hi folks will Nia Tebow here from season six of alone and now that the season has wrapped up I'm
getting so many questions about my gear choices and if I would change anything if I had it to
do over again and what I brought and why and how I felt about it so I want to do a series about my 10
item choices and I'm gonna do them in segments so that they aren't so long so today I want to
talk about my tools that I brought out there so my first four items I'm going to talk about are
my Ferro rod which was very important and kind of a no-brainer for me and my multi-tool and the saw
and the knife that I brought out how they did what I use them for and how I feel about the choice in
general so because they are attached I will start out talking about the multi-tool and my Ferro rod
so I brought a simple Ferro rod that's just the maximum size that we were allowed to bring which
is six inches long and half an inch wide so the idea with this is I wanted of course it for to be
plenty big enough to last me as long as I could want and then some also with this I could if I
wanted to cut it in two and have one one piece always on me and one piece always on my shelter
so no matter what I know I'm not going to lose them but it served me better to have it in one
piece and just always have it on my belt so I knew exactly where it was in any given moment
and the way that I used my Ferro rod also having the longer surface made made for a better idea
because I was drawing my Ferro rod across my tool rather than striking the rod with my tool and you
can see more details of how I used it in the video I put out I think it's just called my Ferro rod on
alone and that's a video demonstrating how I used it so the Ferro rod was a no-brainer for me in an
environment like the Arctic fire is absolutely critical to everything and to life itself so
making sure that I had a very reliable way to start fire that didn't take a lot of calories
was key so I'm very much an ancestral skills person and friction fire has all has been my
go-to fire-starting method however it takes a lot of energy and a lot of calories and it
takes the proper materials and I'm not familiar with the Arctic so I'm sure that I could have
found materials for it but that is a big gamble when you're going to a place you don't know and
an environment as extreme as the Arctic where of course fire is so critical and the Arctic is an
environment where it's hard to find good materials because it's so harsh that the trees grow very
slowly which means the growth rings are really close together and the wood is very hard which
is not good for friction fire and we saw Nathan running into this if he hadn't found that cedar
cutting board which was brought in it was not something that grew there he might not have been
able to get fire and that would have been a done deal for him right so this was absolutely critical
super glad I brought it and absolutely advocate bringing this and one just like this it served me
great the brand I believe is bei ight and it is a a Ferro rod that is of a really nice hardness some
of them are very hard and then they last forever but they're hard to use some of them are very soft
easy to use but don't last very long this was the perfect in-between super recommended and then we
were allowed to bring a striker as well as the Ferro rod and I chose this carbide striker and
it works well as a striker but that isn't what I brought it for what I actually brought it for was
because carbide is is harder than carbon steel or than stainless steel I used it for a sharpener so
this isn't a knife I had out there but if you don't let your blade get too dull then just
drawing the carbide striker over it hones your blade and keeps it in really good working order
so I brought this striker not with the intent of using it as such but with the intent of using it
for a sharpener which I did and it was so good to have which brings us to what did I actually
use for my striker and that was one of the many tools on my Leatherman Serge modified multi-tool
so I have a whole video about the modifications to this tool I'm not going to go into them all
here but I will say that the reason I chose a multi-tool was there were so many applications
for it the main reason early on was one scene Carly come out because of a fish hook to the hand
on season 5 and knowing that I absolutely wanted to have a way to get a fish hook out should that
be an issue and then of course the wire cutters so - the wire cutters because I was planning to
bring snare wire and you would have a really hard time cutting it without your wire cutters so those
were the two critical things but there are so many other things one as I just mentioned is
the saw makes an excellent striker for the Ferro rod because it's stainless steel whereas my knife
is carbon steel I'm a big fan of carbon steel knives and knives are uncomfortable to use if
they have a really hard 90 degree angle on them right it's uncomfortable to push your thumb on
to that but the saw you don't use that way so the thaw saw has a really nice sharp 90 degree
angle and that is what I use for my striker so it was excellent have also the scissors I used
a lot for crafting I did some sewing and some buckskin sewing working on my mukluks working
on that squirrel-skin knife sheath and a variety of other things the scissors were key they allowed
me to cut buckskin thong and I used them a lot in my trapping to snip the ends of my fishing wire to
snip off my hair that I was using to hold my loops of fishing line open to snip willow in my willow
basketry both the harvest and the crafting so so many crafting applications also having a bath
up knife was super key if anything had happened to my belt knife I wanted to be sure I wasn't without
a good cutting edge and I would use this one for peeling poles and doing anything where it would
get pitchy so that my other one I could use mainly for animal processing and for carving also had a
gouge and a bunch of other things here I'm not going to go into the smaller tools but watch my
other video for the details on the modified tools in here this was really wonderful to have now I
brought a Leatherman and a belt knife and that is something that how'd I do it had it to do over
again I might possibly have chosen to use just the knife on the Leatherman and not about knife
just so I could have had an axe because not having the axe was a major handicap at the end that said
I am a girl who rarely goes out into the world without a knife on my belt and a folding knife
is a liability it is never gonna serve you as well as a standard non folding belt knife because that
mechanism the fold is a weak spot so you can't do things like baton ik where you hit the back
of your knife with you know a mallet or something heavy which really facilitates a lot of crafty
projects my bedstead and a lot of my contraction construction I was notching out my wood so I would
use my saw to saw little wedges of wood and then my knife with a baton to whack those out I would
use it for all kinds of crafting purposes with the baton a folding knife doesn't stand up well
