 Today, we are venturing into the mighty Texas Urban Wilderness, a.k.a. my backyard, to see if we can survive using another mysterious orange package. Welcome to the Timu Camping Survival Challenge. That's right, today's video is obviously sponsored by Timu. If you haven't heard of Timu yet, it is an incredibly affordable website. Me and my wife actually get a lot of our home decor, kids toys and things off there, but they got a ton of categories. There's site-wide savings up to 90% off and free returns up to 90 days. Use my link in the description below to download the app and get $100 in coupons. You can also use my promo code. So with a $200 spending cap, I wanted to see what all I could get on Timu to build a basic survival kit slash camping kit. I'm sort of a novice prepper. I'm into little survival kits, things like that. I love camping. I obviously camp all the time and I've got a ton of gear, but I'm always interested in just building little backpack setups because I go hunting all the time, fishing in remote places, and I always want to make sure I have one of those setups with me. Plus, it's just fun. I like doing it. So I think I put together a pretty good basic kit, but let's unbox everything and see what we got to work with. All right, let's see what we got working inside of these packages here. I actually got two. It's actually the fun part right here doing the unboxing. I've always been fascinated, even as a kid, with like little outdoor trinkets, you know, whether it's pocket knives or little camp tools, all that kind of stuff. My dad used to take me to flea markets every once in a while, and we would shop for stuff like that at flea markets, get old knives, tools, enough backstory. Let's get into the first item, which is hopefully a Leatherman style tool. Yes, it is. So I chose to go with one of these because you can really do just about anything with one of these types of tools, pliers, you know, little saws, things like that. So these open up pretty easy. They come with a sheath. We've got a big file here. Looks like a screwdriver, a little mini saw in there. We've got, you know, a Phillips head. There is a knife that is actually very sharp with a drop point on it, okay? We can do a little skinning out there if we wanted to. I actually needed a pair of these. I had a Leatherman years ago, I lost it, I don't know where it is, but you always want to keep things real basic when you're carrying a backpack. My hunting bag, I've missed having one of these around. We've got an essential tool right there we can do so much with. Let's see what else we got in here. I kind of forgot everything that I ordered. Oh, boys and girls. Major camp tool right here. So I was really interested in this camp axe because of the price and it was also this polymer style material right here. It doesn't have a big wedge on the back. It's more, it's kind of slicey. Some grooves in here for maybe to do some ratcheting and it's got a flat back end so we could do some hammering if we need to but not a great wedging axe. Oh, it's got a ferro rod right here. So we could also use this for starting fires. I did not know that it came with that. Is this a whistle? Indeed it is. These two right here I can do a ton. I can do a ton with these and we're not very heavy yet. There's a lot of weight in this one. So let's spill the beans. Alright, let's open up this bad boy right here. Is this what I think it is? I thought we'd have a little fun with this one. This is a heavy item. Yes, sir. This is a camp stove. I do not have one of these already. So I thought it would be pretty cool to get one. Let's see how hard it is to put together. Looks extremely easy. We'll fold out of here. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen. Alright, we're going to put this thing to the test. It comes with a grate on the inside. That's for your wood and then there's also a grate that can go on top so you can do some cooking. We're doing well so far. A lot of fire, tools. Let's talk about organization. I thought I'd throw in a fun one here. This is just kind of a rando. It's kind of a pack but kind of a cool little organizing pouch. It's kind of like having a side sheath. I can just throw some extra stuff in there. I've got a serious deal on paracord. I've got a whole roll, man. I use paracord a lot just for making lanyards and stuff for my sheaths and other tools so I thought I'd get kind of a fancy color. Also could use it hunting. There's a thousand one uses for paracord but big old roll of it, cheap on team use. Now as an alternative cooking source, I thought this would be kind of cool. I've never had one of these. I've never had one of the wind protective cook kits. When I go backpack camping or just even truck camping sometimes if I want to make a quick coffee or tea, I will use just a little burner. They work okay but if it's windy, if anyone knows if they've ever been camping with one of those when it's windy, they're never ever to heat up your water or your meal. So having a little wind protected kit to do your fire and cup set works really well. Fire and cup set, I just kind of made that up. Sounded good though. Let's see, 750 milliliters. So this would be comparable to one of my biggest cups that I go with backpacking or camping. It's got a neoprene sheath around it because these things get hot, y'all. This is titanium, some heat dispersion coils on it. This is the burner system that should attach down here on the bottom. Yes, it does. Look at