Bushcraft Basics Ep17: Fire Lighting Tools

Description

Bushcraft Basics Ep17: Introduction to Fire Lighting Tools and tinders.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from MC Hewish crafts here and welcome to another episode of bushcraft basics in last week's episode we had a look at personal med kits and I just showed you my personal med kit what I carry in the field with me because at this stage you're really going to want to carry a medical kit of some description out in the field with you just to treat cuts and scrapes on a minor level and as we move into things a little bit further in later episodes we're going to be using heavier cutting tools like axes and saws so we might extend things a little bit further at a later date but in this week's episode I'm really going to give you a bit of an introduction into fire lighting tools that are often seen and used in bushcraft skills I've got a range of items with me here today some items are tenders others are the tools and you can see how these items match up and look at their pros and cons and actual functionality out in the field and the reason being is because fire is a little bit like the center of a bicycle wheel with the spokes coming out all around it and the spokes of the wheel are all the other subjects and fire is holding them together in the center it is so important it's fundamental really to many different skills from keeping predators at bay to keeping you warm in low temperature conditions morale probably one of the most important aspects of all outdoor living skills morale is is incredibly important and probably not talked about enough in many respects the refinement of certain foods and the refinement of certain plants so you can actually turn them into soap or solutions to clean yourself something again that you don't see very often but it's really important in wilderness living skills if you're out for prolonged periods making glues making cordage the cooking of food so you can eat them a sterilization of water fire is literally the core in many respects and allows you to do so many different things which is why it's best to try and understand it in its entirety and never put it down for a second always practice it even in its most minimal state in your environment and what we've got here in front of us is a number of different tools I've brought some Tinder's some common ones that are from my environment that I use quite regularly and what you'll find is the further you go into fire and the more you understand about the tools you use you'll start to put them together into formulas and they'll match the weather conditions you're in and those formulas all come together for example if I go out on a very very wet day and it's tipping it down with rain and I've just got a Ferro rod on me the last thing I'm going to do is look for a piece of tinder fungus to turn into a coal or an ember and then some dry material like this poplar bark here to actually blow into flame because that formula on a wet day that's really torrential is a recipe for disaster because it requires me to find a material that's already very absorbent to be dry and then another material that's even more absorbent to be dry in damp conditions and then to put one in the other to blow into flame and obviously then get fuel on top of that fuel word tiny sticks that I need to be dry to make a fire and even though you can find small sticks that a dead standing meaning that they're dead hanging around in trees the first part of it is obviously the hardest in wet conditions I'm far more likely to take my Ferro rod and go out and look for something like fat wood which is the resinous core of a conifer tree which will light whether it's torrential or not or even birch bark that contains a lot of oil which will be fantastic to use in wet conditions because it works whether it's wet or dry and then use that with tiny dead standing sticks to make a fire which you may have seen me do many time in damp conditions on this channel if you watch my videos so just understanding how certain Tinder's work and being able to adapt them to various weather conditions is incredibly important and hopefully by the end of this video you'll have a brief insight into that and the kind of psychology behind it but let's have a look at some of the tools I've got in front of me what I've got here on the left-hand side is a piece of iron varieties and really what this represents a very very primitive ways of creating a spark to try and obviously aid in making a fire and this piece of iron varieties I found on the chalk cliffs in fact there were quite a lot of nodules like this and the key to finding the MIS following the red oxide it's leaching out of rock faces and you can also find them on the beach but this is a very unrefined piece and it would take quite a bit of refinement to make it look and you can to really to be usable is what I'm trying to say you would need to really buff this all back and you could rub this on a stone on the beach for example take it right back and it would go quite black and then it can be struck by a sharp stone like this piece of Flint here which can also be found on chalk cliffs quite commonly or even on riverbeds in a more unpure form often referred to as chert and it can be struck and a very dull spark would be produced but the tinder required to be used with this would need to be very refined because of the spark is of a very low temperature but we've taken it and produced something a little bit more common these days this is a piece of high carbon steel and this is often referred to as the flint and steel and you can see the sparks produce there when I struck it onto the piece of Flint but the flint and steel the technique is very very simple but it really is about the quality of the piece of