Hey, what's up guys?
I brought you back out to the beach again today
because I discovered a cool little trick for turning these fibers
on a coconut husk into a bundle of rope.
It's not that difficult to do and it's a really cool trick,
especially if you find yourself in a survival situation.
Now after you bust your coconut open,
one of the first things you're going to notice
is all these hairy fibers in here.
And if it's a mature coconut,
like the brown ones, it's going to be very dry.
Now just go ahead and use your fingertips and pull off the bits of that fluff.
We want to try and get the finest fibers possible.
Now you can see when this first comes out of the shell.
It's kind of dirty, grungy.
There's some hard pieces of fibers in there.
Get rid of any of the fibers that are a little bit too hard.
We just want to keep the fine fluffy stuff as much as possible.
Now this is where things get really cool.
Once you got your little ball of coconut fuzz like this,
just grab a few fibers up top.
Give it a little pinch and start twisting it,
and as you're twisting, give it a little tug,
and you'll find, just like magic,
it starts pulling a string right out of the center of the fuzzy ball.
And as long as you pull and twist,
it'll keep that string going until there's nothing left of the ball.
It's entirely consumed.
How cool is that?
So there you go. Just like that,
we got a little piece of cordage made out of our coconut husk.
The problem is it's not very strong.
So we're going to reinforce this thing using a reverse twist,
which isn't too difficult once you see how it's done
Twist the cord so you put some tension on it,
the same direction you were twisting it before.
Then put it over, pinch it with your thumb and finger,
and grab the one from underneath and do the same thing.
What we're doing is creating a reverse twist
that essentially locks these two cords together.
It binds them so they can't come undone.
So you can see we've got a few inches of double-stranded coconut husk rope,
which actually is impressively strong.
It takes quite a bit to break this.
Now if you want to make your rope longer, all we have to do is
take another piece of cordage and graft it onto the end here.
And you basically do that by running the two fibers together,
unraveling them a little bit,
and then breaking the fibers together and giving it a twist.
And what that essentially does,
is it grafts it into one continuous piece like we had before.
You can see that when the grafted parts are twisted it in,
the cord is virtually seamless.
So you can really make your rope about as long as you want.
So check this out, guys.
I just spent about 45 minutes on the beach,
made myself a little wristband, here, out of some rope,
and I got about maybe four or five feet of rope stranded out here.
Use it for a clothesline, put it on your wrist, use it for decorations.
Maybe you could use this for making torches, candle wicks.
You can double this up and make it stronger.
We're going to do that same concept again,
but this time we're going to do the opposite twist we did last time.
Before we were going clockwise,
but this time we're going to go counterclockwise
so that it makes a nice twist, and we're going to go underneath.
Then we're going to grab the one on top,
we're going to go counterclockwise and go underneath.
And we're going to repeat that process for the full length of the rope here.
What's cool about this is I'm weaving it by hand,
but if you look closely here,
It almost looks like a legitimate rope, doesn't it?
With the double strands in there.
There we go made it to the end.
Now we're down to about two feet of cord, but that's quite a bit stronger.
And we can pull it to work out some of that tension,
And then if we wanted to,
we could just repeat that process all over again
and make it even stronger.
There we go.
So we've gone from six feet of relatively strong rope
to about one, maybe one and a half feet, of really strong rope.
And that is holding it really good.
I'd be curious to know how much weight that would actually hold,
but I'd be willing to bet it'll hold at least 100 pounds.
*Music*
So there you have it guys.
That's how to take a coconut husk and turn it into a rope.
Any length or any thickness you want it to be.
Thanks so much for joining me for this experiment
and I'll be looking for you in the next one.
Talk to you then.
[tree branch snaps]
[laughter]
Alright, well looks like we got some firewood.
*Music*