this is Jack with Jack Harrison survival and today we're making a cord canteen so stick around for more so in a survival situation having a water container is really important it's probably one of your most valuable items in a survival situation so right here I've got my preferred container and this is a stainless steel 72 ounce Klean Kanteen widemouth and I like these any-any stainless steel uninsulated water bottle because you can boil water now in the event you didn't have this and somehow you've had a container gourd which you know these do grow in certain areas so it's not that uncommon to find them they're planted all over the place in the United States and throughout the world especially in tropical areas and so it's really not that uncommon to find these growing wild that being said making a water bottle out of a gourd is also really fun you don't just have to make a water bottle you can make a ladle and you can make a rattle you can make a bowl like this one here you can burn cool designs into it you can do a number of things with the gourd and so we're going to be talking about how to turn this gourd into a water container when selecting a gourd make sure that you're getting a container gourd basically a thick-walled gourd that has been tried and doesn't have any major cracks in it now some of these will grow with extremely thin walls ideally we've got nice thick walls because what that's going to do is allow us and maybe you guys can see here this wall is probably almost half an inch thick and what that's going to do is it's going to allow our container to be more durable and it's going to let us be a little bit more aggressive with cleaning it up so step one is getting a nice for step two deciding what you want to make now sometimes you will have the luxury of deciding what you want to make and other times you're just going to have to go with what the gourd wants to be what I mean by that is these gourds don't all come in the same shapes and sizes maybe you have a gourd that is really small or shaped in a particular way that it's you know going to be used as a rattle or maybe your gourd is quite large and round and there's no way to make it into a water container or a water bottle so to speak but it would make a much better Pole right now that being said in a survival situation you can cut open any gourd clean it out and you can use it to store water it really doesn't matter what shape it is I'm talking aesthetics here you know having a huge pumpkin shaped water bottle might not be ideal for you not only that but it's going to be really hard to carve a plug for it anyways we've got this gourd here it's it's nice and dry it still has some of the mildew and mold that grows on the outside when they're seasoning so let's talk about the tools that we're going to need to process this fork the most important tool that you'll need if you have a choice and you can only pick one tool would be a Swiss Army knife or some multi-tool that has a soft the saw is really important in this process because it allows you to cut the gourd open you can use any type of saw whether it be a hacksaw I prefer a saw that has kind of fine teeth on it so a hacksaw is ideal the reason I like the Swiss tool is because it's got the saw it's got the locking blade and then it's got you know other tools I can use like this can opener I can use to scrape out the inside it's also got a hook knife here that I can use to scrape out the inside so there's a variety of tools on this tool alone not only that but I could use the butt of the tool to scrape out the inside of the so you need either a saw or a Swiss Army knife if you don't have a Swiss Army knife and you just have a saw then you probably want to have a knife as well it's not necessary but having a knife is handy and really you can you can finish one of these things with just a knife and a set if you have the choice a little sandpaper is good because you can use the sandpaper to take this funky outer layer off the gourd and get that beautiful amber color underneath you do want to get this funky stuff out because it's mold and mildew and what it'll do is it'll make the insider Lord more prone to molding which is something we do lastly either spoon a knife or some type of tool these are these are pieces of shirt and flint and basalt that I have left over from flint knapping and basically I use these to scrape out the inside so anything really rough like a coarse stone or something that you can use to scrape or abrade the inside of the gourd to get all of the material out from the inside and we'll talk about that more later but those are your basic tools so to go over them one more time a saw some sandpaper a knife and some type of scraping tool so the first thing we're going to do before we cut our gourd kantine open is we're gonna take our sandpaper and we're gonna sand it now you could also use sand from a creek or a river or dirt in water to get this job done but you can see here that just with some light sanding it's taking off that outer layer and it's exposing the shell of the gourd not only do I prefer the way it looks but also like I mentioned earlier leaving this stuff on the outside of the gourd will make the inside more prone to molding mildew which boards are already fairly prone to that in general so we're just gonna keep sanding away until we get this thing nice and clean okay so I got a good amount of this mildew off of here and for now this is fine I'm gonna hit it with a heavier grit sandpaper later on and then then come back with the fine stuff but if you know if I was really really wanted to get this thing fully clean and I wasn't filming I would just go ahead and spend you know another 20 minutes just standing out all these little low