Bushcraft Basics Ep18: Ferrocerium Rod Technique

Description

In this video we start to familiariser ourselves with Ferrocerium Rods, their composites and the techniques that work with them. This will be great practice for when we move into fire lighting with the aim of building fires.

Huge Ferro Rod - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Large-Blank-Fire-steel-Firesteel-Ferro-rod-Ferrocerium-Bushcraft-Survival-etc-/281446135432?hash=item41877f3688:g:RA0AAOSwVFlUHqct

Become a Patron:

https://www.patreon.com/MCQBushcraft

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,wood,family,hobbies,fun,animals,game,Ferrocerium

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 fire lighting tools the most common ones used in bushcraft how they work with various Tinder's in terms of that compatibility and a bit about weather conditions and how they perform if you're using them to make a fire but in this week's episode we're actually going to have a look at the ferrocerium rod and practice technique with the ferrocerium rod or fire steel and I've got a range of fire steels or feral rods here with me today some of a soft composites some of a harder composite I've also got a range of Tinder's as well various different Tinder's and you can see how you might need to adjust your technique depending on the composite of your fair rod and the actual Tinder's you're working with and that's really what we're going to look at today last week we talked about different composites of ferrule some can be pretty hard and they last for a long time but they require a bit more force and speed to create sparks off of others are very soft like this like my fire army 2.0 you can scrape this with very little speed and it will produce very consistent sparks and they have their pros and cons really the way it works is the cerium inside the composite will ignite at a very very low temperature and just a slight bit of friction causes the cerium to ignite and the other metals off the back of that will ignite also and their power phoric metals as well which is a huge advantage to it all and you get sparks in excess of about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit which is 1600 degrees C roughly so it's a very very hot compatible tool with a variety of Tinder's but the composite of the fair rod will really affect the kind of material you're using and the setup for example this technique is very good where you shower a few sparks down onto an item like that and it's quite controlled and it allows you not to touch the item most people will do this when they first pick up the fair rod which is not a very good technique at all because sometimes you hit tinder it goes flying off everywhere there is that allows you to keep your distance but maximize the sparks some people may want to rest their arm and pull back the farad like this as well shower spark stone this can work quite well as well but it generally offers less compatibility than this one here on various Tinder's now you may have a farad like this one this is of quite a hard composite and it requires you to scrape very hard now with this one here you can see it's much harder and it doesn't produce in fact it's very very awkward to use it like this and it doesn't produce as good of sparks as this one here which is much softer requires much less effort to carve into in fact this one works very well like this it is a much harder composite so it will last longer we actually have to adjust our technique when working with this one because it's much much harder than this one here and you can actually see by the way that they wear away which one will be a softer fair rod you actually see it in the patterning on it loads of flakes of chunk doubt of that and it gets very rough as you use it where there is this one stays much smoother because of that harder composite so it really depends which one you really want to go for if you're exploring the wilderness or going on an expedition or living out in the wilderness for a prolonged period of time and you took a fair odd with you for example maybe a hard accomplice it would be better because it would last longer and you just need to adopt your technique and get more comfortable with it but perhaps in a general kit something like this is quite useful to actually begin with and start using and they are a very good concept they just wear down quite quickly which is their disadvantage but let's have a look at how they perform on various Tinder's the tinder I have here first of all is birch bark and silver birch a very common type of birch tree that grows in my part of the world is what this is from and it can come in various different forms different thicknesses this is from a live tree that fell down so the bark peeled off in very thick sheets but on a dead tree it can be quite different even on a live tree that has fallen-down bark can be taken from it in a safe way all of those things we'll explore in later episodes but if you do have a nice sheet of birch like this you can take a sheet and scrape it which is what you generally do with this species of birch to produce the pile of dust which is what I'm doing now all these little shavings would be full of oil and they'll burn very brightly this is only a very very small pile for demonstration but it gives you an idea of how they can be used and if we take this feral rod here this is the light my fire ferret you can see we've got this curled birch here so we have to almost turn it to get comfortable and comfort is really all part of success in this kind of thing if I use this method where I just go like that I'm going to hit the pile and it will go everywhere so we can put our thumb on top of our nail there just use the end of the fair rod and put some sparks in it's quite a controlled way of directing all of the sparks into the pile obviously this pile is tiny and if you're in the real world making a fire it probably heaped like this and you would spend a long time doing it but this is just an example but if we make another pile I'll show you a slightly different technique that can be used with a harder composite so we have another small pile there again nowhere near big enough for a real fire but with a hard to composite what I generally do is place it over the top of the pile Schrag down to put some shavings of ferrous cerium into the actual pile itself and then a final strike and you've put some sparks in there and everything ignites and it burns quite brightly the thing you've got to remember though it's just to stop about a centimeter when that finger hits the ground you stop or else what will happen is you'll do that and you'll flatten all the material and you'll smother it and starve it with oxygen and it won't ignite so if you go like that you're just going to flatten it so stopping about there is a very very good way of just

