Next Fire Mentality

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

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

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and what I thought we'd do today is have a discussion about fire mentality and the reason I want to have this discussion today is because char and charring material to me is a very important aspect of fire when I consider the next fire and I teach it at the Pathfinder basic class as a basic requirement to understand how to make viable char from different materials because I think it's so important and I wanted to discuss with you today a little bit about why I have that mentality because when I made a video the other day and used a knife and a rock to make a fire a lot of people seem to have misunderstood the intentions of that video and misunderstood the viability of char from making fire especially the next fire so let's start off with what I carry for ignition sources in my kit I carry a bit lighter a magnifying glass and a ferrocerium rod that's the only three ignition sources that I carry because I believe those three are the most versatile ignition sources my always go to first is going to be the lighter period flick the BIC instant gratification everybody loves that I have flame the downfall of the lighter is that it runs out of fluid over time it's very susceptible to cold and it is also not real good at high wind type situations unless you can get it out of the wind and get that extended flame I don't carry matches whatsoever because I carry the lighter and I believe that's a step backwards it's the same reason I don't carry a specific steel striker for flint and steel because I have the ferrocerium rod and it throws higher sparks than the Flint steel will throw but the Flint steel is like a last resort that I can utilize my kit more multi functionally by using a high carbon steel knife and pick up a rock to ignite char just as if I were going to have to understand how to make a bow-drill fire in an extreme emergency and I have several videos on my channel of how to make bow-drill fires and bow drill sets off the landscape you can look those videos up there in my fire series

my fire crafting series of videos in that playlist so let's get started so I want to talk about quite a few things today ok let's start off by talking about ferrocerium rods to begin with okay and anybody who has a ferrocerium rod uses it very often is going to get what I like to call speed bumps on the rod and now speed bumps come from uneven downward pressure across the surface area of the rod and they cause ripples on the rod and your rod will become nearly unusable over time because of those ripples but you can get rid of those very easily what you need to do is you need to take your knife taking advantage again of that 90-degree edge get that thing on a solid surface somewhere and just scrape through those scrape those completely off of there you're not trying to make sparks at this point all you're trying to do is clean that rod up and get back to a smooth striking surface you can see all that stuff get lit fire there that came off that rod now if you're doing this and you're getting your rod cleaned up before you start a fire save all those shavings because obviously they're a good resource once you get this smooth back out again to a smooth surface you'll then be able to use your knife to make those sparks again and it'll work just fine for you if you build those ripples up again over time just do the same thing and smooth them out with your knife and they'll be fine ok so before we start our first fire and I'll consider this the fire that we're going to use whatever emergency fire-starting implement we have once you've done that you're going to want to char something and you can use cotton material of any kind or linen any hundred-percent natural material will make char but you are expending a resource from your kit by doing that because this could be your cotton bandana your bandages your wash rag and lots of other things so you're better off

