Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Using a Firesteel

Description

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

Bushcraft Basics Blog - http://www.mcqbushcraft.co.uk/bushcraft-basics/

Amazon Store:

UK Store - http://astore.amazon.co.uk/mcqbushcraft-21

US Store - http://astore.amazon.com/mcq-20

Merchandise:

T-Shirts - http://mcqbushcraft.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Connect On My Website - http://www.MCQBushcraft.co.uk

Connect On Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/MCQBushcraft

Connect On Instagram - http://www.instagram.com/mcqbushcraft1

Connect On Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/MCQBushcraft

Tags: woodland,forest,mountains,river,lake,tinder,Survival,Bushcraft,survivor,knife,knives,valley,axe,camping,tent,footwear,hunting,fishing,backpack,clothing,boots,primitive,nature,shelter,shooting,shotgun,rifle,rucksack,flashlight,torch,craft,plants,trees,education,wilderness,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game

Video Transcription

hi there guys illness deserve video today covering something that imagine a lot of people are very familiar with but they're probably people out there who are venturing into bushcraft for the first time or self-reliance and they're looking for reliable tools that they can take out with them into the woods to use in conjunction with natural materials to make fire one of the most widely used tools out there is a ferrocerium rod or fire steel since its nickname goes and they're very very efficient tools you can throw them in a puddle take them out they'll produce sparks in excess of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit they're very light and compact and I carry two of them I have one just here my main knife page which is my primary one we'll also have another one just on my neck knife here much smaller one that I only really use when I just take the neck knife back with me so using a Ferro rod isn't really about speed it's not about how fast you strike it it's really about how much pressure and the angle of what you're applying to scrape the ferrule away say if I do this really quickly and I don't apply much pressure you can see the sparks are tiny and I'm not really going to ignite anything without even some fluffed up cotton wool it'll be a bit of a struggle for me if I apply a lot of pressure you can see that suddenly those sparks are bouncing off the floor so they're traveling a fair distance continuing to burn wherever they may land and that's what you want say you want to apply a lot of pressure and go in at an angle if you've got a little striker like this you'll see it'll have a sharp edge on it you can put put that in you can also use the back of a knife for example could use the back of my knife here so if I didn't want to carry a little striker right around with me you'd use the back of a blade so the way in which you use your Ferro rod the sort of technique that you'll use whether you're sharing an item and sparks you're getting in close and you're gradually dragging down driving those sparks where you want them to go will be all governed by the type of tinder that you're using I brought some various Tinder's with me so we can try different things and you can see how they work and you may be able to relate that the things that you're going to be using so I've got the tinder patch here full of arts and other things bracket funghi target fungus and I've got some lot um some deadfall over there from an ash tree you can see it it's plastered in different sort of types of fungi there which it's basically all crumbles to be honest but I've also got a large bracket fungi here that we can we can play around with as well and you can see how different sort of approaches with the feral different techniques really give you quicker success with the Tinder's that you're using so I've got a range of different materials here I've got some birch bark got some cramp bull fungus some chaga fungus the trauma layer of foam is foam and Tereus the Narcis bracket there are many many more tenders out there but these are just a few I'm going to show you in conjunction with the fire rod if you are interested in all the different funguses and tin design there are a couple of videos on the channel I'll link below at the end of the video so with these cramp balls here you can see they're solid objects they're not something we can fluff up into cotton wool or into a dust that's really going to stay together and hold an ember for us and it would be very difficult if you did make it into a dust and then transfer that to somewhere like a nest for example and blow into flame so you want to keep it as a solid object that's the best way to really use the crumple unless you're using it as a coal extender for a bow drill set or friction fire which is a completely different story and the way I generally use crumbles this is the onion side of the crumple where the concentric lines are that's the shell so you saw when I pull it off the tree obviously I fractured it and expose the inside that's where the sparks want to go if I was using a crumpled like this and this one's very wet I wouldn't just shower sparks down into the crumpled saw hoping to get them into the right place so there you can do it you end up using up a lot of material on your Ferro rod you can see I had a little ember there and it disappeared the better way to do it and then use this one that's a little bit drier is to put your crumble on a hard surface place your fire rod just on the crumple like that just drag a few sparks down and that way you're not using so much of the material on your farad you know you're not scraping the hell out of it showering sparks everywhere so that's really what I mean by the sort of technique you use will be governed by the type of tinder you're using if you're using something like a crumpled it's not going to be fluffed up or you don't want to powder it up because then controlling the Ember it's really just going to be impossible you want to keep it like a solid object and treat it like one in that respect you know if it did fluff up like cotton wore like a big pile of Clematis or cattail or cotton wolf that matter you know I could drag my Ferro rod away from the striker you know sharing sparks down onto it and it would ignite a lot better cause I'm covering a lot more surface area and there's a lot more oxygen within that cotton ball and it'll ignite a lot better but with this item here it's better to treat it like a solid object because obviously if you fluffed it up it would just crumble into pieces and be impossible to control and transfer anywhere so just by putting your fair rod onto the bracket dragging a few light sparks down and put making sure those sparks are in the right place now you're you're making this a little bit more fuel-efficient and you're just putting those sparks where they need to be getting the job done a lot quicker so with this piece of Chagga fungus here you can see it's very very dense very hard bit of material a bit like the cramp ball you've got to treat it like a solid object I could again sort of stand the distance away from it so try and place sparks in the right place by dragging the Ferro Dawei staying very rigid but again even though sparks have hit it they've just burnt away and to no avail they haven't really done too much so the same thing applies when you treat it like a solid object if it's quite dense and it's not as fragile as the crumble for example you can be a lot more heavy-handed this you can put some sparks down

