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Complete Tutorial: Making a Bowdrill Kit and Fire

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Mitch, Mitchell, Alone, History, Channel, Survival, Nativesurvival.

Tags: shelter,hunting,fishing,bushcraft,survival,native,nativesurvival,fire,water,navigation,primitive,aboriginal,shooting,shooting tips,trapping,modern,frontier,pioneer,field dressing,butchering,trees,plants,edible,medicinal,eastern,woodland,knots,sharpening,sun,moon,stars,trap,bow,arrow,handdrill,flintknapping,arrowhead,self reliance,nessmuk,kephart,boone,ray mears

Video Transcription

okay it's machine of survival tonight we're going to make a super quick bow drill kit stay tuned guys let's have a few pieces of pine right here let's look at the knots and all that on them I'm hoping but there's at least one quick bow drill kit yeah but I mean you know it's potentially - okay now that the key to a quick bow drill kit is eliminating the unnecessary reduction so we start with a piece of wood this big you got to cut all that away before you get to usable material well I'm already starting with wood that's practically good to go I mean all I have to do is you know shape this up you know this is already like spindle sized basically so the idea behind this is that you use wood that basically is already the size you want just a touch larger so then you just lose a little material as you shape it add your angles so your core doesn't slip whatever the case is and you should have a bulge okay incredibly fast because you didn't spend all that time getting down to this point cuz you started at this point so first we're gonna do is just trim off the stem all right now I'm gonna figure out my spindle might be something like this right on here I do okay all right so the first thing I want to do is to try to get it as straight as possible

I'm trying to get that nice and straight okay so it's pretty straight I'm gonna do is put my points on each side

okay it's pretty plain what I've done here

okay so basically right now the point that's centered okay I'm going to do the same thing on the other side

okay

so it's literally only been like three minutes of carving my spindle it's already well on its way practically done all I need to do is choose which side I want to be the business end for the hearth board and start working on that this side looks pretty good reason why it looks pretty good is because the beginning cuts are all roughly the same place that's good be nice and balanced so I'm gonna do is just cut off the point so far we're looking pretty good feels very hard to pine we'll see how this goes now I'm going to just go around and just clean up these areas his high points and make it all about the same does that be perfect but it does help when your circle is the same size all the way around okay just what I got it's not too shabby I'm gonna just now work on rounding this a tiny bit

and the corn as well you

okay that's what I got that's bad now I'm gonna just make the spindle or round it skinnier basically I'm gonna just see how it's real fat up to here and go really go starts moving forward I'm gonna just turn that down a tiny bit so that way my spindle head is about the same diameter for about an inch or so and matches the tip so as it starts burning into my heart board I don't run into an issue where you know a little bit down it's wider and it starts hitting the walls of my not over my socket rather then the spindle and virtually be done all right

okay so this spindle is basically done all I have to do now is just add a couple of straight cuts so I can have lines like ridge lines with each cut so my cord is something to grip onto I'm gonna just do cut basically like that I'm gonna turn again okay so half of it as geez sharp edges on it now I'm gonna do the other half okay that's my struggle done so I have these nice angles I have a point for the top and I have a round tip to the hot board okay nice and light we'll see how it works

yes here's the other piece now so far we're only at like nine minutes or something like that of actually carving the set so pretty awesome all I have to do is just cut two sides on this to make it flat because it's it's round right now I want a nice flat section for my spindle to sit on top of and it's a black section on a flat section on the bottom so it's it's the hearth board so it's flat it's not rolling around so I'm going to see the widest point probably right here still the skinny right here plug the widest right here I'll go on this side I'm gonna just make two spot sections flip it over get my legs in there

all right says one plot section I'm gonna flip it over do the same thing I like there's a pretty nasty motorcycle driving road sounds never cease to make it to the woods okay so looks like we're just about there

all I'm doing is just bringing the two edges together and I'm working on the thickness you know thump thick is a max that you want hear your heart yeah

fine-tune it

you

what looks like my heart it's finished

I'm gonna just really work on the area that I want to use a touch more think I want to use the spot right here now actually think oh he's a spot right here okay so the thickness is where it needs to be it's only been like three minutes my hearth is done hmm now I'm gonna do is just put an edge on the side right here put an edge right there and we'll see then you get a number and just very gently very gently put an edge here okay there it is so there's my edge since I'm going to try to get my Ember so now I need to do is get the spindle to be narrow enough to fit on this board let's see