flint you've got if you have quite a dull rounded piece of Flint like this piece here then your chances of making sparks are very slim because iron is pyrophoric and what that actually means is um it combusts in very very small amounts when it reacts in the air and also you can have some metals that react with water and moisture as well and they can also be pyrophoric so what is actually happening is you're striking this piece of high carbon steel it has a lot of iron in it against this piece of Flint or chert and the Flint is carving off tiny tiny fragments of the actual steel and it's combusting as it reacts with the air doesn't need to be done very quickly you can see if you shave off tiny tiny amounts you can see all the sparks forming so the technique really with the flint and steel is not to get really hard because what happens is you damage the Flint and you handle dulling the edge but you just need to find a bit that's quite sharp and just whip it as you go down you do this and what that does is it actually directs the sparks this way like that because when you're using this method you can actually have a piece of material like char cloth or even a small piece of natural material which they would have used millennia ago which is a MIDI which is the actual trauma layer of a bracket fungus like famous foam in terriers we've got a bracket fungus here this is famous foam antarious which is why brought back from Scandinavia you can find up in Scotland it's very rare in the south but there is some of it growing on the river wye actually though I found not long ago but this is the trauma layer and you can refine it down to a very very small piece like this and it would be held over the top like that and the sparks would then go into it and actually ignite it and if this material is charred it behaves even better and that's really the key with the flint and steel it's a fantastic technique of making fire when you're using charred materials for example if you take a cotton like a cotton bandana and you put it in a tin with a small hole in much like this one you can actually charm material so if you carry a small tin on you like this with a hole in it you always have a chance of charring some form of material out there to a really good standard you can char materials without a tent like punk wood just by holding it over a fire but having the tin really just help you refine that process but I don't carry a flint and steel on me because it's compatibility and functionality is actually I'm very poor in my part of the world it's it's quite damp you can see the hole everything's damp today it's been raining for quite a while and the floor is sodden all the wood on the ground is wet and my only real option in an environment like this is to find some dry Ness material a dry cramp ball or piece of tinder fungi and use that or if it's really really wet to start turning to the resinous material that produces a naked flame and that's I would do if the weather got really bad and it was quite torrential and had been like that for weeks so the actual usability of this tool for me is quite it's quite poor in this environment but it is something I do actually use an awful lot running you know doing courses and things like that I have to use this quite a bit but there is a way of carrying that set up in a different form that's more versatile and that's with something like this this is a more a heavy-duty and it's made of carbon steel and if you take a piece of Flint or chert and strike it against the blade or all this back of the spine of the blade I should say you will get sparks and you can essentially char some material if you really need to put some sparks in them and you're therefore carrying a flint and steel setup but just in a more versatile and compact form in some respects so it's not like a redundant material that's just in your pack adding to weight so the flint and steel isn't the most versatile of tools but certainly is quite a rewarding one to use and definitely a very good one to practice with but there are natural materials that can be used with obviously it can be used with cramped balls this is a cramp or fungus styled eniac and Centrica and if this is very dry and quite spacious and really mature and it's of the right age it will work quite well with a flint and steel provided you get the technique right and that's really the main thing with it it's all about the technique punk wood punk wood can be charred it can actually even be used as is if you really get it in the right condition although that's a very very tall order at times but if charred it works very very well the flint and steel as well and can be used to great effect so if you really had to and you had your carbon steel knife you could use some punk wood char it and it wouldn't have to be put in a tin it could just be baked over a fire and it will perform quite well with the Flint steel you do get various types of plants as well and at certain times of year the pith of the plant can be scraped out and used with a flint and steel and there are other kinds of fungi as well like chaga fungus can work well the flint and steel at times will they it does require a little bit of technique and we did talk about the trauma layers of various bracket fungi which can also be child or used as is when refined slightly with the flint and steel so there are things you can use it with it's really just about understanding what you can do with it in your environment and matching it up with the weather conditions this tool here is a fire piston and fire Pistons aren't really my favorite method of making fire they're quite useful and they can be used to great effect if you have the right materials or a bit like the flint and steel you do need some refinement of materials that you use and often they