Fire Craft | The upside down or 'Self Feeding Fire'

Description

In this video I demonstrate how to make the upside down fire. this fire is an excellent fire for burning over a long period of time, very easy to construct and requires very little maintenance whilst ensuring a good even heat and an efficient burn.

Shot on Cannon 1200d, Sony HX60v & a gopro Hero

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Tags: Bushcraft,Bushcraft Skills,Wilderness Skills,Outdooors,Hiking,Camping,Survival,Survival Skills,woodcraft,wood craft

Video Transcription

Oh

hi everyone

and today I'm going to need a fire going so I thought why do is I'd also do a video showing you the process that i use operating on upside down the selfie acquire i really like the name because book 3 selfie so my fantasies and fire set up kind of file name has been forward one you do all of you work for it all your firewall government right the beginning it will burn for a good few hours and you don't really have to tend it too much you get a good efficient slow burn from it and whilst it's going you can pretty much leave it unattended get off and do whatever you need to do so i've decided to do it today because i don't want to be mess around having to collect firewood all day i want to be able to just leave the fire going also i'm in quite a wet boggy area today so just behind me I've got like the back end of the swamp swamp goes on over this way but I've managed to find a kind of raised flat area which is what I'm saying here so my fire is going to go in this area here and so first thing I've got to do is prepare my fire area clear all the poor on these back mon of twigs and slip out the way then I've got to collect my five words I'm gonna get on and do that now check back in with you once i am ready to start stuff to my fire you

okay folks so now that is my firewood prepared so it's quite an intense amount of work that have a warm look quite a lot I'm a little bit out of breath and doing it something about 15-20 minutes to get this ready but actually give me a good few hours of fire so I'm just going to get my breath back prepare my area and then I'm going to begin constructing the fire the file a so this is what advantage of this is that hard work part is now gone I can chill out take a little bit of time to get my breath and I can start to take things a little bit easier now because this fire will pretty much look after itself so going to catch my breath and then we'll start will clear the area and we'll get the fire up and going

so what i'm doing here is I've cleared the space and I actually want to keep all this dirt and look close by today the ground is absolutely saturated I'm pretty much down to bare earth there and it's really really wet which is again when back to advance to this fire this fire is an upside-down fire so I'm actually going to put my foot stuff down at the bottom and what this will achieve for me is my fire when it gets going is actually really raised up off the ground it's gonna be about this high and what I'm going to do with some of this mod not this stage probably a bit further on is I'm actually going to start packing some of these gaps in an attempt to actually restrict the earth male and also to give the file a itself a little bit of extra stability so restricting the air flow means that my fire I've done with another log there so that that will go in not quite the right size it'll be fine and I'll stick with three there we go yes I'm sorry what we restrict in the earth law will do will actually slow down the burnt I so in here I've got some pretty saturated pieces of wood and I've done that deliberately again to slow down that that burn time to make this a long-lasting fire and what I'm doing is I'm constructing the delay in such a way that the bigger wood is at the bottom just take a little bit of tweaking and get in turning around the bigger one is at the bottom and the smaller wood is at the top and the idea is that as the fire burns it burns down through this stack of wood I think that point there I'm gonna I'm gonna pack it just play it by ear just trust it oh and this will actually stop all this rolling around you can see get your hands dirty pack it in lot too much just enough to slow down the burn okay next stage these pieces of pine to go on middle

then I've got this piece of cedar that i found i think it's cedar not a word i have much experience with and there we go I'll pack that a little bit more around the top and this will actually just dry out and kind of fall away as time goes on and you can construct this fire actually much larger than I've done today if you want to keep it going overnight there we go so at this stage in terms of actually getting the fire going it's just the same as like in any other fire except that we're ray were lighting it on this raised or platform I've got some small bits of kindling here just to get it going and I'm just going to light it with the Ferro rod and it can be a little trickier just because you're working up here and I don't want it to drop off which kind of happened whoa very beautifully it's burning really hot I've ensured that the logs at the top of my file a are as dry as I could possibly find and the reason for that is that I need that bit that section to take relatively easily and then that that stage it should just feed the whole thing so you can see now this fire has been going for well over an hour and a half and it's started to get a real heart in it and it's quite tricky to see it on the camera because it's daylight but this fire is you know it's got a lot of flames it's thrown out quite a lot of heat and it's taken very very minimal and maintenance so see here a small pieces just for doubt just need to monitor that I was a little bit when a bit falls out like that just pop it straight back on the top it's already burning so that I'll go nicely and we keep it going like that so guys the goal that is the upside down fire so quick recap of how to build this first off start by preparing your firewood start with thicker longer pieces gradually getting smaller and shorter and construct them on the playground in a kind of pyramid shape with the big ones at the bottom and the smaller ones at the top at certain intervals along the construction packet with a little bit of Earth or moss or whatever you've got to hand just to restrict the air flow a little bit because of the construction of this if you don't restrict the air flow it will burn out really really quickly and actually makes the purpose of the fire not happen so let's have a look at the pros and cons of this fire this is one of my favorite fire constructions for static camping I'm just going to grab my seat and mark so this is one of my favorite fire constructions for the kind of a kind of static camper more static camp and the reason being you do all your construction of it initially to straight off straight at the start and so you arrive at camp you usually pretty fresh when you get the belly full of food plenty of energy you can power through getting the firewood you can construct it you can build it you can light it needs a little bit of maintenance just at the beginning to get it going but once it's done and once it's going you can just leave it it throws out quite a lot of heat it throws out quite a lot of light it burns for quite a long time it's very very efficient and there's very very little debris left at the end of it so though the pros of this it's great for cooking on it's really flamey good heart and it I can really feel the heat coming off this and it burns nice and slow the disadvantages of this fire are you can't construct it quickly it does take a little bit of time to actually get it going so if you just wanted to get a brew one while you're on a hike this isn't the fire for you and initially it's quite smoky and you know it froze out quite a lot of smokers those thick logs start going you're burning quite thick stuff quite early on in this file a and so yeah if your stealth camping it's not the one for you as I said in the night time it's very very bright and in the daytime it's very very smoky and it's it's quite smoky at certain points because this file a does allow you to use wet saturated wood which is one of the advantage of it the reason for that is as the fire starts to burn down through the structure if you've got wet wood in there it actually the heat takes the moisture out because it's raised a little bit of a breeze will take that away requires very little maintenance but Paisley as you can just see me doing now whoa you do need to shove the odd bit back in carefully on like I just did knocking it over but you know

bits of it might fall out occasionally so I wouldn't wanna be camping right next to this that is one more the little disadvantage of it but in terms of it actually just collapsing and falling straight over that's probably not going to happen so yeah overall a really great fire leg if you you know you react camp and you want to be doing other stuff rather than to maintain the fire the whole time so as always I hope you have all enjoyed this I hope you've learned something from it please like share subscribe comment all that kind of stuff and i'll see you in the next video thanks everyone