Processing firewood

Description

In this video I demonstrate my preferred method for processing fire wood. i find that this method can provide me with a large amount of fire wood for very minimal effort.

this method is also great for wet weather as it exposes the dry inside of the wood.

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,camping,how to,fire,wood,firewood,fire craft,Survival Skills (TV Genre),kife,knife work,tools

Video Transcription

hi everyone what we're gonna be looking at today is my preferred method for processing firewood and to process this wood all we're going to be using is a knife and ax and a saw processing your wood in this way can make violatin much much more easy more manageable and actually in the long term save you a lot of work so the first thing I've got to do is I've got to cut myself a sufficient amount of wood for what I need so let's have a look at how I'm going to do that in order to process wood in this way all you really need any type of saw you really need is one of these little falling sores it's more than enough but because I'm not doing really much today I'm just having a fire to get a brew going before myself order myself the luxury of bringing a much larger bowl saw with me the advantage of using a bow saw for this is that it's much quicker and it really gets through the wood a lot more efficiently however it's quite a weighty piece of gear to carry in fact normally when I'm out I only carry the blade and I usually craft the actual bow part of it when I'm out and about but I've just got a standard bow saw with me today cuz I've not had to come far so I'll just demonstrate the differences between the two you'll see this bow saw gets through that in seconds it's a nice clean cut however I'm gonna do the next bit with the folding saw just to demonstrate the difference between the two see whilst it gets to it quite efficiently it's requiring a lot more work I'm going to move much faster on the hot day it's pretty warm today and that can be a bit of a bit of a pain so if you've got the if you've got the luxury of it I much prefer to use a bow saw but you know it's a bulky piece of kit you see that you know the teeth on it and what's larger but it does have its advantages so I'm going to cut this into a slightly more manageable piece of wood it's a more manageable size as you can see it's quite difficult to work on here so to make things a little easier and a little bit more safe for myself I'm actually gonna move on to a nice flat stump to do this and I'll show you what size I'm cutting it into so I just moved over to this stump and of course it's a bit too high for me to work on that large branch but once I've put it into this slightly smaller piece it's much easier to work on here because it's nice and flat and that's not going to roll around quite as much so what I'm going to do is I'm going to brace that piece of wood and I want to cut this and to roughly kind of not quite the same length as my forearm it needs to be just a little bit shorter ready for battling down so maybe - yeah - palm widths two three so I've now got three small logs that come what be work with and I'm looking approached to cease even further to kind of bulk out the efficiency of these pieces of wood I've also precooked for this video as well some pieces of hazel just to demonstrate that the differences that types of wood have on some of these techniques and just a quick little tip one of the things to be looking out for with particularly with stuff this size is if you're looking for dry wood a handy little thing to do is to tap the piece of wood together and if they give you a nice sharp clear ringing sound you can almost guarantee it they're gonna be dry through but if it's a dull thud the probably gonna be wet so if you have a listen to this they're clearly dry pieces of wood and the same goes for my pine so I've got a fairly reasonable amount of wood you know I can get a decent fire going with this it lasts me a good couple of hours so the next thing that I want to do is to batten this wort down and battling just means splitting the wood now I have got an axe here with me as you can see compared to the axe that's a really small piece of wood now I could split this using my axe but to be honest it's much easier to do this using my knife now in the past on various forums and a different place that I've seen people kind of arguing on whether or not you should or shouldn't but on your wood using your knife apparently some people have had issues where their knives are broken to be honest I'd say that's an issue dance the knife rather than the knife or technique rather than the practice itself I've never had any issue doing this you know I do it every single day new and awful of battle and war in this way and I've never had a knife break on me so I'm just going to quickly take you through the technique as well be a little bit awkward for me to work it because I'm gonna try and work at a funny angle so you can see really what I'm doing so of course to battle in this way I need my knife and I've also caught a piece of green wood here well I'm not quite peace agree with sir a piece of fallen tree I found that still quite green it's gone nice but have to wait in it see that fits in my hand quite comfortably and it's got enough lengthen it for me to give it a small amount of Swing so my practice for battling wood is to use quite a chunky knife with a fixed blade on it I wouldn't do this with a folder because it creates a stress point here which is more much more likely to break down or snap I think one of the key problems that people do is they place their knife on this way and it dips in and that that curve and then you're putting a lot of stress in one point on the knife so what I tend to do is bring the blade right up to whether the cutting edge starts and then that way it's nice and flat and I can get it straight in there at the initial court puts a bit of strain on the edge of this it shouldn't blunt your knife too much because as it goes in what actually happens is the wood splits and it's the width of the knife which pulls the world apart rather than the cutting edge of it so we just give that a nice sharp tap on the top there or three and you can see that that is in in the wood now if you can just about see the where the blade is in the wood it's not actually getting to focus you can just see the where the blade is in the wood it's not actually the cutting edge which is going through this it's the width of the it's the width of the width of the blade that's quite nice through so it shouldn't do your knife so once I've got that in I can just continue to tap it and you'll hit a point where that blade starts to go through much easier now if I hit on this end you can see that the life kinks upward slightly and that's not very effective because the more I hit on that end it's just going to keep going going down this way that that blade is going to make it a little bit awkward so if you kind of misjudge one of those taps just bring it over slightly and tap it to even it up if it goes through nice and straight you're gonna get get a much better kind of break on it okay so at this point what I could do is start to bang on the tip of the blade you know and just work that knife through but I don't really need to do that in fact what I can do is place the edge of the edge of my people my piece of wood onto my working surface and just twist a knife to pull it apart and the way it comes and the great thing about battling wood in this way is you can see I've split that in half but I can actually take it much smaller so I'm going to quarter it now see that's gone through much easier and at that point I can just split it you can see already what see already I've got you know a decent decent pile of kindling there you know that's that's more than enough to get a fire going I'm going to process some of this down a little bit more we'll have a decent stack of firewood by the time we're done but I wanted to say hazel is if you've never done this before

