21st Century Longhunter Processing Tinder Fungus for Use

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http://www.thepathfinderschoolllc.com

Tags: Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,Survival,Bushcraft

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morning guys Dave Canterbury back with another video in the 21st century long hunter series we shot a video last weekend while we were in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on harvesting tinder fungus and I took my axe and however said some true tinder fungus off of a white birch tree white birch a yellow birch are the places that true tender fungus or chaga as it's known grow now many other funguses and poly spores that grow on trees even horseshoe funguses will work as a tinder fungus okay they have to be dried out that's a common misconception that only certain ones will work most of them will work some will not but most of them will if they're dried out the secret is in the processing a lot of misconception that I've seen with tinder fungus is people believe that you can take it from the tree and make fire with it and that's not the case okay it's very much like char cloth in that you don't have to char it like char cloth but it does have to be dried out okay that tinder fungus will have to be set in front of a fire and help you affect the next fire or the next several fires it's not going to help you start a fire that day if you don't have other means because it's not dry enough I have taken tender fungus even dried bone-dry I'm going to show you a demonstration on this video and struck it with flint and steel multiple times and it did not catch fire the secret is in the processing and we'll talk about that in just few minutes the first thing I want to show you is what tinder fungus looks like when it's harvested and the difference and what it looks like dried out we're gonna get a close-up view of that and we're going to go through some exercise to show you how to use your tinder fungus and how to process that correctly so stay with me okay guys so first thing I want to do and pull my hammer sock off here I want to show you I showed you in the video what that tinder fungus looked like that we harvested in Michigan and I have a piece of it right here and it has not been dried out yet okay and this is a chunk of the tinder fungus I harvested in Michigan and you can see it has this yellow spongy layer and that's what you really want some of the darker stuffs okay but it's not the best the black stuff no good now all of this can be used medicinally and that's the big advantage to chaga true tender fungus over the others is its great medicinal value as a tea or an infusion it's full of antioxidants it's full of vitamin B it has anti tumour characteristics which have to be pulled out through the use of a tincture but you can read the article that Matt Brooks wrote and this month's issue or the current issue of self-reliance Illustrated magazine and there's a very very good article on tinder fungus in there so what I want to talk about now is processing and use for fire-building

not necessarily medicinal value although it does have great medicinal value so don't get rid of this stuff because you can use it medicinally but this is the part you want for your fire now you'll have to cut this out and once you cut that out into chunks it will look very much like this okay you can see these are orange chunks that were cut from the same piece of tinder fungus on another side of it this other side now this stuff has been dried out and the way I dried this out was using the stove in the yurt I just put it on a rack above the top of the stove and let it burn all night

so a low temperature so it wouldn't burn and now it's so light now you if you pick this up you can tell this is what and you'll know when you pick this up it's light as a feather this is dry okay but even at that point with it being dry it really doesn't take a spark well when it comes to flint and steel not it's not in this state and I'm gonna show you I'm gonna take a piece of flint and steel here and we'll hit it with a few sparks and we'll look at it and you'll see that it's really not going to take a spark and then we'll come back and look at it in a couple different ways as well okay sure you can see the sparks coming off of this all over the place I'm dropping sparks all over this tinder fungus okay the problem is that these sparks are not hot enough with the surface area that you've got here and the fact that this is a compressed material for it to catch fire now if I use a pharisee M rod it's a whole different story a Pharisee M rod throws a lot hotter Sparks than the flint and steel kit does so the Pharisee M rod will actually combust this so we'll take a Pharisee M rod and we'll take a piece of this and we'll hit it a few times here see what we can do here let me kind of pile this up so I can direct my sparks into one spot see if we can do here

okay you can see that's on fire in multiple places with the Pharisee Imran so a Pharisee M rod will do the job and there's another one on fire right there the problem with this stuff is is you bout going to cut the Ember out of it or it's going to burn the whole piece because once it does catch on fire it stays burning for a long time so you really about have to cut your ember out of it