trying to Charl material and you'll just have to experiment with what works best for you but there's lots of tree funguses and things like that that will char well one of the things that I like really well is this hibiscus plant and this is a flowering plant that has a very very soft wood on the inside and a hollow pith now coincidentally the bark strips off of here and makes great bird nest material but if you break these stalks down you'll feel that soft pith inside them and again it's the hibiscus plant grows in wet areas but this chars very very well so I'll break this into smaller pieces and if I am stuck with only my five or ten C's again I promote that container that metal container for a reason that metal container net nesting cup make a great chamber for creating char in an emergency if you're walking around messing around the woods doing bushcraft or whatever the case may be you can then use something like a char ten and I use a ten that is basically just a coffee ten of some sort that I found out a dollar store just happen to have two lids and I've poked a hole inside this lid to make my char and then I have another lid in it because there's a recessed point in here it makes it very conducive to just drop a piece of Flint rock in there to use a conjunction with my high carbon steel tool to make Sparks and again it's not something you can just go out and buy it's just something that I found over time just looking and looking and looking and always thinking about what else kind of used that for when I see it like I said I think it came from a dollar store for like a dollar so okay so as I process this stuff down I know people are going to ask me about this knife and this knife is the new Jeff Weitz Lloyd and slide is a Swedish word and the closest translation of that to English would be handcraft or handicraft so this is basically a crafting knife it could be worn around the neck and camp in a next type sheath just like a Mora and it's basically my answer to an american-made crafting knife and small crafting knives like this we're used all along the Appalachian areas of the frontier as well as into the late 1800s by people who were just making crafts from wood at their house to help sustain their families living from rocking chairs to rakes to pitchforks all those types of things that were handmade with draw knives and axes they used a slid style knife or a carving style knife and this is our carving style knife called the slide by jeff white but i'm using this just to come through here and split these open and i'm going to put them into tin so that we can char them once we get our first fire started so i'm prepping this material for charring before i start my fire and it doesn't matter if I've got some material in there already this charred it's not going to hurt anything you can't overdo char unless you let oxygen into the container if you let oxygen into the container your char is going to be done the pretense of making char is that you're starving out of oxygen and you're turning it into carbon you're carbonizing the material and making like a charcoal so that's what we're doing with this pithy stock and I'm just kind of removing this outer bark from it and breaking it into a little bit smaller pieces remember that anything that you char is going to shrink quite a bit from its current state once it becomes charred and I'm just going to get this container partially filled up I wanted to show you what this material look like it's very very easy to work with you can just poke the point of your knife into it split it down but it is a good material any pithy plant material like that even from like a Mullen stock or something like that would work good for charred material of course you can char cattail has there's lots and lots of things that you can char you can find punky rotten wood that's not too far gone you can char that so I would suggest again that you just go out and do the dirt time and get out there and find what works for you so we've got several chunks in our 10 now and we'll put our lid on it now we're going to get our fire built and once we get our fire going we're going to char material so that we can insure our next fire is easier to make and we'll talk about that in just a minute all right I've got some tulip poplar bark here I've got some pine needles here I've got all of that stuff as well I'm just going to give myself I've got a small stick of cedar here to give myself a few shavings to keep things going once it starts and then just give myself a few longer pieces down like this and this is just creating kindling basically more than anything else not a necessity if you can find enough small sticks you can't find enough small sticks then maybe it becomes a little more necessary so we can add this to a smaller bird nest of material like some tulip poplar bark if we don't have very much of it and it will just give us something that will quickly flame up when we start our fire okay I'm trying to kind of keep this stuff real time for you guys as you can see I don't have a lot of tulip poplar bark here I've got a small bird nest but it's not a ton and I've got my shaving sitting over here on a stump I've got some other pieces of bark it's the more that hibiscus that warrant process down very well so let's see if we can get this going first of all we'll add a little bit of tinder to that and then we'll take our stick pile put it right on top just like that and let her get going now once we get a good fire going here you know I'm just going to go ahead and stick this chart in right in there now as I'm building this thing up I'm making char and that's important

I got some dead pine here I'm going to put on top of this thing just really let this thing go to work alright now we just let her eat now with this charred material you know you'll see smoke escaping from the hole or from the hinges or whatever you're using as a container if it's your water bottle and cup you'll see smoke coming out of there and when the smoke quits coming out it's basically done but you're not going to overdo the char if you leave it in there so I usually just leave it in there till the fire burns down a little bit and then I get it out and worry about it you just got to make sure that the container is cool before you open it that's the key okay so now that our tent is cooled down we can look at these contents you can see I've still got the charred material in there from before I got a piece of rope and I've got some material in there but I also have all of this charred inner path of the hibiscus plant and it will work with a fair cerium rod exactly the same way that it works with flint and steel and that's an advantage so let's kind of take this and put it inside this lid of this 10 so it doesn't fly all over the place and this wind on us just like this and we can break it up a little bit in there with that to expose some surface area without making it a dust and we can then take our knife and as soon as we hit one of those with a spark that dude was on fire I hope you guys can see that so it took nothing to light that up and we can do the exact same thing with our magnifying glass we can do the exact same thing with flint and steel and we can do the exact same thing with a spent lighter that will only throw sparks so charred material is a very viable option to make it easier for you to start the next fire and that's the importance of all of this is our first fire that we start in an emergency scenario may very well be the most difficult especially if we had to do it with a bow-drill fire off the landscape so making charred material for our second fire or our next fire is going to make it that much easier for us whether it involves a rock on our knife or the Sun if yesterday was not sunny and today is sunny all of those things make it easier with charred material and that's why I charred material is such a viable resource that you should create at the first opportunity in an emergency scenario guys I hope that gives you a little better understanding of my methodology when it comes to fire again I promote three items in a fire kit beyond the shadow of a doubt a brand new bic lighter a nice big six inch by half inch ferrocerium rod and a five power nice big magnifying glass those three ignition sources will give you a lot of options in a lot of weather conditions

they also expend different amounts of resources within your kit they can be combined with other resources in your kit to make them more viable depending on the situation and then you can make charred material with your very first fire that you've established to give yourself even more versatility with all three of those ignition sources I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school I appreciate joining me today I thank you for everything you do for our school for our family and for our business follows our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends I'll be back to the video since I can

thanks guys