Drying clothes in the Bush
Drying gear in the bush is always a challenge, and for me it's a priority. I cut my teeth in the Tararuas. It rains there a lot of the time, so I take whatever opportunities I can to get my gear dry.
What I've noticed is that when you hang wet gear to dry, the water runs down the clothing and collects at the lowest point before dripping off. Very obvious eh. ...usually the clothe is wet enough at the bottom of the garment that you can wring out more water by squeezing it out by hand. That's also obvious, but it's something that can be taken advantage of if you can find a way to keep that water moving.
I decided to do some research on this, and to keep it simple I chose to use socks to see what was the fastest way to dry a sock without direct sunlight or heat ( just like a winter's day in the bush ). I used socks because I had plenty of new ones that were all the same. The funny thing is that socks are something that I never bother to dry in the bush because they'll be wet in no time next day anyway. But there is something to be learnt that can be applied to other types of clothing...
A guy once told me that he hangs towels on the line horizontally because they dry faster.
I decided to hang socks every way that I could imagine and weigh them at intervals to see which way was best. I pegged another sock under each one ( the "sacrificial sock") and weighed the top one at time intervals. Then I graphed the results.
What I found was that using my drying method I could dry a sock TWICE AS FAST as using the conventional method.
See the photo's. There are 7 socks to dry, the vertical scale is percentage of the water still in the sock and the horizontal scale is hours.
The pic below is the socks hanging:
- Control
- Dry sock wick
- Wet sock wick
- Cloth wick
- Doubled over wet sock wick
- Horizontal untouched with wet sock wick
- Horizontal wrung out with wet sock wick
The pic below is all of the results
The pic bolow shows the best and worst results. Worst is the control and best is sock 3 which was hung vertically with a wet sock pegged to it's toe. Now THAT is the way to dry a sock.
So having a wet "wick" to peg to the bottom of your clothes is a sure way of getting more water out of them with no additional effort.
Could make a difference in a survival situation...
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You sound like a man of science! Great experiment, and good info to know. There are times when I am pretty eager to get things dry so its definitely valuable to know!
Cheers for that!
P.s FYI you can add images into the body of your post by using the little camera button. I did it for this this time hope thats ok =) -
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DRYING BOOTS
I tried this technique recently to dry my boots out. I didn't expect it to work since the boots were already partially dried, but I was surprised at the results.
What I did was to stuff a damp towel into one of the boots. The towel had beeen soaked, then wrung out by hand so it was pretty damp.
I then stuffed the towel into one boot, leaving about 300mm of it sticking out. I hung the boot upside down with the protruding piece of towel hanging underneath it. This would allow the water in the towel to seep down the towel and drop off the end.
I was surprised to find that the boot with the towel in it lost about twice as much water overnight as the one that I was just allowing to dry out in the wind.
To get your boots dry faster ( at home ) it might be a good to "wick" your boots for one night then air dry them.
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Wow... I'm impressed and can see how this would work. your pinning the sock is similar to the tassles/fringes on clothing worn in the old american west.
I notice as you have that water does not drip off the bottom of wet items and seems to be held their by capillary attraction within the garment. Hanging a towel diagonally will dry all but the bottom corner. Water will also move to the coldest side of permeable material so turn your polarfleece inside out so the inside is dry in the morning.
I have made several different tube hats and on some of them made a series of vee cuts around the bottom so when hanging up they form drips similar to the fringes on the western clothing.
I'm going to try the sock idea - and tell everyone I know, A big Thanks for this tip.
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This is not bushcraft but related to drying...
I washed the foam swabs off my couch a few weeks back. They weighed about 20 kg fully wet but I slowly got them out of the water then hung them up with rag tied to the bottom as a wick. It worked amazingly well.
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Hi Frank... I think this is a bush skill as it is not something you would normally use in an urban situation. And if you consider the wide ranging definition of Bushcraft I think it fits beautifully... See the bushcraft definition thread onsite. Great to hear the technique worked well on the foam squabs.
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