work better if the material is charred making it a lot more combustible but the way they work is you have a piston and it has a seal on it you have a chamber just there you put a piece of combustible tinder on the end and you slam this very hard and pull it back out quite quickly what happens is it works a little bit like a diesel engine in some respects you've got a chamber there full of gas you slam this quite hard the gas heats up very fast to about 500 degrees Fahrenheit and basically ignites the material that you have on the end if that will combust quite well and then you take that out and it should be smoldering and then you can transfer it across and this is usually the mistake a lot of people make they try and dig the Ember right and then drop it an S when the reality is it works far better as if it were like a cigarette lighter you put it on a larger tinder you blow transfer the Ember across and then something obviously a bit smaller than that marble-sized goes into a nest and they generally work a lot better that way for me the fire piston isn't really a piece of equipment that I would carry in my pack it would just be dead weight a lot of the Tinder's you can use with this can be used with a flint and steel or an improvised flint and steel setup even if you find a piece of quartz then one of the riverbeds around here or piece of chert it can be used and it will produce a spark if you've got child material or materials that you've prepared quite a bit so it's not really necessary for me to carry this as I can use those Tinder's with an improvised setup if I after one method always carry with me in my mind though is friction fire and friction fire is a fantastic way of making fire and I think if you're practicing bushcraft and you've been practicing for some time it is something that you should really know how to do because it really is that that primitive skill that you do not need to carry on you physically but it can be carried in your mind and the tools you can use and your understanding of your environment that's personal to you in your part of the world what woods work best can be used for you to assemble a friction kit effectively a friction fire kit for you to make fire with and there are many different forms of friction fire the one I use the most is the bow drill where you take a spindle a half board a bearing block and a bow and you can drive the spindle repeatedly into the half board to create a lot of heat through friction eventually leading to an ember and that can be blown into flame and it's um it's very very good method for me to use in my part of the world a lot of hardwoods and quite a lot of damp the the boat rule really does excel in this environment there is the hand drill as well the hand rules not too bad over here it's not the best method but something like elder and clematis work quite well for a hand drill set bow drills something I used and carried just the only way I made fire for quite some time now when practicing bushcraft and it gives you a really intimate understanding of how to use it

and it's something that you should always carry on you in here because um you never know when you might need it and if you lose an item like this for example if the art if the environment is permitting because there are very very challenging environments around the world where friction fire would be absolute struggle where the damp is just so ingrained in everything that it would it would take a long time to dry the wood and an already existing fire and the process would need to be quite quite refined really but if you do lose items like this it's worth knowing those methods of primitive fire lighting skills simply so you have something that you can use and again an amazing thing to be able to do in practice but probably the most common way that I make fire a lot of the time these days is through an item called a ferrocerium rod and this is a ferrocerium rod here you can see that this is my own ferrocerium rod that i've made we've got a rod here which is about six inches long by half an inch thick of a fairly medium composite we've got a piece of antler and a leather strap the antler actually cracked in half I had to glue it back together and make this leather brace so that isn't there just for decoration it's supposed to be holding the antler together with a bit of glue and I've got some leather cord on and it can go on my belt and I can carry it and it's got a locking mechanism that I've made so it will never fall late and I don't have to worry about it dropping or losing it in any shape or form but ferrocerium rod sir I'm really a combination of pyrophoric material made up of many different things quite a lot of its iron and cerium have two of the main ingredients you can look them up online the amount of iron they add often determines how hard the Ferro rod is because they can be bought in different composites you can get very hard ones that generally require a bit more speed and pressure to produce sparks that last a lot longer and you can get very soft ones like this like my fire army 2.0 which is a got quite a soft composite and it can be pushed very slowly but it produces a lot of sparks but it wears down a lot quicker and they have their pros and cons and you can obviously make choices the further down the line you go I go with a fairly medium composite if I'm honest with you and I really just adapt my technique to the fire rod that arrives and use it accordingly if you're going to buy a commercial Ferro rod and you're new to bushcraft and you're looking to buy one off the shelf then the light my fire army 2.0 is probably one of the best ones you can get in terms of composite it's a very very good composite performs consistently comes with a very good scraper as well and as a beginner you don't really want to be using your knife straight away to do the scraping using one of these provided scrapers

