Feather Stick Fire

Description

going a bit farther in the feather stick process and showing how I start fires when the weather has all the other materials damp

Tags: survival,bushcraft,woodcraft,survival kit,outdoors,knife,camping,gear,primitive,skills,mantis outdoors,preparedmind101,william myers,family,education,preparedness,wilderness,woods,Feather Stick,Survival (Multipart TV Episode),Fire,Cabin,Survival Skills (TV Genre),Outdoor,Weekend,Fun,Tent,Camp,Campsite (Accommodation Type)

Video Transcription

hey how you guys doing this is William Irish mass outdoors today we're going to bring you a fire video it's a feather stick video and what I see on line a lot is people showing people how to do feather sticks but nobody shows how to do a feather stick fire and what I mean by that is we take one stick that is around the size from your nose to your fingertips and that is roughly the size to where you can't grasp it all the way around with one hand and then we cut that split it up into in multiple sticks and that gives us everything that we need from a fire from one stick alright guys this is what we come up with a little bit of a hard wood but it will feather what we're going to do is now we have to cut this in half again pretty much from fingertips to elbow this is a little bit shorter than I want to be just a hair shorter but it's still perfectly fine but now like I said what we're going to do is we're gonna go fingertip to elbow whereas all that in half that's going to get us equal two halves if you measure something out from your nose to your fingertips then you go fingertips to elbows you're going to get right about a half alright so we measured fingertip to elbow got right about half like I said just a little trick if you're measuring out something that's no sphingo to fingertips to elbows will be right about half so now what we're going to do good and throw that down alright so now what we're going to do is we're going to put on this in half twice giving us for half so we're going to four sticks out of this one and four sticks out of the other one and what the purpose of this is is to get those eight sticks six of those are going to be really big heavy fueling curls and then one's going to be fine paper thin curls and then with the eighth stick I'm going to cut it down and some finer kindling and that's what's going to help fuel the fire from there so we're going to get seven feather sticks and one fuel stick so don't gonna work week a little not on that side then go through that side first you know in doing this you want that last stick for that fuel stick what i would do is take pretty much the worst stick when you do not you know it's not going to feather no matter what you do and make that one your fuel stick you know you want to get the habit of putting all these sticks up off the ground because if you're actually needing to use this technique you're probably doing it because you're in adverse weather conditions and you need to get into this wood to the dry parts of the wood all right so what I want to do when I'm making these feathers I want to use at least three fourths of the wood that I'm trying to use and then you know you can make a couple clearing cuts get your get some platforms set up start running those ridges what I want to make here is bigger curls any Creole that comes off of this it's not like it's a waste that's all be collected it will all be saved you know if I can't get all the curls to stay on this I'm not going to cry about it that's for sure we're using pretty hard wood here I said it will curl you know a lot of people concern themselves with how many times the woods curling over you know like oh it has to curl this much or at least four curls here at least two girls don't concern yourself with that you know as long as this wood is coming off in the diameter that I want it that's the only thing that's important is the diameter of the curl I don't care how much it curls over it's going to start a fire in the matter what and I want to make this into a big ball of curls because I need to stack these so I want to make them this type of a feather stick I want to make kind of flat that's good enough see what i mean by those real thick curls there guys i'm going to go ahead and finish this one save the battery and get back with you when i'm done this is the stick that I want to feather really really well all those other sticks are just for fuel I don't care if they feather and curl Rome well this is the stick that I want to concentrate on making really fine girls and that's one of the reasons why I'm sitting down and doing this if I could sit down and put this stick beyond my triangle of death as you see I'm not cutting into anywhere around with my legs or anything like that are holding a stick outside of that for safety reasons and I'm doing very controlled slow cuts that are producing very very fine curls because I'm lighting this with a fat with a Ferro rod now the lighter or anything like that so I'm going to need those fine curls to get this bundle going then get bundled to going bundle three going and chain reaction to where I have enough heat and enough fuel to get my kindling going and then get the other stuff going that I follow along that will do right there plenty stick this up in the cedar sapling right here and go on with a known and what I like to do when I'm starting out one of these and this one I'm going to want to use as much as the board as I possibly can I want to take that big Ridge off so I want to make a a nice clearing cut with my knife get as much purchase on this thing as I can make it a nice it Clary cut just like that okay and then I got ridges that I can start feathering like I said the first few or so don't stay on that's no big tragedy not a big deal long as we start to get some of the staff like some day at least a but like I said all those ones that don't stay get gathered to get used it's not a loss you know this one I want their curls to be a bit thicker good picker a little bit of not there keep it out of it yea big deal a little bit of uneven surface what happened there continue on really hard wood you know making all these feather sticks like this especially how hard this wood is I'm agree I mean this is it's pretty hard but that's about ninety percent of what's in this area is hickories or oaks this is a hardwood forest there's some maples that would have probably been a little bit of a better choice but I don't want to cut anything green this Hickory is down so let's just go ahead and use this it works is fine just a little bit more of a laborious task so making all these feather sticks on this hardwood like this you might get you know start to fatigue a little bit you know I've been at this probably 20-25 minutes already almost done just getting down to the last sticks right now what you can do if you are starting to fatigue a little bit is you know brace this knife the spine of the knife in your knee and then just start to actually draw the stick back this way and you're going to find you're going to have a little bit more of a control in fact in some instances then he would if you were just doing this regularly the bad thing about this is that you can really get a good bite and it's go really deep doing it that way so you kind of really got to get used to what you're doing if you're going to do it that way so but it is a good technique it's good to know good to learn and we're going to continue on and we'll get back to you when we're finished alright so that's pretty much the progress we got so far on this one adversely you know got to find what's comfortable for you if you're not using this knee brace you know some people like to use it on the inside me just like this you know it doesn't matter whatever's comfortable for you both can be comfortable for me depending on what I'm doing what I'm cutting I'm taking really really deep huge chunks out of my would i like the inside me if I'm just doing really really light stuff I'll go to back up late so I'm taking light feathers I like to use the outside me just like this it's just I just find that I get a little bit more control that'll about do it for that one we're about done we're going to get on to busting up this kindling alright so now we got to start making this kindling stick so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the last stick that we had made I'm gonna start bussing it up into smaller pieces