all to work quite successfully and that's generally the technique you'll see me use with these two tools here other Tinder's that perform very very similar to birch bark is this fat word here and these are sort of resinous Tinder's really they're very special they're fantastic in wet weather and if I was in a coniferous woodland this is what I'd be looking for a piece of fat wood and this is a piece that I carry on my belt from time to time especially in wet conditions but if I just make a pile of shavings just to increase the surface area then I cut that off there like that almost like a little fire feather really in some respects we can get our soft composite and use the same technique where we place our thumb on top of this thumb like that keeping the striker at 45 degrees and supporting almost all of the ferrah rod and just putting some sparks there you can see that once you actually get a few glowing embers in there it doesn't take much really to convert that into a flame and you can see it burns very brightly brilliant stuff if you find a downed spruce tree or European larch tree where I am in my neck of the woods you want to dig into the core for one of these because you can find them from time to time and it's a very good find but I'll show you how to do it with a harder composite there we have another little pile can take our harder composite you can see when I struck down like that my index finger touches that log and I stop if I carry on I smother it that's the thing you got to remember don't carry on all the way down just stop when that index finger hits the ground you don't need to go full ball but I just stopped when it hits the ground you'll always leave that gap birch bark and fat wood are very similar materials in the way they behave they're both quite resinous or they have oil in them and what that does is it protects them

from moisture and allows them to use and adverse weather conditions but other than other tenders that produce a flame as well like this one here this is greater Reid mace or often referred to as cattail and it has these big seed heads unfortunately this time of year they're not quite ready to be used yet they're still maturing into a seed head so if we put a spark into these there's still too much moisture and they wouldn't be able to be used but what you would do with this is use expand it out a bit like clematis or old man's beard as its referred to and you could put a spark in and it would ignite and generally the technique I would use with a hard composite for something like that is I would drag away like this and what that does is it showers the surface area in Sparks because you're not localizing the Sparks to a little pile or focusing them down or concentrating them you're showering a big pocket of oxygen a little bit like cotton wool with lots of sparks so although I can't show you with these that is the technique that I would use and the same technique with this can be used where you could drop sparks down onto them and they would ignite but there is another type of tinder that we can have a look at that produces a number these tinder is all here in front of me attenders that glow like embers and we talked all about this last week so you should have a bit of an understanding of what I mean we've got a cramp ball here dialed in e'er concentric ax we've got the trauma layer of a bracket fungi we did talk about that again last week we had a look at foams foam in tereus and the amber colored a Madhu trauma layer that comes from it and how you can refine it and it's obviously a bit more efficient this is what I call poor man's amedy and it's from a bracket called Ganoderma Australia which is a different type of bracket that grows in the northern hemisphere and it's a bit more common down in the safe but it can be produced into a trauma layer like this and if we bend it you'll see all the material sort of break away and it's almost like cotton wool again it's been compacted down and these can be really really useful this is a slow burn ember and this is a quick burn ember and we'll have a look at this one first of all if we take our soft composite we can use a variety of different techniques it really depends on the type of ember producing material you have some of them require you to strike the ferrule up very close and concentrate sparks on a specific area much like this one here if we showered down on this it wouldn't ignite very easily and other preparations would have to be made but with the cramp ball if you get one at the right maturity you can literally drop the lightest of sparks in and it will burn very well but we'll see how this one performs oh there we go so you've got some sparks now you can see it didn't really take much to get that going but that's really down to the crammed pool some of them you actually need to get up very close to and concentrate the sparks on an area dry a tight and then carry on with other technique to get them going but this one is of a perfect age and it's very very dry so it didn't take much at all but if we had a harder composite it's a little trickier to get up close like that and use that technique where you're getting close because it the compass it's so hard you just can't do that at all so we have to kind of process the cramp ball to give us a surface area that will work so if we break it down a little bit we can get a flat little sheet like that just on the ground that's really all we need to begin with and it really is about the preparation and materials here put a few sparks down I think we just caught it there that had one well we have that little piece anyway so we could actually use that it's another piece that broke off if you just place that on there and blow in fact we'll hold it there with our knife you can see we spread it to the other piece of material and if we want to then spread it again to a bigger piece of material

