Fire School Part 8 No Container Char

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

my folks did can't agree with the Pathfinder school I got here with another in our series of the fire school what we've done is we've established a fire and we've thought about the next fire and we've charred material we talked about that in the last video what I want to show you today is a way that you can char material if you don't have a metal container you can use your fire to char material and that's what we're going to do today so our first concentration on this fire needs to be to build up a good solid bed of coals which would be good for us anyway if we were cooking we'll want that bed of coals so we're gonna build up a solid coal bed and then I'm going to show you how to charm material using your fire and no container stay with me so the first thing we need to do is establish a good bed of coals and that's what we're working on now we're burning small soft woods that will burn quickly and establish a large bed of coals very fast that's the key to getting a coal bed burn the softer woods first resinous woods if you have to to get a fire going but softer woods will build up a quicker coal bed longer-lasting coals will come from harder wood but soft calls will give you a quick coal bed that you can add harder woods on top of to establish a better coal bed long term so let's get this coal bed established and then we'll start with what we're doing okay so once I've got myself a good pile of coals established I'm just gonna kind of dig a little bit of a hole here doesn't have to be real deep then I'm gonna scrape some of those coals into that hole just like that then I'm going to lay a piece of my material on top of that cover it up real quick just like this and then cover it with coals just like this and then I'll add some more sticks to my fire and let it burn down again okay let's circle back around to flint and steel ignition for a minute while we're waiting on our char yesterday we talked a little bit about how to strike the Steel's to create the sparks but let's talk about the mechanics behind it because that will lead us into our discussion later on ferrocerium rods in this series the mechanics behind flint and steel for people that are new to this or new to bushcraft is that you are actually driving iron particles off of the steel the rock is harder than the metal so you're shaving microscopic or small particles of iron off of the steel those particles combust when they make contact with oxygen so you're basically adding friction and you're adding oxygen and the fuel becomes a small microscopic pieces of iron and they spontaneously combust or combust when they contact oxygen in small amounts so when you strike a steel like this one the sparks that are coming off of that steel are basically pieces of iron that are combusted they are about 800 degrees understanding that is important because that's why char becomes so important to strike the sparks that you'll drive off of your knife are going to be the same as a steel they're going to be about 800 degrees so there are low combustion temperature the sparks you drive off a fair cerium rod three to five thousand degrees plus depending on the material in that rod it's also made up of pyrophoric material like iron but it has added materials in it like magnesium and other materials that also will combust like that that are very hotter and burn much hotter when they come off of them off of the piece of metal so that's something we need to understand to make this operate you're just trying to make glancing blows against the steel you're not trying to hit the steel you're trying to glance the steel and that will drive sparks off of the steel and all of these Steel's will work in that same fashion

this one throws really really good Sparks this one was hand forged by me so those 800 degree sparks are enough to ignite charred material they're not going to be enough to ignite most materials other than like a true tinder fungus or a chaga without them being charred you're not going to be able to light grass and things like that with the sparks from a ferrocerium rod now I really want to show you the proper form that you use when you're driving sparks off of these devices with the CIE steel like this it's made to wrap inside your hand like this almost like a set of brass knuckles probably a secondary use for this bad boy I don't know you want to hold it pretty much straight up right and use glancing blows straight down the steel down the whole length of that steel just like that that's going to give you the most sparks if you do this you're going to get a few if you do this you're gonna get nothing you gotta use long glancing blows with a sharp edge the rock just has to be harder than a steel obviously you can see this was chipping off and are going to do that to you because Flint is a NAPA Bastogne it's going to flake off you can use Flint you can use quartz quartzite some forms of granite chert all of that stuff will work when you want to learn to identify rocks that will work with your fire steel just take your fire steel in the woods and start picking up rocks anything that you can find it's got a broken sharp edge on like this just pick it up and start striking your steel with it if it throws sparks put it in your kit you're gonna find something it throws really really good Sparks and you might find stuff that doesn't throw very good sparks because some materials are better than others but the only way you're gonna find that out is to just go pick them up of course you can buy Flint off the internet if you want to do that but there's going to be some type of stone probably in your area most likely in most areas United States that will throw sparks from a fire steel you just have to find them and once you identify that then you'll know what you can pick up in the future

one of the things that we have to remember in this case is that we have to let this cool down remember we talked about with the char you have to let the tin cool down before you open it well it's the same thing when you're charmed by fire and that is the challenge or the time-consuming portion of charring with fire in no.10 is that you're going to have to let this coal bed cool down before you can actually check the char and if your materials not charred then you've got to build your fire over again or start all over again move the coals back take your little hole put coals in it put your material on top of the coals in and again so all of that is very time-consuming

so our char is in this area I'm not sure exactly where right in here and we're gonna have to let this coal bed cool down quite a bit before we can even check that char so an operation in a container that takes 10 to 15 minutes at the max with a container like we used yesterday or something like this you're talking about an hour best-case scenario an hour okay what's this gets to the point where I can put my hand over it and touch it and hold my hand on it it's probably cool enough then like you just start moving some stuff out of the way with my hands until I find the cloth there's a corner out right there okay now I tell you what I'm seeing already see this brown right here that parts are not done but this is pretty well done right here so we've got some areas of this char cloth that aren't quite finished charring we could put that back in there but I'd be much more inclined to take the parts off here that are charred and not worry about this piece in the middle of streak here of brown

that's not charred I'd worry about this stuff on the outside right here the discharge this may have been buried a little bit too deep anything could have happened right there to make that notch are all the way out so what I would say is we take this over and we see if we got viable charcloth now the best way for us to check the viability of our char is just to take a small piece of it off get our fire steel out we're gonna use that big ugly one for this instead of a commercial one dig around in here and find us a piece of Flint there's a piece right there now like I said you know these areas that are brown are definitely not going to work but this stuff out here on the edges that rips real easy like that that you can see airspace through those should most definitely work so we'll just take a small square of this and put it on top of our Flint here on a good sharp edge and try to bounce a couple sparks up there and see what happens okay there we go you definitely got viable char cloth in there we've also got stuff we know it's not going to be viable because it's brown and not finished so our options are two things we can just disregard the park just not and take the park that is when we can start the whole process again like I said I'd be much more inclined with this to take that brown part and you can tell what's not done because you'll be able to see it and when you tear it it's going to tear along that line very good that isn't done and you're going to be left with the viable stuff this stuff here is going to be good this piece here is not going to be and it's going to feel like stronger material to you than the charged stuff so just pay attention to that everything's not going to work perfect every single time you do it that's just the way it is but we got enough viable char cloth here for a couple of three fires and that was the intent to make sure we had something for the next fire if we didn't have a container so we did accomplish the end goal all right folks one Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and iris and myself are off to the school with a long hunter and pricketts fort and then we'll be headed over to Holland like we discussed the other day so it's going to be several days probably before any videos are posted to my channel I just wanted to let you know that I'm going to be tied up and that's why I won't be posting videos I thank you for your support I thank you for your views I thank you for everything you do for our school for our family for our business our sponsors affiliates instructors and friends and I'll be back to another video as I can thanks guys [Music]

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