is ideal for just getting control and styling to understand how the Ferro rod performs and then you can move on to a knife later down the line and then if you change Farah rods and you build your own you build a custom one out of bone and a Ferro rod blank or piece of wood then you may want to just carry a knife in the Ferro rod and have it on your belt for example and you might not want a little striker kind of dangling around and that's fine but starting off with the striker it's fine but now we've kind of come down to this tool here the ferrocerium rod or Ferro rod or firesteel as its nicknamed we can start to understand the psychology of certain methods of using Tinder's in different weather conditions and I've got a range of Tinder's here with me and I'm going to just sort of show you how they perform and which one I turn to in certain weather conditions the first piece of tinder that we'll start off with is this cramp ball here these are sometimes referred to as King Alfred's cakes

dull linear concentric is the scientific name because of these concentric lines and also coal fungus or cramp balls is another common name for them and not everybody will have these in their country that's watching and that's I'm not being specific here with this piece of tinder this is more of a representation of a class of Tinder's Tinder's that perform like embers and burn like briquettes and that's why we're using this one I've done a number of videos on them on the channel in the fire lighting section in the fire lighting playlist if you wish to to have a look at them but this represents Tinder's that perform like embers much like the trauma layers of this bracket fungi here they will perform like embers they will not produce a flame without this material here they need to be placed into this material to be blown into flame but there are tenders that produce a flame straight off the bat things like birch bark like pine pitch or fat wood just what this is and even waxes like beeswax will produce a flame straight off the burn so we have two classifications of tinder tins that produce flames tins that produce embers and we'll talk about their pros and cons in a moment but let's start off with this cramp ball here if I take my knife and I cut this in half you can see all the concentric lines just there and this tinder here is a quite brittle they can be tricky to use I always break them down even more say than that sometimes with my hands like this we do not need that much at all in actual fact I mean even that's quite big but that piece there is absolutely fine I'm not really going to cover technique in this video we'll focus on that specifically in next week's video but there's a few ways we can approach this crumple especially with this soft fair rod here this technique here works very good with a soft fair rod because it doesn't allow much power and you can see we've got a little spark in there after one strike and that's simply because of the age of the funghi it's a perfect one really to use if you wanted to transfer it to a bigger bit you could simply place that there and blow and then the ember has gone to another piece of funghi that's even bigger but we do want to keep that piece so I'm going to get rid of that the characteristics of a tinder that glow like an ember like this one here like a briquette is that they burn hotter and use more fuel when you blow on them which is very different to a tinder that produces a flame a naked flame and this is the thing if you blow on a tinder that produces a flame if that isn't established and it's very young just a small flame you'll blow it tight and that's the thing we're windy conditions are concerned if it's very very windy then you'll struggle with an open flame on birch bark if it's in a large fire and there's a lot of heat and a lot of oxygen goes in and it's an established fire and it'll burst into flames but if you blow on it in that stage when it's very very young and unestablished you'll blow it out I'll demonstrate in a minute but you can see here that this is glowing very nicely and then what we need to do now to convert that into an actual fire or flame let's place it into a nest of dry material this happens to be the inner bark of a poplar tree which is very very effective and to be quite honest with you on dry days you can take a Ferro rod and place it straight on the nest and just ignite the nest you don't even need a tinder and that goes without saying for a lot of nest material if we're in dry conditions then you very very rarely need an ember what you really need to do is just put a Ferro rod straight on the nest and it'll burst into flames effectively you can see this really does help I'm thinking about wind direction the winds going this way so I'm not going to be like that all the smoke going into my face inhaling it all and you really want the Ember almost partially covered so you can barely sit because it needs to make contact with that outer material there's no point holding it like this and blowing it like that you really want it buried away you can see that raw if we hold it just like this it won't burn us until we turn it over cuz obviously heat rises vertically and we can put that down like this and then we have a fire and it will burst into flames and obviously there's a lot more to that than just doing that to make a fire we need a raft on the ground - obviously separate from the dry ground and allow oxygen to flow in and that'll eventually form our bed of embers and then our fuel wood goes on top which is tiny dry sticks and that's the foundation of the fire and then larger fuel wood can be put on on top and that obviously keeps our fire going for a lot longer but you can sort