Self Feeding Fire Part 1 Basic Bushcraft

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

afternoon folks Dave camera at the Pathfinder school out here with another video today in our basic bushcraft series what I wanted to discuss with you guys today is how to build an upside-down or self-feeding fire I've had a few requests about that that was one of Nesmith's favorite setups and it works really well with the tent or tarp set up like a tarp tent Scout tent that we have been working on with tinsmiths I've had a lot of requests to follow up on this tent Smith's design and talk about you know where that's at in the project right now we're still under R&D but we do have a 6 by 8 model coming soon from tent Smith's that we're going to test out but what I want to talk to you about today was this is the same tarp tent design that we had set up across the way here at the Pathfinder school when we first showed this to you it's been setting this location under a tripod at the Pathfinder school for over three weeks right now it's rained it's snowed it's snowed again it's rained again it's poured rain for almost 48 hours straight and we put some hay inside here a couple of weeks ago before a class on instructure could sleep in this tent and test it out and I can tell you that you know right here where the opening is that it's a little damp this de straws a little damp but if you get back in here this thing is absolutely bone-dry back here so if I was sleeping in here I'd be bone-dry no question about that

this tent will keep you drawn it's designed to have these open flaps on the front that it has right here so that you can capture heat from the fire inside this pyramid and hold it in there and that's why nesic prefer this type fire in front of the shelter because it would throw heat into the shelter and feed itself throughout the night now you're going to have to put a little bit of wood on here every now and then and you may have to start it and get add some kindling to it in the beginning to get it going away you want to get to burn down into the layers but once it starts burning down into the layers if you have a set up right it will feed itself for quite a few hours then you can lay some you know kindling and things like that some extra wood inside your shelter and you can feed it when you need to peel wake up cool so give me just a minute here we'll get this set up and we'll start talking about feeding fire okay so let's talk about the basis of our self feeding fire here basically itself being fire is the same thing as an upside down fire light used a lot by Ness McKee swore by this type of fire lay situation and you would need a couple more logs up here and they're really not for reflecting heat or log backstop as much as they are angled to let the logs feed into the fire throughout the night as the bottom one burns they'll feed down into the fire and what we've done here is we've really just set up some bigger logs at the bottom and again this is part of the importance of understanding your landscape you want woods that are going to take a long time to burn maybe they're damp or maybe they're hardwood type materials at the bottom of this fire and I've used oak for all of this then my next thing I've went up from the bottom I've went out two layers from there then I have put in some heavier pieces of damp pine on top of that and I'm leaving space in between all of these log cabin type stacking so that we can take advantage of the venturi effect or the updraft in this fire so we'll put them fairly close together but not right on top of each other so we get that updraft and then I've taken some smaller pieces and put them on top so you've got your biggest at the bottom and your smallest at the top it's basically the way that works I think what we're going to do is make this a layer and then what we'll do is we'll put our last or final layer on here we'll be pretty close together because this is what we're going to use to put our fire lay really on top of will build our teepee type fire on top of this last layer of slatted pine so we've got a layer of hardwood that's damp we've got a layer of bigger pine that's damp and then we've got a layer of smaller pine that's damp and then we're going to use some fat wood to make feather sticks for our bird nest so that we can ignite this by flame we'll use a cigarette lighter five-second rule five seconds to flame that's all you're allowed that's what I teach in my pathfinder school

for students that want to use lighters things like that five seconds of flame is all she'd take to ignite your fire so we're going to mix the feather sticks make our fire lay on here light our lighter for five seconds and hopefully this bad boy is going to go up and it will give you a good example of how a self-feeding fires built okay so now I've built a basically just a big stack of small pines here it's all pine branches for the most part and I've left myself a space in here where I can put a pile of feather sticks of fat wood pine and that's what we're going to light and then we'll just kind of pull this over the top of it and that's going to become our fire lay and you can see I just piled those on there they're random not all of these sticks or pencil-sized are smaller but because I've got the accelerant of pine sap in my fat wood I'm going to be able to get plenty of burn time to ignite some of that material all this stuff is pretty much off the ground and it's still wet but it will burn and pine is going to be a very fast burning wood and that's important to understand when you're building fires with marginal materials or you know in damp conditions like this you under need to understand what materials are going to burn for you quickly what materials are going to take ignition fast and those are the materials you use to build your fire that's why we're using mainly pine for our whole top layer of this thing and then oak at the bottom okay so now you're going to take you're going to process down about twenty match size sticks of fat wood or at least pine that's got some fat wood in it and then you're going to create feather sticks and the best way to do that is just to get your knife stationary and pull that wood toward you this is what you're looking for and you're going to want to do that to all 20 of those sticks and get them stacked in there just like that

be patient

a hundred percent of your success when it comes to fire-starting is going to be your preparation of the material if you prepare things correctly you'll have good success when you light your fire if you don't you won't it's really that simple

but by putting the larger into that stick up into the fire light that's going to allow it to catch these smaller feathers and travel up the stick just like it would a match okay so once we've gotten to the point where we've got 19 of these sticks cut and we're down to our 20th one this one's going to become our match so I'm kind of going to be real easy with this one and get some really fine curls because I want this one to be lit in five seconds with a lighter and then I'm going to like the rest of my fire lay off of this stick so this is going to become my match stick so if we've got our firelight correct 1/1000 there's the one second fire and we shouldn't have to do anything except maybe pull this lay a little more over the top like this we should be good if you have got wet material on the bottom from all of us rain we've had out here in this pine being wet below that being wet you're going to have to have a good long burning twig bundle like us on top to heat and dry that up so it can burn down into those lower layers to get that soft feeding action okay guys I appreciate you joining me out for another video today I appreciate all your views all your comments all your support I thank you very thank you for me for my school for my family and everything you do for self-reliance Outfitters I'll be back to another video so as I can thanks guys you