spots on here to get the gourd looking consistent with none of these mildew spots on here so the next step is going to be cutting the gourd open so the there's two things you need to think of here one where do you want to cut the gourd so when you cut the gourd obviously that's going to dictate what your final product is going to look like so we could cut it right here and remove a section here and have kind of a ladle kind of type deal this gourd doesn't really fit that in my mind we could cut it down here and we could get a bowl much like the one of Midd over here we could cut it a little higher up about here and get a little bit of a canteen there kind of like a pot / bowl slash canteen we could cut it way up high and get almost like a hold jug out of it it's kind of like one of those old medieval wine containers and we can also just cut it in the center like I'm going to do and we'll get two separate containers out of it first thing I'm going to do is I pick my spot so the important thing when you're cutting the gourd open is you don't want to cut all the way through in one shot because that is likely to crack the gourd so when you start cutting it pick your spot and cut partially through basically like create a cut mark that goes part of the way through the gourd all the way around and then once you've done that you can go a little deeper and a little deeper until you break through and once you break through then it's it's safe to cut all the way through but it's important to score the gourd first so as you can see here I've scored the gourd so I'm gonna continue scoring it and just to show you guys what that looks like just going nice and slow making sure I'm getting a straight cut it's really easy to kind of go off at an angle so you want to take your time with this because you definitely you can fix it if you do cut it at a funky angle but if you're trying to get two separate containers out of one large gourd like this you really need to be aware of where your scoring is going and that it's going to connect okay so I've scored pretty much all the way around the gourd through that outer shell just like this so now I'll go ahead and start cutting through it so when I'm cutting through it I don't want to put any torque on the gourd I just kind of want to let the saw do the work I don't want to be bending the gorge at all and again I'm going to use that same technique of turning the board and carefully cutting through okay so I've broken through here so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna follow up once I broken through I can just go ahead and start cutting all the way around there we go so here are our two containers we've got it cut we're gonna start with this one here so let's just set this one aside now let's talk about cleaning the gourd out so I just wanted to show you guys what the inside of the gourd looks like and it's hard to do that without a flashlight but you can see there's a bunch of stuff in here and all of this stuff is super bitter and we need to scrape it out so let's go ahead and talk about how to clean the inside of the gourd out so step one is just taking some type of course--i braider whether that be a scraping stone or like a heavy piece of sandstone or pumice or something that you can use to scrape the inside of the gourd out now some people really like to use spoons so first thing I'll do is dump the seeds out now these seeds you may want to consider keeping to plant some container gourds of your own so now I'm left with all of this funky stuff in here so I'm going to start scraping it out the biggest thing you want to watch out for when you're scraping is not to crack your gourd so if I didn't have this stone tool what I could also use is my knife make sure it's a locking blade it's not going to close on your finger and I could take my knife and use my knife as a scraper now it's not ideal depending on the the contour of your blade but it will work then I actually got some of this gourd dust in my mouth and I can taste it it's really bitter and I'll show you guys what this looks like now you don't want to carve into the gourd you just want to scrape that layer off so I'm just going to go ahead and continue to scrape so once you've got your gourd all scraped out you want to go ahead and you'll put some boiling water in there if you can't do boiling water then just put water in there but the idea here is that you want to leach the bitterness out of the sides of the gourd right so the walls of the gourd are full of this bitter you know gnarly stuff and we try our best to scrape a lot of that off but if we don't use water it's going to continue to be bitter I don't know exactly what it is inside the gourd that makes it bitter I believe it's tannins but I'm not a gourd ologist so you would have to reference a gourd ologist for that I'm just a guy who really likes to live in the woods once it's cooled down we'll come back we'll see how bitter it is will add some water we'll let it sit for a second take a little sip of that and if it's not bitter anymore then be done with it if it's still bitter we'll do a second boil or second steeping so we're done leeching what's left of the lining of the inner gourd we finished scraping it and then we filled it with boiling water and now at this point we're pretty much ready to drink out of it anything beyond this is is basically for aesthetics and a little bit for functionality and now it's time to do a little bit of sanding on the inside of the gourd and kind of clean it up a little so what I'm doing now is I'm sanding the inside of the gourd with some coarse grit sandpaper if you don't have sandpaper you can always use like a nice Rock like this this works especially well in this situation because this