Bushcraft Basics Ep20: Making Fire Feather Sticks

Description

In this episode of Bushcraft Basics we look at Fire Feathers also known as feather sticks. Learning to feather sticks will teach you to look past typical tinder's and allow you to be able to create fire almost anywhere in poor weather conditions. They can be used with Ferro Rods, Matches or Lighters.

This is an essential part of bushcraft fire lighting that will improve your knife work, tree identification and using a ferro rod (fire steel).

Feathering sticks exposes the dry dead wood inside the stick allowing you expand its surface area and light it with a ferro rod, matches or even a lighter.

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Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here and welcome to another episode of bushcraft basics in last week's episode we have a look at phat word a resource that can be gathered from coniferous trees from the stumps branches and even the roots of the tree when they've rotted out or died on the ground but in this week's episode we're actually going to have a look at fire feathers and if you're not familiar with a fire feather it's where you split wood down and you make fine shavings into curls actually feather the wood out and increase the surface area to make it usable to actually ignite much easier and if you feather well it can really be the difference between not having a fire and having a fire in environments where resources are sparse so let's have a look at my immediate area around me we're going to have a look at the types of woods that are on the ground and pick something that's perfect for making a feather so we have a dead tree in front of us here and this is what's referred to as dead standing wood and you may hear that term used a lot it's definitely a term you'll hear used in wet weather fire lighting always look for a run dad standing wood and that just means wood that's dead that's standing and that's essentially what this is this piece here is dead standing wood the piece next to me there or even this piece this is dead standing and it just means it's off the ground when woods on the ground you don't generally want to use it if it's saturated because you'll just have moss all over it or plant life it'll absorb a lot of moisture and unless you're looking to steam some food or produce a very smoky fire you don't generally want to use it but if you're going to make a fire feather it's usually for one of two reasons the first reason could be that you have some tinder like birch bark or fat wood and you want to take that flame from the birch bark and fat wood and make it bigger very quickly because you can't find dry twigs or dead standing wood very easily so you make a feather and the feathers then put over that flame and it makes it very bigger very quickly and you can sister we have lots and lots of feathers and have a roaring fire in a very short space of time that's hot enough to ignite other wood around it that might be slightly damp if you're struggling in colder or wet conditions the reason I often make feathers is because I'm in an environment where I can't find reliable Tinder's that will easily accept a spark from my Ferro rod so I find wood that's off the ground i feather it create a lot of surface area make very thin fine shavings of the feather but a sparking it from the fire rod and I've got a flame right there and then it can only be built upon quite easily but knowing a bit about your environment also can greatly assist you in making feathers for example this wood here this tree that's come down this is an oak and English oak and it's very easy to tell that has a very linear grain structure the way it rots is quite uniform doors looks very similar and the branches are very angular and it looks to me Oh cause reminds me of this a very large antler that's fallen on the forest floor and if you remember that and it can be very easy to identify but oak couldn't be my first choice to make a feather with this is something I would come back to almost definitely when my fire is going I would come back to this oak put it on my fire and it would give me an incredibly hot bed of embers and burn for me almost all night keep me warm help me cook my food it'd be an easy fire to manage so this is something we would come back to much later and we can talk about that much later on in the series when we get to that stage but in this environment here at being a coniferous environment I've got much better options

I've got conifers dad standing all over the place that contain resin and will make a very volatile feather so let's go have a look around and see what we can find

this bit here looks pretty good it's off the floor so moisture won't have gotten to it and rotted it down too quickly it's a bit of conifer this is actually spruces a lot of Norwegian spruce in this area and this is just one that's come down fact there's lots of them all around me here that have come down and you can tell it's dead wood as well if you break some of the branches have a look at the bark that's actually peeling off you get a good indication that it's actually getting dead for some time you even got a nice bit of fat word just in that actual shoulder there that I've picked off so again it has more resources to offer than just the feather as we looked at last week but the piece you really need to pick is the smoothest and straightest piece and you really want as fewer branches coming out of it as possible you want a nice straight grain to work with very few kind of curls in the grain where branches would have been coming out and that'll mean you can feather it very very easily so I'm going to take a piece that's about a foot long and then we can split it down and start working with it take the excess off first the weight of the branch to my left ear and drop away and that way you're not then working with something on the floor and you can stand up that's nice and dry in there it looks very good

there we go the piece of wood I've chosen is quite thick there's a good reason for that I generally don't go for very thin pieces of wood when I'm feathering because I live in a damp climate and thin wood absorbs moisture far easier than thick wood with this petite particular piece of wood here you'll find the core is very very dry even then the outside might have a bit of moisture in it would have rotted slightly that's where the moisture will be held the center is always dry so when you actually split this down and work with the inside you're working with dry wood so that's really where the logic of that comes from we're going to batten this down as well

this is only a foot long and it's quite thick and straight pretty easy to work with just place your knife on top and start battening we did talk about knife safety so do be aware of this triangle here the inner leg you can even put your side to it if you wish to if you're a bit uncomfortable just make sure you're not straddling it and you're battening it because things can go wrong you can lose control you're out in the woods on your own with a wing to the inner leg then it's um it's light sight really if it's a bad one just stir start splitting that down that was a pretty solid bit of wood there we are feathering is pretty simple I always placed a little piece of wood that I might have spare on the ground just like that and then what you find is you have quite a hard surface that you can put pressure down on and if you look at my position I'm sideways to the piece of wood and it's as low as possible the higher up it is the more Bend you have in your arm and the trickier the technique becomes all you really need to do is start quite far up we do have a knot there it's not really too much of an issue and just start running your knife very lightly found the corner you can obviously dig in a bit towards the bottom as well and the more pressure you apply the more of a curl you end up with the thicker the curl you can see that one thing I always quite like to do is always like to work on these ridges you end up with the little ridges everywhere when you're working on a piece of wood and when you feather on a Ridge you generally get much better result than if you try and feather on a great big flat piece and obviously the harder you push the thicker the feather will be the lighter you push you more consistent your stroke the thinner and fluffier the feather will actually be so you can alter that but really when you're starting to get to the end of the feather where you're going to be using your Ferro rod at this particular part here which is generally what you would do you make much finer feathers you can angle the feather as well for example if I point my knife like this you'll see that the curl starts to face a particular way and actually spiral like that whether is if I just go down flat then the curl just bunches up into a little barrel and if you go the other way like this you can actually send the curl in the opposite direction