yeah definitely Fitz I'm gonna just make the rest of it the tip fits perfectly I'm going to just make the rest of it a little bit more now so it gets closer to the size of the tip like I was saying earlier so as I stop running in start heading down into the hearth board I don't learn into any troubles of the side of my spindle hitting the walls you know he's not getting that that knocking noise and messes up here your spindle and all that I'm just flatly going around shade them a little bit off looks like we're there tell us what we got

okay nice now spindle it should it should fit on there now okay lots piece of the equation it's just putting in I did it to hold my spindle into place this is key this is very important when they get this right because if I make it off my spindle isn't going to burn on the wood it's going to be completely ruined my spindle is pretty wide it's pretty close to the width of this so I don't really have a huge percentage of error that I can rely on here so I need to be very careful I'm going to just line it up and make a little little light mark with my knife so I'm gonna go put my Enver right here we'll say you go white mark of the center and there's the mark right there now I'm gonna do is just carefully scrape out a little depression you only takes a minute

I basically rub the knife using my thumb again this is critically important you do this well this is literally the cradle that your spindle is sitting in as it gets started and it also there also

direct your spindle whether or not it's gonna fit on your heart board which is very important when you're dealing with a heart board that is so close to the same width as a spindle itself so if I get this right shouldn't have any problems I get this wrong my spindle might wear down towards the edge and actually be hanging off a little bit and then it will end up blowing out on you fly out and all that obviously don't not that gotta be careful if that happened okay this is looking like it's like it's done there it is spindle in credibly important and I get this right have to be at the right spot you know I think I would actually like this back section to be a little deeper a little further from the south take a second and it can mean all the difference to succeeding and failing yeah you have to listen to the kit that's what it told me they told me hey look this spindle is going to prefer to be on the front wall instead of centers so you're gonna wanna pop a back wall a little bit which is what I did got a good fit feels like I want to stay get situated

I'm good

you

all right lots of smoke nice just smells good

okay so so I got burned in quite nicely smells good let me just cut my knots now put a line down the center yes I can okay there's my three lines I need to follow

okay there it is let's give a shot okay so let's get situated here see if you can make a number let's do it like a dusk bring the speed up you

looking good

that's a huge Ember look at the size of that guy's let's drop us into my tinder bundle hmm man is that smoking monster and right there there we have it nice

that was a fast road okay fast underst okay so these these little kits these real quick ones can get the job done and I better only had nine three three fifteen maybe we'll say five minutes in miscellaneous something like that fifteen twenty minutes you know maybe 20 minutes of carbon to make this kit so you know you can buff them out really fast I mean 20 minutes to make a bow drill kit it's pretty quick you know I mean I wasn't bombing like Quincy like I was you know you know panicking in trouble like oh my god you know I need to make this kit within a minute and a half type of thing you know not that that's not possible

I don't see why you couldn't just do the same thing instead of carefully doing in talking about if you just block you know I'll be blowing off corners like a maniac and just just get it done you know instead of scraping the socket of the whole sort that the divot really nice you just got your knife run real quick

till the spindle down if that burner then yeah there's no question you can bang one of these out a couple minutes but this is the progenitor that you know by starting with material that's really small it allows you to basically it allows you to basically start almost at to finish sighs you know so you're starting your kit almost where you need it to be done you know so again super simple super quick you can stick material that's almost the same size as what you want to end up with and here's the kit

you guys are banged out a huge Ember got a nice fire started for and also with this kit you can see that I used about halfway so I can get one more ember out of this before this socket is all done but here's the beautiful thing look at all the fire that is in this kit there's another one that's two more if I can get to overtime it's 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 more embers that's awesome just a missionary to survival thanks for joining me tonight for the super quick bow drill kit take it

About the Author

NativeSurvival

NativeSurvival

Mitch is a Wilderness Living Skills Instructor, he has been featured on The History Channel's program "ALONE" and written articles for Outdoor Magazines; he owns and operates The Native Survival School which provides woodland living and survival classes, as well as offering quality outdoor gear he's designed. Defintely, he is a master at bushcraft's techniques.

You can find all his videos on his YouTube channel.

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