family got set up with trading wild game for other food items, many other people started joining in. This also happened with the bounties on coyotes. It went from $75 per set of ears to $5 if I remember correctly. We ended up having to adapt and change how we made extra money several times and as quickly as possible.
  • Don’t be afaid to learn new skills. I can hunt, fish, trap, sew, cook, mechanic, weld, carpentry, lay cement, do flower arranging, pick out formal outfits and help fit women’s clothes, match perfume to skin type, clean jewelry, electrical, shoe horses, plumbing, break horses, train dogs, hydrolics, run heavy equipment, basic logging and land clearing, built structures from logs, auto body work…. The list goes on and on all because I realized that I have to be completely self sufficient to cover areas where others people are not and possibly turn a buck when needed.
  • Lastly, I no longer assume that I will be able to depend on anything or anyone. My only assumption is that I will have to be the one to do soemthing if it needs to be done. If I don’t know how to do something then I figure it out and learn. This has been one of my best traits as an adult. From rebuilding engines to replacing the roof on my house, I just research and do it. It saves money and allows me to know exactly where things stand after the fact. Plus, I have made money when needed by pimping my skills.

This really felt like a long post and I hope that this fulfilled my friend’s request that I put down some of the crap I had to deal with during that time and some of the lessons I learned from it. If not, I might be adding things here and there until it seems as complete as possible without giving away too much personal information…..

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Wyoming In the 1980’s Oil Bust – Part 1

by Woodsbum

I was talking to someone who mentioned that I should share a bit of my story as a way to help educate others, so I figured I would do a quick two part post and see if this helped anyone out. If nothing else, it helps give me a link to our family’s ordeal if I decide I need to pass this information along at a later date.

This first part will cover how I see myself and how things suddenly changed for us as a family. Of course we were not the only ones that had our life change, but considering my age at the time I will have to keep everything related to how I saw events unfold. This did change how I look at things as an adult.

The reality is that I have never considered myself a “prepper” in any stretch of my imagination. The whole idea of “prepping” brings up mental images of the people on Doomsday Preppers that are “prepping for the upcoming EMP due to ticking off X country and the ensuing volcanic eruptions because of X.” Their unsubstantiated fears have always bugged me thus I never wanted to be stuck with the handle of “prepper.”

Now why do I put things back for possible bad times? It was learned after the bottom fell out of the oil industry while living in Casper, WY. I was in grade school at the time and still remember the initial impact and what it was like for everyone after the fact. Let me start with the first time I truly understood how bad things were:

My first realization as to the impact of oil and fossil fuel slowdowns was when the richest kid in school was pulled out and moved away. We all hated this girl because her family had everything. This was the early 1980′s and her family had cable TV in several rooms, Atari consoles, an indoor swimming pool, hot tub, and the girl seemed to have every new product that had come out recently. She was always dressed very well and on her birthday our entire class was bussed over to a pizza place where all our expenses were paid to play games, eat, and “kid party” with her. Both her parents were geologists for oil companies and I remember both of them having new “his and her” Corvettes. Well, when per parents came and got her things had changed. They were in a newer station wagon that was pulling a trailer. She had been crying at school for several days and she told us that their parents had lost everything because the company that their parents worked for had closed down the local offices. That day they had put all their remaining posessions (after selling as much as they could) into this car and trailer and were headed to a small piece of property they owned that wasn’t taken.

I also have vivid memories of the local banks just pushing mobile homes into a landfill at the edge of town because they had been reposessed/forclosed upon and taking the loss was less of a financial impact than letting the mobile home sit. A large group of oil field workers has actually built a tent city just outside of town in a multiple acre park. We are talking about something that looked like an overfilled KOA over Labor Day. It was crazy.

Then there was the grocery store. Another vivid memory I have is of the young families that were walking around in an attempt to somehow get all the items they needed for the little money they still had left. Several years later we ended up having to go live with my grandparents in Texas and I thought it was odd that no one was crying at the store because they couldn’t afford food.

This change in the economy seemed to drastically affect everyone I knew and it really made us change how we did things as a family. The next part will cover some things that we did as a family to be able to make it through this hardship.

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