that French press system right there. It comes with a lid as well. I mean this thing is decked. Absolutely decked and I've got a stand. I can put my little butane source on here. It doesn't come with that obviously but I've got a ton of those laying around so I'm excited to put this to you, see how fast it'll boil water. We need some shelter. So let's see what we got in here. This is a full deal. We've got ropes hanged, serious tarp with stakes. That's what it is. It's a serious tarp, sort of a thick material. Let's see what we got here. Looks to be a pretty good material. One of the things that I like to look for on a really good tarp, if you're going to bushcraft or camp with that is having lots of grommets including in the center seam. More fire starting tools. It's a rope in a tube. So you've got this natural material rope right here that's soaked. I don't really know what's in there but it's something flammable. So the idea is you take this and you light it and you're able to start your fire with it, get it going. It'll last longer because it's kind of like putting Vaseline on a cotton ball. It's a trick I use a lot. It allows you to really get the kindling lit. Get your tender lit even and then you can just pull it and it goes out. It loses oxygen, it goes out and then you can just keep that thing going. Super light. This is an excellent thing to keep in the backpack. These are actually, this came in a two pack and it's a necklace. So that's pretty slick right there. So the idea with that is you've always got it on you. This is super lightweight. You can just start your fire in the evening. It's there. It's on your person. These things to get wet. The reason I like always having these, I start my grills with them. You can't find a lighter. Oh crap, I don't have a lighter. I don't want to stick my fingers in there to light propane. These always work. They always work. Lighters don't always work. These always work. This is a headlamp. Yes, it's a two pack. Alright, it looks like it's USB rechargeable. Could never have enough headlamps. But this one right here is different because it is an LED strip up front. It looks like it also has a beam on the side. And supposedly it is a motion activated. I feel like that dude in X-Men right now. Figure out the buttons. Wah-Bam! Flashing. I've lost. I need help. Oh no. Oh no, that's it. Look at this guys. Wah-Bam! So if this thing will do a red mode, I'm all about it. Last thing here. This is hopefully to keep us warm. I don't have a sleeping bag or anything like that. But this right here is a survival bivvy. Something I don't own. But I was like, you know what? This thing is tiny. It would fit in a pack really nice. And just in case. Just in case I got wet. I need to get warm quick. We'll give this a shot. It's cold enough outside. I can tell you if it's going to work or not. But those are some pretty cool little tools. Some basic survival stuff. Let's get out here. See if we can build this shelter. Get our little fire going. And let's cook something up. Okay. So the first thing we got to do is find ourselves a little place to set up our shelter. I'm feeling right here. This is nice. We're not even solo camping. We got our little avian friends. We got a couple of foam deer for a little accent. Let's get this tarp out. Basically just stuffed all my things in this backpack. Everything fit pretty nicely. I think what I'm going to do here is I'm going to set up an A-frame. And I cut a piece of our paracord. Got it in my little saddle pouch right here. Side pouch. So the first thing I'm going to do is set up a ridge line. I'm going to run it between these two trees over here. This paracord feels a little squishy compared to some other ones I've used. But I think it's still going to work just fine. Now if you never set up a ridge line, the first thing I'm going to do is just tie a little bowling with a hitch. It should come out quite easily. And we'll run it over here. Now we'll come over here and run our trucker's hitch. Finish that off. Now we got a nice little ridge line. Now let's throw up our tarp. Oh, we have middle notches. That's good. So a nice thing that I didn't notice at first is that the tarp actually does have these sewn-in mule tapes with these little metal rings right here, which is going to make it really nice for just securing the tarp and stretching it out. So it's not going to get crimped up. And then we can secure the four corners down to the ground. I've never tried this with paracord. I usually use a bank line, but I want to try this. So a little piece like that. We'll go ahead and tie it in a loop, just a little loop like that. And then we're going to wrap that around. What's nifty about this little knot is it allows you to slide it a lot of toggle right here. And then when pressure is applied, really pull on it. It shouldn't go anywhere. So we just need a stick. All right, I got that slipped through with a toggle. We'll do one on the other side and we'll tighten it up. This ain't going to be pretty slick. All right, let's find another stick. Here we go. Plenty of sticks around here. All right, now we can slide this out. It's tightening up. There we go. Let's stake these down. Let's see how sharp this thing is. Let's see if we can cut this paracord with it. Yep, pretty darn sharp. So the paracord that it came with, or the string that it came with, is actually designed to tighten how I'm doing here. But what I can also do is just tie a little taut line hitch and