With all the survivalists on the forum, I thought some of you might be interested. You can make a quite strong cord from the inner bark of pines, at least white pines.






Strip the bark. The part you want is the inner bark, which is kind of white and spongy. You'll have best luck if you can rip a long section of bark off the tree, like 2 feet or better. Work in the middle of the slab of bark: wiggle your fingers under the edge of the spongy inner bark and isolate a handy wad of the fibers, then pull straight away from the bark so that it's peeling away toward both ends. You'll get much longer strands this way than if you start at one end.

You can twist it up immediately if you want, but you can make it a lot less sticky if you soak it in water for a day. Then just finger spin or thigh spin it. It is easier to twist if you shake the excess water off as it comes out of the bucket and squeeze it a little, or leave it drying for a quarter hour or so. It becomes kind of rubbery then, instead of slippery. The bark fibers shrink *a lot* as they dry, so twist up about double the thickness you think you'll want to end up with. As the cord dries, you will need to continue working it. Twist the cord in the direction of its lay to tighten it, and also stretch it out; a piece of pine cord can grow 25% or more in length as it dries. A pair of rocks can be used to weight the ends down, or use notched sticks or whatever you've got at hand. Twist and stretch, weight it down, let it dry. It will take a solid 3 hours to dry on a sunny day.

Pine cord is kind of stiff and brittle. You can improve its flexibility and strength by wetting it before use. Don't soak in a pail, just get your hand wet and play with the cord a little. If you try to bend it sharply or tie knots in it when it's dry, it will likely break. Likes to be rode wet and put away dry. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

On the plus side, though it's kind of labor intensive by cordage standards, you can make it very tiny if you want to (hand-fishing-line?) and it's pretty strong. Plus if you get ambitious about gathering pine bark you can make A LOT of the stuff and it's always in season.

VERY COOL!!!!! i have been wanting to try this long strips of the inner bark from cedars for a long time. Maybe i'll get off my dogrug and go out Sun and give it a try...

That is awsome. Thing is we don't have a lot of white pine in my area. I guess I need a road trip.

Good to know, thanks Momaw. Have you seen the toilet paper version on mythbusters?

Braided



My bent-stick approach to holding tension on the cord as it dries. This only works for braided, if it's spun cord you have to keep adding twists to it (of course spinning it takes less time up front!)



This fiber has been soaking for two days, and was even more supple. Also taking much longer to dry though. I know that it will start to rot after a while if you leave it soaking: smells horrid and becomes useless for fiber. But I don't know what the best balance of soaking time versus strength is. My suggestion is to go for one or two days of soaking (it's still slightly tacky after 1 day, better for thigh-twisting than leaving it for 2 days), and then dry it if you're not going to make cord immediately. Soak it again when you're ready to process to cord.

Pine cord is kind of a pain in the butt apparently. I guess it makes sense that it wants to be wet whenever you're working it, after all it's wet when it's alive and part of the tree.

Wow, thats awesome, didn't know you could make twine from pine bark

Gonna try it? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

It boggles my mind that people wouldn't have pine trees around. Here in New England, your nearest pine tree is a stone's throw away. One of those things I guess one grows to take for granted.

wow. that is useful. here in NJ, the pine barrens are the biggest area of woods (the largest are from Boston to DC I believe) around, so being able to use the pines is probably a good idea. I should try it sometime.

Please do try it, somebody. Then I'll look less crazy <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

Really this stuff is quite remarkable in how it behaves. Dry it out, and it weighs almost nothing but is so fragile that you can snap it with a slight tug or a sharp bend. Soak it in water for a minute, and it becomes the supplest, most slippery stuff I've ever seen in natural fiber. With my braided line, I literally cannot break it using just my hands between being unable to get a grip on it and it starting to cut my skin. Using a pair of pliers to get a non-nonsense grip on the cord, I estimated its breaking strength at over 15 pounds (for an approx. 1x2mm braid). Not bad for tree bark eh.

It only stays strong for a few hours, though, maybe as little as one hour in dry and warm conditions. I assume the bigger the cord the longer it stays wet. It is an ideal on-demand cord, and you just keep it wet when you need to use it, but there's not a lot of survival type tasks that work that way. You'll have a lot more need for cord you can tie and then forget about.

Currently I'm testing what its "service lifetime" is like, by wetting it and then letting it dry out again. Have a piece on its fourth cycle and it's still strong, though it's kind of fraying a little bit. I think that's more a matter of my vigorously pulling on it than just getting wet. Treated gently and kept away from abrasion, I don't see any reason (based on current findings) that it should not last at least a dozen times of being used.

The braided version is MUCH more practical than the twisted, I've discovered. Twisting is easier to make up front, but requires quite a lot of upkeep to keep twisting and stretching as it dries. If you don't keep twisting and stretching, it becomes an ugly unraveled mess. The braided stuff can't unravel because it's all bound together, so the fibers just swell and shrink in place. That's my recommendation for any fellow pine-cord experimenters, is go for braided.

cool! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />

Thats neat! We used to make twine when I was a kid in the boyscouts.

Never made it, always got it off the hay bales.. Seriously, that's good thing to know.