of see how a tinder that performs like an ember behaves you blow on it it gets hotter ignite surrounding material it needs to be blown into flame but there are tenders that obviously perform very differently so if the weather was very very damp and really wet and it was torrential out here I wouldn't use that at all because this crumpled material is most likely going to be wet that nest material is definitely going to be wet and my chances making a fire are very slim so you can see that I wouldn't turn to that very often in my part of the world but if we take this tinder here it'll perform very differently if I take my knife it doesn't really matter which side of this birch bark I scrape because it's so resinous you can see it in the color like scraping this side will be better off the bat which is the underside of the bark just because of how much resinous material there is this is really what you want when you're scraping birch bark you want lots of deep red shavings like that and you can see them just there and if I light that with the fire rod I can do that in a few different ways I can use this technique which is quite good you'll see that burn then if I blow on that I've just blown it out that's a common mistake that a lot of people make when they're starting to use tin this for the first time you need to know how these Tinder's behave so if it was a very windy day that would have just blown out I really need to take steps to protect it in its beginning stages in its infancy when I'm making a fire I can revive it

almost

unfortunately it's got a bit bit tarnished now it won't go we've got a little flame there anyway but most of the material is burnt away unfortunately but you can understand what I mean by blowing on it one thing often see as well is a little ember glowing there so if you're trying to get it going and you see some embers glowing people will blow on that as well thinking it's a bit like tinder like that performs like an ember when it's not at all you'll just blow it out and at the same time you'll scatter your material everywhere what you really need to do is if it's glowing hit it again and then you'll get flame and that's really the key with that kind of material and the same really applies with this fad word here another resinous material wonderful for wet weather work and something that I turn to in coniferous woodlands when I'm in commerce woodland and I'm just carrying my Ferro rod and nothing else I'm really sort of it's going out there and just testing out materials and enjoying the wilderness a bit then I really look for fat wood on wet days you can see it burns fantastic how much it's burning but I can blow it out so it's not like a an ember that glows when you blow on it when it's young in its infancy it's very very fragile so you can see how different Tinder's behave we've covered quite a bit in today's episode we've had a look at a range of tools their compatibility and we've also had a look at those Tinder's as well and you can sort of see how they accompany different weather conditions and their pros and cons in many respects I think one of the fantastic things about Ferro rods is you don't even need really any material at all if you carry a knife on you and you can identify dead standing then you can actually light fire feathers just like this one which is a brilliant way of making a fire not really relying on too much at all almost had it once it's small doing like that

a few more blasts with the fire rod and it usually goes it really is just about making the curls as thin as you can possibly make them and the dryer the wood the batter this one's got quite a bit of damp in it it's not catching quite as nicely as it as it should but it's getting there and if you made quite a few of these it's a fantastic way of getting a fire going with just using the wood itself it's just finding a wood in your environment that is quite soft and burns nicely obviously you wouldn't just use this you'd have quite a few of these so I hope you found this video useful it's kind of like a crash course really in a variety of methods or tools I should say in making fire that the most common ones you'll see in bushcraft and a lot of different people use them and also a bit about Ferro rods which is the tool we're really going to focus on specifically and different kinds of Tinder's the psychology behind different classifications of tinder so you've got ones that produce an ember one's a producer flame their pros and cons and really an insight into which I choose in my environment and that's really where the key is you need to have a look at where you live if you live in a northern temperate zone like me you'll probably see very similar materials around you and you might adopt even the same techniques as me or similar techniques but if you live in a very very hot part of the world then perhaps it'd be very different for you a Ferro rod could be used just to ignite a bunch of grass that would always remain dry for 80% of the year and you wouldn't really need to refine materials at all so techniques will really differ all around the world and that's the key to get out there have a look at different materials start practicing and I would really recommend that like my fire army 2.0 Ferro rod for any of you out there looking for a Ferro rod off the shelf but in next week's video we're really going to focus specifically on the ferrule and have a look at techniques and from there on it will actually start gathering materials refining them then moving on to heavy cutting tools and actually building a full-blown fire and looking at the mechanics behind it and please have a look at the links below there are useful videos in there related to other fire lighting videos on the channel and thank you again guys and I'll see you very soon you