that will keep tension on that line. That taut line hitch is just one of those camp knots. Just got to know. It just works so good, so useful. All right, we'll do the other two sides or the other two corners and we will have ourselves a shelter. Step one complete. We now have a proper shelter. If I wanted to close this down even more, I could. I could just stake it directly to the ground. But I kind of like it the way it is. I got plenty of head room in here. So let's see what else we got. I'm thinking next we'll set up our little camp stove. We'll set up the camp stove and then we'll see how this axe will split some kindling and see if our fire starters are going to work. Really curious to see how that little rope system does. And I've never done this before. This could be a little sketchy. But setting up a little stove inside of the tent like this so I have heat, I'm thinking I might do it just right on the edge so the heat can escape a little. Alright, got a little tray here so we don't set the forest on fire. There we go, stove is set up. Let's go see if this axe will split some wood. Pretty much everything is wet right now. We just had some rain last night and this morning. But I do happen to have a piece of dry ash out of my truck bed. You know, this would be great for like cutting down some small trees. It would get some good penetration for splitting. I don't think it's going to do very great but we're just going to try to maybe get it started. We'll see. We're getting some split. The problem is it's starting to hit that handle. So it's not driving a wedge. We got a little piece off of there. There's not much weight to it too, it's pretty light. Yeah, so right there it's catching on that handle. Not a fantastic splitter. Alright, there we go. We've got some decent little kindlings. Now let's see if this thing will chop. Chop these in half so it'll sit in our stove nicely. Not much weight on it. Man, really having a beaver chew that one. Okay, I think that'll just go in the right direction right there. So I'm going to try to make a fire using my little necklace ferrariad and striker here. I'm really interested to try this rope. Now I've got some tender and normally I just use cedar bark shavings for the Texas woods which I have right here. I've also got some punk wood. I've made a little nest with that. I also have some shavings from a bow I was making this morning. Some bowdark shavings those work good as well. And I've got this punk wood. The punk wood works really great. If you guys aren't familiar with it, it's rotted wood that dries out and makes it easy to catch a spark at times. So I'm going to try this. If I can't get this lit, then I'm going to try the punk wood. So let's see how this rope is going to do. Okay, there's a little spark. Alright, it is making a spark but it's very difficult with this small rod. Okay, I hit the rope and it flared up for just a second, finding it pretty hard just to get a spark. Oh, there it goes. Oh, cut out, it cut out. So I've hit the rope a couple of times and it seems like it started to go but it cuts out. I'm going to fray it up a little bit so that some of those fibers can maybe catch a little better. Let's go, one time. Hit it good a couple of times there. It's like material is wanting to stick to this little comb and it's not flying off where I need it to. Alright, so I could not get the rope going but it looks like I did get a piece of the punk wood that is starting to smoke now and smoldering. I think the little rope trick would have worked if I would have kept at it but my fingers were about to start bleeding. Struck, I think, so many times. So this punk wood, it will just sit here and smolder until this whole thing is gone. But what I'm going to do is break off a chunk of it. I'm going to put it into my little cedar-shaving bird nest and we'll let that smolder up a bit. Just broke that up. I've actually got two pieces. I'm going to stick one of them. I'm just going to stick one of them in the fire there. I'm going to take this piece. I'm going to put it in my nest. Punk wood is pretty sweet stuff. You can find it at the beginning of a camping trip. Let it dry out a little bit. I like to carry one of these little burlap sacks. This is a big one I have. Little burlap sacking, hanging up things that you want to turn into tenders to make fires. That's going to heat up inside of here. It's going to really start smoking here in a minute. We have fire. This could get interesting with a tent here in a second. May have to move this. Just on the outskirts. There we go, guys. Now we're cooking with Crisco. Now I have a little fire that I can move. Let's get hot. Let's get way bigger than I anticipated. I've already burned a hole in my tent. No shelter. Camp notes. Getting that baby going. Got a little hot. A little hot inside the tent. Let's see how hot this thing is going to be. I would say gloves would be advisable here. Now that we have this thing under control, I'm going to slowly add the little kindling here until I get it exactly where I want. Nice thing is I can just move it. Move it around with those handles. If I was going to sleep in here, it would be pretty difficult to just get up every 30 minutes or so and add some more kindling. Would it work? Kind of keep me warm for a little while, but I'd really have to monitor it. It is like wafting heat around here, though. Alright, I just migrated our little stove over to a little safer area because I noticed little ash pieces