Making a Primitive Hand Drill Fire

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

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Video Transcription

especially at survival so going to be doing a andro fire I'll go away so I'm going to carve this basically the same thing as my bow drill it's just a small version to fit the smaller drill so I'm going to make an impression okay this is a piece of pine eastern white pine just dead standing and my drill is small see right there on my work sack two-piece Amol

okay so I have a piece of birch as my platform catch my amber when the time comes so here's my piece of Mullen so I'm going to just clean up the end a little bit and should I get rid of all the leaf scars so I don't want anything to just stick out from the overall diameter because it will get caught up on the sidewalls and my knotch

so as you can see I cut about the same depth in the stick all the way around now that creates right here creates these little crowns where the angles change so I'm going to go around just take those off just like this

it creates me that creates a nice nice round tip that will spin well okay see it was any think I need to fix looks pretty good okay let's burn it in okay so Mullen Mullen is a great local resource to use for hand roll and the thing about Mullen is that it's really easy to harvest you can either harvest it when it's brown and dead

and use it right away or you can harvest it when it's still green still growing flowers on it and everything and then you just cut it to about the size you want as you leave a little bit longer on each side and you want to find a nice straight area of the plant and then you just dry for a couple days and it will work as well so I've gotten it to work both ways where I cut it green and where I cut it dead all right so there's a few ways to look at this you can use the fat side on the bottom and that way when you spin you're going towards the thicket area so it bites your hands a little bit more so physically have a little more grip or you can go the other way put the thin side down and get more spins more revolutions compared to the other way so that's the way that I like to do is I like to put the thin side down and a fixed side up top that way when I'm spinning I'm going to get more spins because it's like a differential gear ratio right so because I I'm spinning a larger a larger area up here the smaller area spends more time so that's what I want I want more speed I want more revolutions because that way I I do less work

there we have smoke smells like it's burning on pretty good okay so we'll stop right there but are not CH okay so it again it's very much just like bow drill so I'm going to put a cut and split this depression in half right here and I'm going to go about a quarter to the left and a quarter to the right and I'm going to cut towards the middle just like this now it's going to give me nice wood shape and how far in am I going to go I'm going to go well halfway and towards the middle so if I was going say all the way across

well the middle is about halfway across that depression right so I'm only going to go about a quarter in I'm going to do the same thing on the width because halfway is right in the middle I'm going to go about a quarter in quarter in cut I'll end up about a quarter in here that way I still have enough surface area at the bottom to create friction to bring my heat up but there's still a spot for dust to fall out and collect in my notch down here

all right so here we go I cut in a little bit into the bottom of my depression and I flared out so I'll say very much like my bow drill here's the interesting thing when you flare out the bottom so it creates a wider bottom to your ember so now if the place where it starts flaring is higher up on one side so we'll go wider out that side that means that your ember pile will be more fortified I have a bigger foundation on that side right now - equal so that means that my kit is calibrated for Flat Earth for a flat area because my ember is equally balanced on each side to stand up if I if I was on a steep hill like this my ember would fall over unless I built up this side of my foundation right here so instead of coming in equally here I would go higher up and I'd cut across like this so then I would have more material at the foundation of my ember on that side holding up my ember just like a building so right now this kit is calibrated towards flatland because at the bottom of my amber foundation is equal so let's see if we can get a number

so I'm gonna get comfortable No make sure I'm comfortable all the way down my feet placement get my handsome grip let's see if we can make a number not yet

I think we're in business let me keep giving an air yeah now let's see yeah it's good we'll leave my set there because it's like a heat sink it's holding seat it's holding heat now I'm going to transfer it to my bundle okay as my amber drop it in my bundle really love the way that Mullins smells when it makes a number ones like incense almost okay try to get in frame few guys it's close

there it is all right so again you know you just need a spindle and I chose Mullin I've use other things like yucca and and cattail and there's more than one style of using a hand drill by either using a fat end of a narrow end or drilling style okay so this has a very soft hollow pit very soft pit on the inside whenever you're using materials that are very soft like cattail or like mullen things like that that have a hollow pit like that they're very very soft on the inside and have kind of a harder shell kind of woody shell on the outside you can't you can't put a ton of pressure down while you're drilling because if you put a ton of pressure down you're going to crumble your tip it's happened many many times and it's it's something that can be easily avoided all you have to do is when you're spinning just don't put a ton of downward pressure I basically just let my body wigs I'm right over my drill I let my bodyweight supply the pressure I'm almost almost no pressure at all of my arm I'm just a tiny tiny bit and what that does is it creates just just enough friction to bring it up the temperature but not enough friction to destroy the material that you're working with now when you're working with harder materials say like yucca and things like that you can put a little more downward pressure and you can you know you know not really bear down but put a little more downward pressure and and you won't rub off your tip now when you're working with much harder materials like I've seen people use out west you know like I using some using so tall and mule fat they will just blast it you know with tons of damage so much down pressure the drills bending a little bit as it going wah you know what I mean bow tons of downward pressure this is exact opposite so in the Eastern woodlands I do the opposite I just sit there and very smoothly and I'm just building up the heat of the set allowed to naturally smoke and once there's a ton of smoke then I triple my speed I do that as many times I think I have to sometimes only do it three four times sometimes to do ten times but I triple my speed and I really don't want to add too much pressure I just want to triple my speed because again if you add pressure you're going to crumble the the spindle and you have to start over because there's no longer burning and all that fresh unburnt material gets into your Ember puts it out so I just go nice and slow starts smoking good I go tiny bit faster start smoking really good and when I have a good pile of dust and I think my amber is almost there or just about that I blast it with speed and not pressure then you get your under so hand rolls real easy it's a you know really kind of like no moving parts in a way there's there's no like strings and bows and things like that for bow drill so it's just a spindle path board just like a bow drill but differences difference is is that the hearth is much skinnier where a bow drill can be you know a thumb as you can see my thumb is bigger than this so this is really like a first finger or even even a little bit smaller even like a pinky so it's it's really important to know that you have to use different size materials you know will you have a material that you can blast a number out really fast and a couple passes you can go with a smaller parts board and what that allows you to do is is to use a small piece of material that heats up really fast we all right because it's just like a heat sink it's something that's this material heats up you know I mean and the thicker it is the longer will take to get the temperature and because it's thinner it's going to heat up faster but the problem is is that when we use spindles that take a long time right compared to those other ones we only go one pass two passes down you have a number spindles that take a long time they need a long time in other words to go through their board I used about half way through my notch right there now if he had taken me longer I would have gone through my board and had to carve a whole new notch and go through the whole process over again so if you make this too thin you could go right through it before you get your Ember so there's that kind of give-and-take balance right between what using is a spindle and how thin or thick you have to go with your hearth board so again this is eastern white pine this is just a dead standing pine that I took down for this and mullen spindle and I just used a piece of birch bark as my my cold catcher you know to just to feel a little plate for my amber to land on well it's been mentioned a survival appreciate your views your comments you support thanks for joining me today for this hand roll file see in the next one take care

you

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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