and you know everybody talks about using hatchets and axes and knives and stuff like that stuff this small I'd rather use a knife to Baton not to say that I couldn't use an axe I just would rather do it this way I want to make sure that I get the pieces that I want out of here and they're going to be flammable to the 10 to the 5th make another feather sticks that we've made that not now if you see when your baton you're going to have you're running out this way torque the knife in one direction by the way you can dig in a little bit more and get more than run out the whole piece that's all if I had it torque my knife on a ran out real short the wood flying everywhere go shower all right so I'm going to continue getting this stuff busted down even smaller and we'll get back with you should be able to get at least eight sticks of kindling out of the eight to stick so don't go nowhere be right back so right now what we're doing is we're kind of separating these feather sticks and from the heaviest to the finest and we don't want them to sit directly on the ground when it kind of keep them up a little bit we have an older fire over here that we're kind of cleaning these up against and what we're going to do is we're going to light with a Ferro rod the finest feather stick and then start adding feather sticks and start adding kindling so all right I want these so I can grab them pretty readily how I want them they're out here probably won't go on the first bar but we'll see what we can do here

yeah I'd be careful when you're messing with feather sticks is one will grab the other one and that's all she wrote we're gonna be stuck together and you're gonna have a dangerous situation possibly start stacking these feather sticks on top of each other it's going to go rather quick here's the real beef you want then start stacking your kin link there you go guys start a fire from this point you should already have all your other materials built and sitting and waiting so you can just start adding from here

alright so what we got going on right now is we're going to take all these feather sticks that we've made I'm going to kind of class them as in the beefiest feather stick to the lightest to the stick so this one's pretty beefy just kind of set them out here try to get them in the air a little bit you don't want them sitting directly on the ground