were coming out. So I just want to keep the fire contained. Our wood is cold down, basically. Now we can still access it from the front. It's a little sketch. You definitely want to have something you can grab here to open that front to add more fuel to your fire, but this should be plenty hot to cook on. I did not clean this at all, by the way. I should probably do that real quick. Just a quick little wipey. Now, what are we going to have to eat? Well, we have some fresh dough that we harvested just about two weeks ago, and this is one of the rounds. I can't remember which one. Cut across the grain. This is a cut that I normally turn into burger or we do in the crock-pot. I've never had it on a grill, so I thought I'd give it a try. See what it's like. Got some salt, pepper, garlic on there. Ooh, hear that sizzle? Wabam! So I'm cooking directly over the coals, but we could also put that on a little cast iron, something of that nature. I think they're going to cook up pretty quick, though. This is pretty cool, guys. Never used one of these before. Pretty awesome. Already starting to sweat. Let's take our pliers and do a flip. Ooh, sticking. Sticking pretty good. Probably should have put some olive oil on there. This fire has burned down so fast I just really wouldn't see it being a viable source to put kind of on the edge of your little canopy tent or anything. Definitely not a tent with a floor. You don't want to do that. It's going to catch on fire, burn holes through it. So I've got some ash that's coming out the sides, even with the tray. But for just making some quick little meals, you could do a decent steak on here. Let's see what we're dealing with. Fresh dough from the force. I've never cooked the rounds this way, but slicing them thin against the grain. It's not quite backstrap, but daggone. This is what we're actually having for dinner tonight. This is what Stephanie's cooking, making little protein bowls for the kids. I just told her to try it this way. She gave me a couple pieces as she was cooking and I thought I'd cook them out here. Love having this as an addition to my camp kit. That was an option. Very cool. I'll be using that in the future. Now, we still have our little cooking system right here that we could use, to make coffee or tea or something. What I'm interested in is this little bivvy sack. The Life Bivvy. It's chilly out here, so I'm going to be able to tell if this thing is really going to warm me up or not. Essentially, it does a giant trash bag help you with some aluminum foil looking stuff on the inside. We're about to find out. This seems like a one-use deal. It looks like electrical-taped trash bags. Maybe some sort of foil on the inside. I'm crawling in. Crawling in, but my gosh. Is it going to trap all of my body heat? It's a noisy sucker. Look at that. This is the perfect elevation. Not like actual elevation, but my head-to-toe ratio is perfect right here at this little camp spot. I can feel it starting to radiate. I mean, if you had a blanket on top of this thing, it would really trap your heat. Obviously, it's going to be windproof, but I can feel it. I can feel it in my leg area, in my stomach. There's definitely some warmth being trapped. See, it would rip very easily, but if you were really cold, you got one of those wet, chilled-of-the-bone days. You can see that being a player. Now, if you get it back in that little pouch, that's going to be a challenge. And I guess the only thing we haven't tried out, let's just try it out. Let's try out this little quick. This is something I would actually use hunting. I know a lot of guys run these style cooking setups. And I always thought they were a little heavy and bulky for a backpack. So when I'm backpack hunting, I usually go with a little smaller system, a smaller cup with the butane sorts that fits inside. Very small burner, but what I figured out was, in the wind, it's not good. Like everybody's eating their meals while I'm still cooking mine. Figured that out. Last time I went elk hunting. Let's just see if this baby will kick on and work. This is a bigger butane source than I would carry backpack camping, but it works perfect for this type of scenario for backpack hunting, I should say. Let's see if this thing's going to light up. Wah-bam! That baby's going to get hot quick. Oh yeah, this thing rips, y'all. I don't even have to put water in there to make a coffee. Okay, you guys already know. That thing's going to rip quick. Lights good too. I would say that was probably one of the best things that I found on Timu. It was this right here. I know that I'm going to use this on a backpack camping trip or a hunt. And that, ladies and gentlemen, completes our Timu camping survival challenge right there. We have created our shelter. Pretty pleased with the tarp, nice tarp. We've created fire with our kit. We even cooked on it. The only thing I'm not going to do is sleep out here because I've got a nice bed about 50 yards away and there's hot deer on the stove right now. So I'm going to go eat the rest of my meal and go enjoy it. But I hope you guys learned something on some of the camping tips and if you want to pick up some camping gear, survival gear on Timu is cheap. So thank you guys for tuning in for another video in the great outdoors. Don't forget to use my code down below or click on the link to save on Timu. And I will see you back in the greatness very soon. Subscribe to the channel, smash that like button and I'll see you soon.