to keep it from burning or it's just gonna keep on going on you or smother it out by putting it in a container but you can see how much you're getting off I mean look at the huge amount of smoke and coal you're getting from that piece of tinder fungus right there and this one's still burning even after I've tried to cut out of it what was burning it's still on fire so as far as carrying fire goes and things like that you know this stuff is the bomb for sure for that now I'm just going to have to kind of play with this one to get it put out or let it burn up one of the two but the easy way to really get this to combust with flint and steel is to grind it up almost like you're trying to create a number four like a magnifying glass fire this thing is just burning burning burning clay that it just does not want to go out and cutting it out continuously and that thing is just still burning white hot look at I mean that thing is not going out guys neither one of these pieces are going to go out you can see them sitting there just burning wide-open so if you've got a Pharisee them rod and you can dry this stuff out then you've got something there's no question about that because you got a huge coal there you'd want to cut that down in some smaller pieces most likely so that you're not wasting big chunks like this to start a fire with these as an ember but this was for demonstration purpose so I wanted to show you what this stuff will really do but as far as a Pharisee imrad goes this stuff is the king now if you wanted to catch this on fire I'm going to move this out of the way onto a hot rock here just set it aside we'll let that burn for a few minutes and move this out of the way now if you wanted to catch some of this on fire with your flint and steel kit and you wanted to do it in more traditional manner then what you're going to have to do is you're going to take something like your axe and you're going to pound this up a little bit and break it up and you're gonna have to make it more of a powder basically what you're doing with that is you're increasing the surface area and you are making it less dense it is highly combustible obviously so really what you're trying to do is make it less dense and make it more of a powdered form and if you break that up and you make the surface area a lot bigger that can catch sparks or small embers you can catch this stuff on fire with a flint and steel kit but it's all in the processing of how you do this stuff and you don't want to over process it either so now I'm just going to kind of take it up in my hands and grind it up a little bit and I won't have to get too overzealous about this it doesn't have to necessarily be a powder it just has to be ground down into very small fine chunks and then I'll take and I'll scrape that all into a pile like this and then we'll try with the Flint steel again

okay we have intently don't have anything small enough you up there we go here it goes right there sure you can see that wisp of smoke coming off of there and that's all it takes once you get that going then you can just kind of pile that stuff up on there and nurse it and it will flame up on you I shouldn't say flame up it will turn into a large ember that you can use to blow a tinder bundle to flame I've got things getting big now now convinced that's not going to go out no matter what I do so I can just let that sit there and smolder until it makes a great big ember that looks very similar to these that I've got on the rock over here you can see those are giant coal sized members right there I mean even if you got marginal tender you're gonna get something with that you'll get a fire going so this tinder fungus is definitely you know worth collecting and worth having and like I said it's not only the chaga that will work you can use other types of course--you fungus you're just going to have to play with them you're going to process if you're gonna have to harvest em from the tree dry them out real good get into the insides of them and get us you know ground up into something that you can work with try it with your fire cm rod try it with flint and steel and see which one works for you and then you'll understand because a lot of guys that live south you know don't have access to tinder fungus true tinder fungus like chaga chaga only grows in the north it grows all around the world you know above a certain latitude basically so anywhere north of Ohio I mean Ohio doesn't have tender fungus because we don't have the right trees here but the yellow birch and the white birch that grow up in Michigan they got tinder fungus everywhere the farther north and the farther cold or the more cold it is longer year round I think the more tender fungus there is it seems to me like from talking to guys up there in the Upper Peninsula but you can see it's very good stuff it's worth its weight in gold as far as fire tinder goes as well as medicinally so I hope you enjoyed this video on kind of how to process this stuff after harvest to use it for your fire kit you could keep small chunk something like this in your fire kit and you'd be good to go and you can also use it medicinally like I said but I urge you to research that and also to read Matt Brooks article and last month's issue were the current issue of self-reliance Illustrated magazine okay guys well I hope you enjoyed this second part in the series 21st century long hunter on harvesting and using tinder fungus you know don't take my word for it

go out and practice and stuff try it for yourself find out what works what's important is what works for you not necessarily it works for me I'm just trying to give you some tips and tricks that I found to work for me and I hope they work for you as well don't forget to pass on the tribal knowledge to someone else I thank you for your views I thank you for support and I appreciate everything that you do for me my business and my family I'll be back with another video as soon as possible

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