How To Light Birch Bark With A Spark

Description

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/ How do you light a smooth sheet of birch bark with a Swedish FireSteel (also known as a "ferro rod" or 'fireflash')?

Lighting sheets of birch bark with matches or a lighter is relatively simple. Birch bark takes a small flame quite easily and it then burns well. Birch bark burns hot and for a surprisingly long time. This is due to the oils in the bark. You can see the oils burning off in the black smoke that is given off when the bark is burning well.

But how do we ignite a sheet with a single spark? Many of us these days who are interested in Bushcraft and Survival Skills carry a Swedish FireSteel. We carry these because they are extremely reliable, you can get many, many sparks from them, many more fires from them than a box of matches or a lighter but where people have some difficulty - the thing that they find a little bit tricky - is lighting sheets of birch bark with a spark.

So, we need a good technique - or combination of techniques in order to light birch bark in a reliable way (as well as maximise the life of our FireSteels).

There's one straightforward technique that makes a massive difference to how easily the birch bark lights. In this video I share that technique and show you how to combine it with good FireSteel technique to light your birch bark reliably every time.

This video forms part of a series of 20 FREE videos I've made to help people with wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and general outdoor life.

To get the other free videos right now, please visit

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/free-tips-and-advice/

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Tags: fire,fire lighting,FireSteel,ferro rod,Swedish FireSteel,birch,birch bark,Birch (Organism Classification),Betulaceae (Organism Classification),bushcraft,survival,outdoors,camping,wilderness,Outdoor Recreation (TV Genre),sparks,tinder,betulin,Paul Kirtley,Frontier Bushcraft,bushcraft knife,matches,lighter,flames,Burn,Burning,Flame,Summer,Fun,Survival Skills (TV Genre)

Video Transcription

hi there I'm Paul Kelly founder of the award-winning frontier bushcraft and author of poker at leas blog the leading source of wilderness bushcraft advice and information on the net now in this video I'd like to share with you some fire lighting tips lighting sheets of birch bark like this with matches or a lighter are very easy and and it burns really really well birch bark burns well because of the oils that are inherently in there in the bark the becha lien which is in the bark and you get a nice black smoke it burns hot and it burns for a long time but lighting this with Sparks is a little bit more difficult and many of us these days that are interested in bushcraft and survival skills carry my Swedish fire steel otherwise known as a fire flash we carry these because they're extremely reliable you can get many many sparks from them many more fires from them than a box of matches or a lighter but where people have some difficulty the thing that they find a little bit tricky is lighting sheet2 birch bark like this with a spark it's actually very simple it's quite easy and in this video I'm going to show you some tips and some tricks on how to get this lit really easily with some Sparks what I have here are some sheets of birch bark if I try and like one of these directly with a with a spark it's very unlikely to light but let's just try it

as an example drop a nice big spark on there nothing's really happening okay so I'm going to need to make some changes to this I need to prepare the material so that it will readily accept a spark and this is how we do this what you'll also need is some strips of bark to add in yep so with a lot of preparation of materials for lighting then what you're doing is decreasing the size of the material decreasing the size of the fuel and also at the same time increasing the surface area so there's more oxygen getting to the amount of fuel that you've got and you're allowing it to light from a smaller heat source a smaller spark or a smaller flame that's a major principle in your fire lighting which what

wherever you're looking in your fire lighting exam is a big important part so I've got some strips having some thin ends some tapers like that like this is very useful as well because you can feed those in there quite fine and they're light very readily now to prepare the surface of the sheet of bark to accept our spark what we do is we scrape that up and we use our knife to do that also if you've got a striker some of the five Steel's come with a striker you can use the striker to do this but more efficient still is using your knife and what you do is scrape up the surface like so scrape down you're scraping the outer surface of the bark the silvery side of the birch bark and you'll start to see the inner layers the red and the yellows underneath will come through you can see there that I'm creating quite a fine dust fine shavings on a windy day you really need to protect those if you can try and keep the shavings attached and the better quality bark the shavings will stay on there very readily this is not great quality bark that's one of the reasons I'm using it for this demonstration to show you that even with bark isn't particularly good quality you can still light it with a spark it's all well and good me doing a demonstration with fantastic bark but that doesn't necessarily instill confidence in the bark that you might find rather than having to go hunt for some really super excellent bark so there we go and what I'm doing is I've turned it round there and you can see that both sides I've scraped into the center and I've got this nice Ridge of material here it's going to do a little bit more as with a lot of things in bushcraft if you think you've done enough do just that little bit more we're all naturally a little bit lazy and we seek to try and minimize the amount of effort that we put into into things but with your file Item make sure your preparation is good get your strips ready to go and then what we're going to do is drop a nice big spark right in the middle there that takes a little bit of practice with your fire flash have a look at my other videos there's one there about creating really good sparks with with a fire flash so here we go I'm going to scrape a little bit of material in there just to give it an extra bit of oomph to start off with and then we're going to get the spark and away we go I'm going to put my highlighting equipment away before I lose it in the excitement and then I take the small parts I've prepared the small tapers and get those going as with all of your fire lighting a bit of preparation good preparation goes a long long way and it's really quite simple to light sheets of birch bark just that scraping motion bit of preparation of the surface make sure you do plenty drop a nice spark on there and away it goes have the other pieces ready to add in and you've got a certain fire even in really wet conditions so I hope that serves you well I hope you find that useful if you like this video please go to my blog Paul curtly Cote UK where you can get 20 more free videos like this one that's at Paul curtly Cote UK I'll send you those videos straight away so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video