Had two cups of coffee waaay too late last night, and this happened. 5" x 1/2" rod with an elk antler handle, hand cut oil tan leather lanyard with a hammered copper tube bead. Handle was taken up to 2000 grit before being rubbed with bees wax and buffed with printer paper. Made it specifically to go with the pictured blade. Here it is next to an Army sized ferro rod for comparison.
I'm truly sorry... please except my sincere apology. Let me just skip ahead to page 3 of this thread.
Boy... you have no idea. If you could have only seen the original post. @Reno Lewis was so blown away I had to edit it.
I've been working on a simple, lightweight scout kit recently, and needed a way to carry a usable amount of cordage in a haversack or small pack. I normally just use a figure-eight hank for 550 cord, but it tends not to work very well with light bankline. Specifically, #12 tarred, twisted bankline. So, I decided to make a spool for it. Ultimately, this spool holds 27 meters (88 feet) of #12 bankline. Could easily get 30 meters, or 100 feet on there no problem if desired. I split a 1/2" thick plank from a large piece of Red Cedar drift wood I harvested a couple years ago. After I had a plank, I marked out a 2" x 7" rectangle, and cut it out. From there, I just squared it up on my belt sander, and free handed the prongs. Depending on how it holds up, I might shorten the prongs to increase durability. Final dimensions as it sits are 3/8" x 2" x 7". Red Cedar is a wonderful material to work with, and is the most utilized wood in traditional hand crafts in my region. It's light weight, rot resistant, easy to split planks from and easy to work. It's a very soft wood though, and not incredibly durable. For this purpose, it should be just fine. Here's the spool in progress, next to the plank it came from. *Sorry for the pic of the messy bench* Before oiling. Soaking up some BLO. I decided to drill a couple of 1/8" holes, to help hold the strand of cordage at the beginning of the spool. Here it is all spooled up. Roughly 27 meters, or 88 feet of #12 here. And finally, I just added a simple ranger band. This prevents the entire spool from coming undone accidentally in your bag, or while you're only trying to take a short length of cord, but is easily removed if you need a lot of cord. Thanks for looking!