hazel is an excellent it makes a good sound Hazel's an excellent one to practice on hazel splits really nicely the grain it's got long fibers in the grain of the wood and it really kind of lends itself to this practice kind of likes to split get a nice crackling sound in it is however quite hard burns beautifully as well see it just splits beautifully you know that maker that would make a nice spoon actually but it's good on the fire today see that split just go straight down instantly it allows me to break it open and the other great thing about splitting wood and processing wood in this way is you know it exposes that dry wood on the inside split wood always burns better anyway and it allows you to control the thickness of the wood that you want so obviously smaller pieces are going to burn much quicker and much hotter

whereas larger pieces will maintain your fire for much longer see that hazel just splits beautifully see I'm just processing down like loads of firewood in no time here I've already got more than enough to have a small fire sink than a lake about this that I find it really kind of therapeutic process I could sit and do this all day I'm quite sad in that way this knife as well as excellent for it it's slightly thicker than most knives that are out there and that thickness kind of lends itself a little bit more to splitting just one thing to watch for a while back I did myself a bit of an injury we've quite painful I was rushing this and I slipped and I just caught the end of my knuckle that it's very really quite painful actually thought I'd broken my finger thankfully I hadn't so this is one of those tricky ones which doesn't want to go through now you just see me do this that's actually not a good idea if you're new to this practice but I'm not pushing that knife I'm kind of what I'm trying to do is when that ends dipped I'm actually going to push that end upwards so I'm working I'm still working away from my hands even though it might not seem like it another thing to listen for as well is the camera probably isn't quite picking it up but you get this really nice kind of fizzing popping sound as it goes through it if you get in that you can tell that your would have split nicely and usually it means it's dry through as well as a general rule but not always so I'm leaving these some of these quite thick for the fire so just in that time alone I've managed to split myself an excellent mount wood and to be honest you know if you've got a log bonus on the home this is an excellent practice it's that amount of wood at the shop in kindling it's going to cost you four or five pounds it's just taking me you know less than five minutes to do it really really efficient way to process you would know that method of battling is all well and good a piece of wood this size but for something that's more like this length you know getting your knife through that will work but it can take quite a while and be a bit of a pain so it's much easier to use something like an axe now what I'm not going to be doing is splitting the axe through like this you know that's going to struggle to stand up well it's a small spot to be aiming for with that axe and there's a much easier way of doing it and all I'm going to do it's holding the wood at one end and holding the back end of my axe and placing it gently onto the center of the wood this method also gives you you know a much higher degree of accuracy I'm going to bring the two up and bring the two down together and that force will drive the axe head in and eventually start to split it with a piece of wood this long I might need to move further down slightly as well but not always well there's a few different techniques we can use though we'll see which one this leads us to when you're doing this watch your hand as well once you've got that axe head in I tend to move my hand slightly further up because obviously it's banging against that piece of wood then it can be quite painful you get a bit of a shock off it especially it's very dry woods quite springy and you kind of it'll be quite hard work at first but then once it makes that split I'll just go pull straight through you'll feel it you can't really see it on the camera it's more a sensation getting your hands I can take that out so I'm not creating a new split I just put the accent to split at the top see now they're cutting the edge of the axe isn't doing any work it's the width of the accident this is quite an oddly twisty piece of wood but I can take the whole thing through and that's nicely split for me there now as well splits nicely along the grain so the next stage of processing the firewater is to make something like these feather sticks which just gives me these really fine shavings attached to a thin stick which will really get my fire blazing in this week to get it going you don't always have to make these quite often there's a sort of natural versions of this available kind of natural kindling well this works balloon you can make tinder out of this as well I haven't quite perfected that yet I'm just going to quickly demonstrate my preferred method for making these feather sticks now I like to work on a nice flat surface like this and I've braced my hand up against the log and I'm not gonna actually move the knife the knife is gonna be braced and I can adjust it backwards and forwards together the right type of curl on the wood but really armed is I'm just gripping the back end of the stick and then I'm gonna gently bring it up bring it back and usually you use your first couple of shavings because the wood is uneven as you start to smooth it out get some really good fine shavings on it I just find this to be a much more controlled method but I find it works myself you haven't got like a nice stable like this heads like this to work and you can work on on the sort of on the side of your leg making sure that you're not pointing the knife toward yourself but obviously the blade itself isn't moving so it should be quite safe I do apologize my knife is slightly blunted now we have liked it so what are you so in the past few days I've neither Chester accent sharply I'm not got my field sharp and click with me you see just slowly processing it down to get those nice curves and right angled that edge slightly that point the more towards my hand the curls will start to splay out a little more soft get a bit more curl in them now this is a skill that requires a lot of practice I by no means mastered it either it requires a good sharp knife I mean this knife is reasonably sharp but it's by no means shock enough to make really good curls I'm just working away all the way around this wood I want the interior stick kind of the main stick to be come eventually as still as possible allowing it to take a flow much easier this feather stick then could be ignited using a match or later