you'll find different words perform differently when producing feathers this is actually a particularly good word in terms of its resin content Norwegian spruce but in terms of feathering there are the woods that I prefer and they actually produce much better feathers goat willow is one of the most common woods that we find in this woodland here when you start getting into the deciduous and it's produces a really really beautiful feather and burns very well even though it doesn't have a resin content like the conifer here it still burns fantastically and it doesn't rot down too quickly if off the ground another one I like is hazel lots of hazel here very straight grain really easy to work with any trouble you'll find with it is it rots incredibly quickly so finding one that's quite hard in the core and dry can just be a little bit tricky at times but it's everywhere so you generally have quite a range to pick from if you are wandering through a part of the woodland with a lot of hazel in it's got an incredibly straight grain which is why it's split so well and you can then always work off of that peak that you end up with and being quite a softwood as well it's quite easy to work with you can kind of be as hard and soft on it as you like and produce really nice long wispy feathers will work on a flat area produce thicker ones you can even angle it produce angled feathers as well start to curl like we do on the Spruce but you can just see the difference in the way this is feathering so this wood here which was actually harder to work with but in a way it gives you better results simply because of the resin content but that doesn't mean you can't experiment with other woods and it doesn't mean that you just have to look for conifer so once you've made your feathers you can take your Ferro rod and actually try and light one and once you've let one and it's burning well the others go on top and you've got a roaring fire well I'm making feathers I always work on the ground even if the ground is damp I don't mind the outer of this here getting wet and hopefully I'd position myself somewhere where I'm out of heavy rain before I even begin doing this kind of work get a tarp up or a shelter of some description but the reason the ground is good is it's a stable surface and when you put pressure down on the feather it will bed itself into the soft ground and it won't move around if you're working for example on a small log or stump things can wobble everywhere and it gets pretty irritating but we're going to put the ferrocerium rod just here where the softest material is and you can even get your life just create a small divot for the end of the Ferro rod to go into this is really the key you just want to take your time with this sort of thing and when you press down now the ferrule you're actually pushing down the feather and what you can do now is just put some sparks in find your feet with it you see we have a little flame straight away and then eventually you'll get a flame and you hold the feather like that because obviously heat rises vertically and you want that heat to transfer into the other material and start burning it we might have got lucky with this I get me is burning I thought it was just smoking after that and it starts to burn and you can see you get a lot of flame off of that a lot of heat it's a really good technique to use so just to show you it's not all about the conifers we have the hazel here as well same process just flatten an area for the fair rods sometimes you can put your knee on it like I can do with this and just stabilize it a little bit you've got these really fine curls there well almost there we go they should ignite a little bit easier than the rest if you hold that vertically it transfers upward into the rest of the material you can see that Hazel's lovely makes a good feather but notice about different thicknesses of curls either thicker curls burn for much longer than the thinner curls that disappear very rapidly say always stagger your curls make thickens and thin ones and they can both assist each other and assist you to ignite that those twigs and things that might be actually a bit damp and need that assistance another scenario might be like we talked about you want to use the feather with an existing tinder like fat wood this is the fat wood we gathered on last week's episode and it should perform even better than that it's been sitting at home drying out we just need to scrape this down so you can see I've cleaved some of the hazel to make flat surface I always do that flat surfaces so highly underrated especially when you're outside take a section of that off try not to splay everywhere Ferro rod on top again it should be much easier there we go some flame and transfer that into the feather we didn't even use much material there we could have used a lot more in the real world if we wanted to make a fire that you can see that was Easy Street you really didn't need too much effort there with something like fat wood you know you're really laughing if you make a feather so I hope this video helped out really just a simple video covering fire feathers it's a subject that you may not use too often you may find you don't need to use fire feathers but just remember it's always useful to have that skill because as we've just demonstrated you can create a fire with just wood alone it doesn't even need to be particularly thin Twiggy pieces of wood you can choose a very big log split it down and make a feather with the dry wood inside and in some environments when it's been raining for months on end that wood will be soaked and you'll need to seek out this thicker dead logs to actually split them down to get to the dry wood and feather it and it could be the difference between having a fire and not having a fire but what I would advise to you at this point in the training series is to actually go out and start identifying different trees get yourself a useful tree ID book if you have a look at the description this video I've put a few in there for you and the British Isles unfortunately for you guys overseas you might have to seek experts in your region to actually tell you which books to have a look at but it's a great thing to be able to do and don't just ID would take a section of it home carve with it work with it burn it and see how it performs burning wood and carving with it really tells you a great story about that piece of wood in your mind's eye and when you look at a tree you don't just have a look at the tree itself and take it for face value look beyond the back you see the timber you start to imagine what that would is good for and remember the experiences you've had with it so I hope this videos helped out and thanks again for watching and I will see you very soon in another episode of bushcraft basics thanks again guys take care