to that and they're not comfortable to hold long term that's the thing is especially for me having
small hands it's not comfortable to hold this blocky Leatherman it's not rounded it's got all
these weird metal things so I could have gotten by with just the knife on the Leatherman it would
have really been uncomfortable and challenging I'm glad I had both that is something that I
might have chosen to change knowing what I know now but the knife that I brought was a heavy-duty
Mora companion so it is a carbon steel knife I'm not sure I think some Moors are laminated with
a harder steel in the middle and then softer on the sides and I'm not sure if that's true of the
companion but it has a three-quarter tang I would have preferred a full tang where the knife goes
all the way through the handle but 3/4 is really good and it gives you strength so that you're not
gonna break the handle even though the handle is plastic it's really grippy it's got the bright
colors so I wasn't likely to lose it and it's got the Scandinavian grind which is very much
my preferred grind for knives and particularly for bushcrafting knives easier to sharpen more
sturdy and they're really good for general purposes they're a little bit thick for some
like food preparation purposes but they do the job and they're strong enough to really abuse them in
your crafting when you have to because you have a limited amount of tools so this serves me really
well really glad I have it had it you know would I have done it differently I don't know maybe it's
maybe the only thing that I feel like I could have considered doing differently of course we'll get
to my fishing line snare wire thing but that's something that knowing what I know now I would
have changed but knowing what I did going in I wouldn't have which brings us to the final of
my three tools which is my saw now I went back and forth certainly about a saw versus an axe I
did a lot of research and talked to some folks who were familiar with that area and my understanding
was the trees up there were all really small so splitting firewood and splitting wood for
construction probably wasn't going to be really important that is a major reason why I went with
the saw the other thing is that saws cut really efficiently the thing with a saw is particularly
this style japanese-made pruning saw it has these double rows of teeth that are incredibly sharp and
incredibly efficient far more efficient than bow saw or standard handsaw so that is why I brought
this particular saw it is a silky katana boy it is I believe 40 inches so it is the largest of the
silky pruning saws and that was really important to me because I wanted a saw that was going to be
very efficient so the longer cutting edge means that I'm cutting more with every pull of the saw
much more calorie efficient and then because it has such a long handle I was able to limb
trees while they were still up I could limb you know 10 feet up a tree between my height and the
full width the full length of the saw so that was really helpful because it's easier to limit tree
when it's standing then when it's on the ground and moving around on you that was huge and also
this if necessary could have been a weapon because it's big enough and strong enough and another
key thing was this which is that this had a nice long blade and I felt like I could have used this
to scrape a hide had I gotten a big-game animal like a moose or musk ox or a bear but also it was
substantial enough back that I could sharpen the back surface of my saw so this is sharpened in a
single bevel just on one side and this is what allowed me to use it as a draw knife so I could
both pull it towards me and push and this is how I took the bark off of all of those poles that I
debarked for my shelter so this was super key and also really good for crafting purposes because
I could use it like a machete I could whack at things with it and use it for some wood carving
purposes so let's take a closer look so here you can see how there's a bevel here very sharp edge
so I did that only for about 6 inches here so I sharpened just a few inches along the back so
that it would be still really sturdy and so that I could grab it comfortably without risk of cutting
myself but have enough to grab on either side to use this as a draw knife as a machete as limbing
tool and for so many other things so this was absolutely awesome super recommend this saw and
I think it was a really good choice of saws to bring the other part of my saw that I ended up
using somewhat successfully early on and then less so as time went on was using the back end of this
to bust through the ice so you can see the blade comes all the way around so all the way around
the back is still metal here so in that way this was a sturdy full metal piece that I could use as
a chisel for getting into the ice so that was my plan for getting through the ice if I could bust a
small hole then I could saw it much larger larger using the open saw and that is indeed what I did
when the ice was only three to four inches thick however once it got to 18 inches and thicker I was
not able to get through it and that was a major liability so these are the tools that I brought
the silky Kitana boy saw the modified Leatherman surge multi-tool the heavy-duty Mora companion
carbon steel and then of course the Ferro rod which was key I feel really good about all of
these choices they all served me really well of any of the types of these individual items that
I could have brought I thought I made wonderful choices the one thing that I might do differently
is seeing if I could get away with just the knife from the Leatherman and not bringing a secondary
knife that said I would want to make sure that I spent a lot of time in the woods with just this
before making a decision like that because I think that this would have been really uncomfortable and
a pain in the butt and had I chosen to do it that way I might have been cursing and wishing that I
had done it differently the thing with the axe is the only time I really needed it were those
lasts a couple of weeks once there was ice and really only the last week and if you think of it
choosing to take the axe would have meant giving up something else that I used the heck out of for
an axe that I only would have needed at the very end and maybe having the axe instead of one of
these things would have meant I didn't even stay until the lake froze over so it's always a gamble
it's always a toss-up and as you saw only four of us were left when the ice froze over so had I
chosen something different and had the axe instead of one of those things I might not even have made
it until the ice froze over so in that way yes it was a bummer not to have an axe and that doesn't
necessarily mean that I feel like I made the wrong choices it's very challenging to go out there with
only ten things if we had gotten to take 11 oh my goodness that would have been incredible so
thanks for looking and check out my series on my other items that I brought out as well