board has such a narrow mouth on it that it's hard for me to reach in there but all I'm really doing right now is just smoothing the inside out you know when you scrape it it does have a tendency to get kind of scored up a little bit and in the reason you want to smooth it out is because it creates a more even surface for the liquid or whatever's inside the gourd to dry on or be cleaned out again these boards are really prone to molding if they're not cleaned and maintained properly so we just want to do our best to make sure that the inside of our door is going to stay as clean as possible so I'll just keep sanding the inside out with this rock and then once I'm done doing that we'll make a little backboard so we're gonna take this jute twine and we're gonna make ourselves a little net baggie to carry our gourd in I'll do a separate video on how to do this in detail for now I'm just gonna make a really quick and easy one you can use any material for this whether that's you know torn pieces of cloth you know fibers leaves like yucca or poem or cattail or natural cordage you've you've made whether that's two-ply or up or paracord anything for that matter first thing I'm going to go ahead and do making this bag is I'm going to tie a small loop on here and I'm going to leave some tag ends on both on both ends transy do this so you guys can see there are many different ways of doing this I'm just doing it the quickest it's the most simple way I can come up with so I've got my loop tied around the top I've got two pieces hanging off here now what I'm going to go ahead and do is I'm going to attach more strands by just running them taking it doubling it up taking that end and running it through and pulling this there and you can do as many of these as you want if you want the the weave to be tighter add more you don't really care you can just add a couple two or three I'm just gonna do three total so this is my last one so I've got my three strands here and now it's really easy all I'm going to do is I'm going to take the two strands that are closest to each other and I'm going to tie them together and I'll do this all the way around just do an overhand knot using both of them time together just like that take these two time together it doesn't have to be perfect or even this isn't necessary this is just a way to carry your gourd it can't be kind of awkward to carry if you don't have a little bag or something so I've tied them together all the way around now I'll just do the same thing with the bottom strands that are left so I'll take these two strands here so now we'll do a couple more rounds it starts to get loose or funky you just pull it down tight was a little big but every time and if you tie one that's too big doesn't fit with the rest of the little triangles you're creating just retie it so at this point we've got our little net bag pretty much I'm like one of this couple of these are a little bit big but that's okay doesn't need to look perfect but this will hold our container really nicely we can tie an attachment up there there's a few different ways to close this up the most fast and simplest way is to just tie an overhand knot at the base with all of these and like I said before I'll make a video on how to do this for those of you who are interested because there's definitely nicer ways of ending than that so there we go we've got our little net here now we can just attach our holders either side so you can just take either one piece of twine to tie it on and we'll just do that for now or you can make a braid there we go trimming the bottom up now we can carry our gourd with us it's not beautiful but it's functional it only takes about five minutes to make so we're done with our gourd so far enjoying some water out of it so hot there we've got our bag so we can carry it not have to worry about it spilling or falling and breaking the last thing we need is a lid or cork now a really simple way to do this is to just find a green branch that's about the diameter of the opening on your gourd cut it Whittle it into a bit of a taper and just stick it in there biggest thing you need to be careful of is it is if you push it in really hard you could crack the rim of the gourd so it's it's a friction fit although you don't want it to be really jammed in there tight things you can do to create a better water seal would be to carve a little notch around the base and tie a little bit of twine in that notch use a rubber band something like that to create a seal and I'm not going to be making a cork in this video just because we're getting you know we're already at almost 30 minutes and I feel like we've covered a lot the situation where you won't use a cork is if you're the mouth of your gourd is just extremely wide at that point you know you don't really need one you just want to make sure you have a bag so that this thing stays upright more containers are awesome they've been used for a really long time they're really really easy all you have to do sand the outside cut it where you want to scrape out the inside put a little water in there keep scraping out the inside and then once you've done that let it dry out sand the inside out get it nice and smooth make a little bag for it if you want so you carry it fill it up with water and drink out of it hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did please subscribe or give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see videos on anything in particular leave a comment I'd be happy to do a video on whatever skill or craft you'd like to see as long as I'm able to do it and maybe I'll see you guys in the woods in the meantime check out my website at Jack Harris in survival comm or find me on Instagram at Jack Harrison survival you