How to; Make charcloth

Description

In this Video, I 'Fozz' of Forrester Bushcraft demonstrate how to make your own charcloth.

Char cloth is excellent for fire lighting as with a single spark you can get an instant coal which can be blown on inside of a tinder bundle to create fire almost instantly.

All you need to make the char cloth is some old 100% cotton fabric (old t-shirts work brilliantly) an Altoids tin or similar witha hole punched in the top, and a decent heat source.

Tags: YouTube Editor,Char Cloth,Fire lighting,Bushcraft,Survival,How to guide,life hacks,How-to (Website Category),camping,outdoors

Video Transcription

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hi guys what we looking at today is how to make char cloth really simple really straightforward all you need is a heat source or here I've got a fire so you can just about see an old cotton t-shirt and an altoid tin with a whole PSN top so first thing you've got to do is go to take our t-shirt which I've already had a party Corp his remains of it in bushcraft green hopefully and here is a section that I have cut from it so before I do this one is this gonna take my knife and I'm actually going to cut this into strips which will fit into my Altoids tin really nicely so really simple I don't want to overload my tin so I don't need to cut loads and it is a very quick process so I'm just going to cut some small strips into this so cut a little licking the t-shirt on the fabric and then rip when they do that a few times i have already kind of precut some so you have to sit and watch me do the whole lot this is what we're going to do keep putting quite long strips because it breaks apart really easy when the child class made and then I'm just going to roll it up and here's a couple of bits i've already pre-cut and then replace these neatly into my Altoids tin that's the preparation done ok I've already got my fire going you don't have to use a fire to do this in fact I tend not to attend to do this at home on either a campaign cut stove or an indoor gas hob the reason for that is obviously this is a fire fire starting piece of kit and you don't will be relying on needing this when you get out there and you want to start a fire this is one you're going to need to have in your pack if you're going to be using it's really really cool little thing really simple to do so all I'm going to do now just readjust the camera for you I've got my Bush box going with a fire here and just going to pop this on to the flames gently so let's use a stick it gets very hot very quickly try not to push that into the actual bush box and I'll leave this for five minutes or so and what will eventually start to happen is I'll get the camera rolling again for you is that it will start to smoke and eventually a small flame will pop out of that hole in fact you can already see this is a this is smoking already hopefully just call out that hole there so this is probably going to take about a couple of minutes doesn't take long at all there's quite a lot packed in there and what happens is this turns it into charcoal basically and this forms an almost airtight container for it with all the heat and hot air being forced out of that hole with the pressure that's going on in there and it burns all the gases within the cotton off obviously you know it's it's a natural product and it does contain gases and it will eventually turn into charcoal you can see we've already got flames there one thing that we do need to be careful of on the making char cloth or anything for charcoal is that we don't want to we don't want to heat it too much because you run the risk of igniting the charcoal or the char cloth inside the container itself obviously we don't want that and this is going really quickly ministers flames coming out all the little holes are already so we'll just probably leave the camera rolling I can see it turning black already inside see we can reduce the heat a little bit on my it's quite tricky on our fires much easier to do on a stove because you can regulate the heat a little bit better but you know this is a nice way of doing and I do like having a fire going so what I'm watching for is I'm watching for this flame to actually started to die down what's that flames died down I'll leave it for another few seconds just to get a little bit of extra heat in there and then they'll be charcoal inside because what that's what's causing that flame is the gas within the natural fibers of the cotton whoops view back in

and charcoal sweetie good is it takes a spot really really easily and you can do the traditional flint and steel striker you can do with a magnifying glass it takes you really well and it immediately start to glow so we'll show you that solid

so you can see the flames I should start to cool down partly because the heat from the boss box is dying down upon Karthik partly because there's less gas in there you can see someone's game from society so about going for a moment I'm helping for you can you can really make out what's going on there video I was burned myself the videos here's a piece of chopped off of all you may so I should just be able to get that in the flame and get it going so you can see this already here is smoldering away and that's how easy it is to get this chart off going it takes a spa really well but that's just a little trial piece I did let's mess around you I don't need that stuff I didn't leave it in quite long enough so the flames died down there now so I'm going to give it another couple of seconds and then I will knock this thing off using a stick and let that cool down then once it's cooled down I get the foul right out and i'll just show you how easily it takes a spark inside okay so i think that should be it if it's not i can just pop it on the flounce a little bit longer so i'm going to very unceremoniously knock this off to the side there we go i let that box cool down obviously something it's a tin so it's going to be very hot to start with so i'm going to let that cool down and then we'll start the camera rolling again once i'm ready to take that out okay guys so here's an hour cool tin and hopefully inside what we should have it some nice char cloth so and i'll show you before you don't need to cut it free clip it into the tiny strips i like to keep it as these large ones because what will happen is you can just pull it apart really simple because Joe spurn con so I pop that back in there for later on then i'm going to show you very quickly how easy this takes a spark and hopefully i'm going to get a little bit of a gun with it so it's going to grab just dry grass that I pre collected and hopefully we'll get a fire going from this book it's very quickly show you how easily it takes a spark so that take not quite missed it there we go so real quick hopefully you can see it starting to glow red there so I'm just going to pop this straight into our tinder bundle give it a blow you

and there we have fire from an old t-shirt yeah sorry I wait a little bit our shot line pop this in the bush box get out the way and there you have it that is how we make ngu type off so as always thank you all for watching oops let me get my tinder bundle fell out the bush box and thank you all for watching I hope this has been of use for you everyone's got any suggestions or anything what you'd like to see or what you like to see me learning or trying to do please give me a shout any feedbacks always welcome and what I'm hopefully going to be doing in the very near future is showing you a few different methods for using charcoal for getting your fire and some few traditional methods including my new flint and steel violator which I'm still kind of getting to grips with so I had hoped to use that today and what I'm still kind of getting to grips with using it so please bear with me on that one thank you all for watching guys