there we go once again say really easy to transfer embers around there ever feel that you have to chuck that bit away that you didn't mean to light and concentrate on the bigger piece that you did because it never really works like that but with materials like this if you're finding it difficult with a harder compass it you just have to angle the material the right way and put some sparks in like that you can see we've actually got some sparks on there now so it really is just the same technique we've used before but just manipulating the tinder to actually give us the right face that's facing our Ferro rod like that to receive the sparks I collected a little bit of Bracken from some hedge sites on the way down just in the woods the same place where I got these cattails from from the greater Reed mace just further in there's kind of like a boggy area where they grow it's a shame they're not quite ready yet or I said have been quite good to put in the core of the nest but we can take the cramp ball or cramp balls we've got quite a few of them lit put them all in this material and this is a pretty good material that you can find in quite a lot of Woodlands anything dry like this is fine

there is some dampness to it you can probably hear the rain lots of smoke but no flame just shows how damp it really is there we go the crumble was pretty easy to light you can see it's really dry it's of a good age nice and spacious so it didn't take much to get it lit this material here is a little bit different it's much denser and it needs to be fluffed up and prepared and you do that by taking your knife and scraping into it and it fluffs up all that material and starts to let it kind of space out a bit for you but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be easy to light in fact it performs a lot better when you actually char it but we don't have the luxury of doing that at this moment there's a few ways you can actually ignite it with a softer composite you get up close it allows you to direct those Sparks in a very easy way and you can see we've just caught it there it's starting to burn that doesn't mean it will continue to burn this kind of tinder really needs encouragement and you have to keep blowing on it in the sandwich damp in the air at the moment all the fogging they are the weather that it will be very very hard to keep this going just expecting it to burn on its own accord it's not like the crumpled so we can put sparks in like that you can see that very very efficient we get a burn quite easily and this may even spread that one looks pretty good actually we just need to blow on it just encourage that a bit more but if we use a harder composite I quite like to direct the sparks with this you can see can really concentrate those sparks down even to the point where you see a bit of flame not that that's what we're after it's just a more efficient technique and this is probably much more likely to not to go out to now I actually really like this technique in this one I use all the time this is my farad here and it's the same composite as this one just slightly harder composite than you normally see on most of the commercial fair odds lasts for a very long time and if you get the hang of this technique you carry a knife with a very good 90-degree spine like this one here then you can just really put sparks down and localize them as well as using this technique which would be very good for things like cotton wool and Vaseline and Tinder's with a large surface area so that's going quite nicely now you can see this is a real slow burn tinder you think how dense this is and now it's lit properly it will just glow like this for a long time maybe even about an hour if we're lucky especially with this damp as well can really hear the rain coming in there one thing I get asked is how do you know what composite the Ferro rod is how do you know if it's soft or hard when you buy it and then the answer is you don't you'll buy it and then you'll find out through using it and that's the way I find that with lots of different fair rods I've owned loads of different ones and tried the mate just that interest really and some of them are really hard like the one from Optimus I aim was rock hard that thing required a serious amount of power and speed to get it to light but it was really good for other things you could build up a huge pile of dust with it and then ignite that and it you could like things like candles with it

like a wick on a candle in the woods which would be much harder to do with a soft composite that would be more likely to spark and ignite if you were trying to build up that kind of material slowly over time so for me I generally go for this one that I buy off of ebay it's of a fairly kind of medium composite I'd say and I find it just really to be one of the best fair rod blanks that I that I've used and I buy them while I can get hold of them really I've only got a couple of them this one here is just a demo one that I use quite a lot if I go to a course or something and I have to use it quite heavily and I don't like using mine and wearing it down just for the sake of demonstrating it because this is the one I use when I'm out in the woods or I go away somewhere and actually do something bushcraft related but this one here is from eBay they cost about 10 pounds just for the blank just quite a lot of money but if you think how long they last it really isn't in most respects and it's a 6 by 1/2 inch Ferro rod and I'll put the link in the description below but very very good and if you can get them I definitely buy one and just pop it in a piece of antler or wood hang it on your belt and you've got this soft something or lasts a very long time if you get good with the technique you can use it on a broad range of Tinder's with ease and get a fire going when you need but I hope this videos helped out I appreciate you watching and I'll see you very soon for another video and in next week's video are actually going to start going out and harvesting materials and focus on them specifically look at them how they differ when we find them in the field and how we actually need to adopt our technique to get them to work properly and hopefully that will give you a really good insight and actually how to harvest these materials and what to look for because they can differ quite a lot they don't just always come looking as nice as this when you find them on a tree sometimes they're old sometimes they're thinner sometimes they're thicker it really depends on where you live in the world and in what environment you're finding them in but I appreciate you watching and I see you very soon in another video take care guys and thanks again you

you