you can see it's going already so again the kind of tinder has governed the kind of technique we're going to use and there was no need for me to stand there blasting sparks down on it for ages and they're hoping for some accuracy when just placing the rod over the material and dragging a few sparks down where they need to be without flattening the spark of course and sig knighted the material very easily for us I do want to keep this piece of chaga so I'll put it out with some moss so birch barks one that requires just a tiny bit of preparation depending on whether you've got very very thin paper birch or not but this stuff here it's obviously quite thick it's come off of a dead tree so got a sort of under residue on it and it's quite firm all you want to do with this is take a small knife just make a dust pile in a place on the bark that's kind of convenient so it looks like the rains are setting in again just as I finish this dust pile black clouds overhead but again I've got a little pile of dust there and I could spend some time firing sparks in the right place and I probably would eventually get one in the right spot and ignite it is possible I've done it before but far easier them easier method again just place your fire rod down near the pile

make sure your striker whether it be the back of a knife or a scraper is it a 45-degree angle and you really want to cut into the Ferro rod and it should ignite pretty much straight away and if you've got some backup pieces of birch obviously they go on that's the beginnings of your fire right there obviously some preparation beforehand would mean you have success so again the kind of technique we use there really did speed everything up for us just one scrape as opposed to many and we have a fire and in wet conditions where I live all the time we might show year round we'll always expect rain having birch bark and dead standing hazel can be the dividing factor between having a fire and not having one so employing a bit a good technique and you can have a fire going very easily don't want to lose my supply in wet weather Birchbox really the main thing that I use always do a basic fire lay just have a small raft here to keep it off the damp ground allow oxygen to bring into it and have a little V there just allows me to elevate the bundle I'm going to be putting on top you don't really want to be smothering the fire you will oxygen to being named on that gap

just having that V just allows you to control the bundle on top and bring it up or down so no more oxygens come in so you're not starving it putting out the flame even in damp conditions get fire going really easily just requires finding a bit of dead standing would the finding a tinder that produced a good flame for you there are other techniques you can use like feathering sticks and things if you find sticks that are thin enough and dry enough but dead standing would something your burns for long enough like birch be very easy to get a fire going and don't worry about smoke the smoke will die down as soon as the heat picks up so because of the heavy rains a lot of the natural materials around that behave a lot like cotton wolves are all soaked and to drive them out it's going to be very very difficult and it won't be done today so I've prepared something like a little bit of a substitute to short sort of show you you know how a cotton more like tinder will behave and really with a cotton wool like tinder if ever you've used cotton woolen and Vaseline for example you know that you mix cotton wool and Vaseline together you sort of pull it apart and expand it tight you need to get air in there and break those fibers apart so it's not so dense and then you share it in Sparks and it'll ignite and burst into flames and be very very efficient so with that kind of tinder you wouldn't really push the feral rod close on to it like you would with those sort of dense hinders we just looked at those fungus and scrape a few sparks onto it you really want to shower some hot sparks in in there you know to ignite the tinder and ignite the oxygen that's contained within these little air pockets so it all burst into flames so I've spent some time fluffing up some amedy here as a substitute for cotton wool and it won't behave quite the same as cotton wool cotton wool will sort of burst into flames and ignite unlike a lot of other sort of natural materials that have the same properties of cotton wool and sort of being very spacious and full of that very fine fibers but what this will demonstrate is that fibers like that don't require sort of a dense amount of Sparks being driven into one area you can simply just drag your Ferro rod away from it you can see it's beginning to smolder already it requires very little ignition to actually get the Samedi material going and you'll find that with a lot of sort of cotton wool type materials that have the same properties

so you can see this material has been smoldering for a very long time that's just one of the good properties of a material II but if you did go out there and do some experimenting I hope this video sort of helped out really because you know a lot of the sort of programs you see people using feral rods and things you know they're blasting sparks down onto onto something you can't quite see and then a fires magically there and you sort of think all what you know how'd you do that a lot of tenders behave differently in a some of them you know like a lot of the tins we've used today in fact all of them apart from birch bark you know produce an ember like this so they need to be put into then I can nest bundle of dry material like dry grass and blown into flame and that's really how those two materials differ so you have Tinder's that behave like embers and tenders that produce naked flame like birch bark and pine sap and things like that then they require sort of different methods with the Ferro rod if you're going to use a Ferro rod to ignite them so you might want to get in place and just drive down some sparks like we did today just required one strike in most cases and an are aren't you know our material was lit or it may be like cotton wool you may be using cotton wool and Vaseline and you may need to sort of blast some sparks down on it dragging the Ferro rod away an angle like that they're sharing in sparks creasing that surface area it's also you've got a material with a lot of surface area igniting that material and the oxygen pockets in between and it'll burst into flames so different Tinder's behave differently and you need different techniques that kind of get more success with them so if you are looking for more information on bushcraft I do have a website you can go to WWMT Q bushcraft kETK forward slash WP there are various articles on there and things designed to help you get started in bushcraft also more advanced things as well if you are interested as well as a video archive page where you can check out all the other videos are available on YouTube do you feel free to check it out and obviously contact me if you've got any questions right a comment below I'll get back to you soon as I can but thanks again for watching guys and yeah really appreciate all the support and hopefully I'll see you in the next video take care

you