Making fire with sticks, string and a knife: Another all mobile post from the road! - Original Work

Eventually I'd like to make a full post about my experiences with making fire, but I'm chilling at my parents house right now and everyone's watching stranger things which I've already seen so the time is good for a new all mobile post!

This past year I went through a phase of learning and practicing wilderness survival. I grew up in the sticks so being out in the woods isn't foreign to me, but survival stuff is.

I got it into my head that I would teach myself to start a fire using only my hands and a knife. I decided to start out with the bow drill technique because it seemed easier than the hand drill.

Long story short I you tubed a bunch of videos, bought some paracord, found a nice secluded spot in the woods and started practicing.

Where to start

To start a fire using this technique you need a few things, but most of them you can make yourself. You need a spindle, basically a straight stick about the width of your finger that is roughly rounded on one end and pointed on the other. You need some sort of top block to put pressure on the spindle, which you can make out of a rock or a piece of wood. A crushed beer can works really well in a pinch, or if you have an old skateboard or roller blade wheel that works best. You need a fire board which is basically a flattened plank of wood that you cut a notch into, and spin your spindle against to generate heat and ash. You make this yourself or find a suitable piece, but usually it's best to make it yourself. You need a piece of cord and a stick roughly 3/4 the length of your arm. Paracord works best but a shoelace will work in a pinch. And finally you need an ash pan, I use any big leaf that I can find. You also need a tinder bundle which you make yourself. Basically a birds best of super dry, fuzzy or fluffy material to catch fire easily once you've got an ember going. You can make your tinder bundle out of anything dry and stringy/fluffy. I have used crushed up cedar bark, dead fern leaves, crushed dead pine needles, crushed leaves and dead grass and combinations of all of those and other things.

How it works

The theory is that you use the bow to spin the spindle, putting pressure on the top of the spindle with your top block, which generates heat and grinds the wood of the apindle and fibreboard together to create a fine powder. The powder gets compacted in the notch of the fibreboard and when it is heated up enough will become a packed ember. You put your ashpan/leaf under the notch of the fireboard to catch that ember. Once you have the ember going, you gently blow in it until it glows, at which point you can transfer it to your tinder bundle. Once your ember is safely in your tinder bundle you gently blow on it to build and transfer heat and gradually you blow harder and harder until the heat in your tinder bundle becomes critical and it catches fire.

Sound simple? Easy? It did to me. But trust me, it can be an incredibly maddening experience to learn. And even once you have learned it, it can be even more maddening if you can't make it work.

The first time out I made my tools, started bow drilling and just went at it for about three hours. I could get it to smoke but couldn't get an ember. So I gave up, went home and watched more videos. I realized my notch wasn't correct, so the next time I went out I adjusted, started drilling, and on my second attempt I got an ember. You can not understand the frustration I felt when I failed to blow that ember into a fire. But I kept going, drilled for another two hours, and FINALLY got another ember. This time I was patient, and gentle. I took my time, took care, blew gently and within a few minutes I was holding a ball of fire in my hands!

In the end it is totally worth it. The experience of creating fire using nothing but a knife and your hands is really amazing. The first time I did it I was literally jumping up and down spinning in circles and nearly singing. I honestly didn't believe it could be done until I did it with my own two hands.

One day I would like to post a video of how it is done so you can see it first hand, but right now all I have are some photos on my phone that I've taken of the tools I made.

It's a great project to practice if you are interested in wilderness survival, or just if you are curious about it and want to give it a shot.

Firemakeing tools. You can see my spindle, bow and fireboard with many notches.

Another angle of the tools.

The first fire I made!!

Bonus shot: This is what can happen when you sharpen your axe too much.

I'll be doing a post in the future about sharpening knives and tools and how I restored my grandpas old axe which I use now. But as the photo shows, you need to be careful, you can make an axe too sharp, and I'm lucky to have the outside half of my left foot right now haha.

Anyhow as always if you enjoyed the post feel free to toss me one of those sweet sweet upvotes, you know I always appreciate them! And be sure to follow me @dexter-k on Steemit to keep up with all of our adventures and see new original content all the time.

Thanks for reading!

Dexter

P.s. Please excuse any formatting or other errors this post might contain. I wrote and compiled the entire thing from my iPhone sitting on my parents couch!! Also I'm posting this under the art tag because the perfection of this kind of stuff truly is an art to me, and the people who do it well really are artists at it.