CatDrill is a new scout pioneering technique (it has nothing to do with carpentry) which that supports the classic pioneering (with ligature) and the froissartage (with French origins).
This is a light pioneering technique because it uses only light wooden poles that can be find in the undergrowth (e.g.: hazel) or branches found on the ground (e.g.: larch).
CatDrill intensively uses holes, where the cord is passed and resides. In this way it is possible to join different pieces of wooden poles (called “modules“), creating ties, sinks and a lot of other suffs which allow us to solve the most common problems found while building structures inside a scout camp.
CatDrill is born for solving the following problems:
- the price of the building material (wood) and the difficulties found to get it from the forester;
- the price of the rope;
- to avoid the hazard of mooving heavy wooden poles (and the tools needed to work with them);
- to avoid ties, joints and toggle realized in the wrong way (we saw them too much times in pictures & co);
- to practice pioneering during our one or two days trip, doing it quickly and avoiding to use the ground both as a chair and as a table;
- to approach how a boy thinks, who wants to see concrete results as soon as possible.
CatDrill schemas
In this section you can download the CatDrill schemas. They are a starting point for learning a new technique. This set of schemas constitutes a small guide about how the CatDrill joints have to be done and suggests base building schemas. Of course, all these techniques must be tried in practice, otherwise it is simply not possible to learn and to understand them!
A new schema will be made available once every two weeks, in A4 PDF format. They are thought to be folded and hold inside a A5 collector. We suggest to print them using colors, even if they are readable even using gray scale.
Download the schemas clicking on the following links:
- Introduction schema
- SelfBlocking
- Square joint
- Diagonal joint
- Parallel tripod joint
- Crossed tripod joint
- Simple spiral joint
Appendix:
Projects
- Bench for 4 scouts/guides
- For more projects visit the italian version:
https://trento1.wordpress.com/tecnica-cat-drill/
“Uncle Sand” square
One of us is available to reply by email if you want to propose something, if you have questions, if you want to send us photos about what you realized using the CatDrill technique and so on. This email address is mainly thought for both scouts (boys and girls), not only for leaders.
The email address is: trento1.catdrill@gmail.com
In the “Download” section you can find the new quiz for the CatDrill technique.
Please report any errors in translation at trento1.catdrill@gmail.com (uncle Sand). Thanks!
Scout Trento1 - F.S.E. 