and don't get lazy with this this is a really fundamental skill you know this skill if you refine it can allow you to craft fire in almost any situation these are natural resources there we go about walking for now so that's nice and thin some next age here is to just get this fire going I've put down a small bed here just using some some pine needles using some of that butter and wood there's kind of a little fire bridge which will eventually give me a nice bed of coals you'll notice some of it's already burned the reason flat isn't the reason I'm using different feather sticks the ones I just made is I forgot to press record on the camera do apologize for that well this next stage is really simple what I'm going to do is I'm going to put these feather sticks in here like this and then I cut down some really thin slivers of wood as well just using that battlin that technique to get them as thin as I possibly could and this should get my fire going really nicely as possible the screen use a lighter today because I'm not really getting much of a fire going on this videos more about the actual process of you know processing you look down rather than specifically if I like the technique it's not a method I particularly like to use right quite awkward especially on a breezy day like today those feather sticks go really nicely once they get going I'm not a fan of the firelight they're the lighter for file item find it quite problematic

there we go they've taken now it's that fire or crackle away quite nicely quite quickly especially those very thin sticks on there like a slowly start to build it up they're using the different sizes of kindling I've caught myself using that battling technique so guys you can see really quite clearly that processing you would in this way allows you to make a very efficient fire very quickly it allows you a lot of you know really good dry firewood you can see this is really efficient fire there's hardly any smoke coming off this there's quite a lot of heat and very little smoke and that's because I process the wet wood in such a way that it exposes the dry interior and allows it the maximum efficiency of burning rather than it being round buttons on what it sees split piece of wood split wood always burns much better if I wanted to I could build this fire up to be quite a large fire really quite easily but I don't need anything like that today I was here just to kind of you know demonstrate mainly the best ways of the best practice of processing wood I mean this isn't the only way of doing this is just my preferred method if anyone's got any hints tips or suggestions I'd like to know and I'd love to see you guys practice and the same things as I said earlier though that feather stick method that is something that is really worth practicing I struggled a little bit today because I this was kind of an impromptu video and when life wasn't really up to it maintain your tools is really important for this method if you've got those three main tools and they're well-maintained making a fire is going to be really simple for you those feather sticks if you really practice it you can get them to a point where you can you can you know get them ignited with just a spark I use the lighter today just to speed things along a little bit well that's a good little fire will be kicking out quite a lot he actually so yeah thank you all for watching guys

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