Fire School Part 7 Strikers, Scapers, and Smooth Strokers

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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

morning folks Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do this morning is continue on with our fire series we have talked about primitive fire we're going to discuss that a little bit more today as in the bow drill we talked a little bit about char and charring materials and then we showed a little bit about ignition by flint and steel of those type fires or that type material we're going to continue today to talk a little bit more about that I want to show you some different types of Steel's that can be used other than your knife to strike sparks to ignite charred material then I want to talk about some advantages and disadvantages of different types of strikers and I want to show you a multifunctional striker or two that may open your eyes to some options for your kit that you hadn't thought of yet stay with me okay so what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about flint strikers we're going to go back and revisit again with the bow drill and talk about hand holds as well because some of these are combination type tools that I think are very useful now understanding that really all we need is our knife if it's high carbon steel to drive sparks too charred material we talked about that yesterday and we can get plenty of sparks off of our knife as long as our knife is high carbon steel we can get the sparks that we need off of that knife to affect ignition but understand that it may not be the most optimum choice for you depending on conditions I'm a big believer in making sure that every tool we have is multifunctional in nature that is one of the reasons that I haven't always just carried a flint striker in my fire kit because I've always figured that the knife will do that job or should do that job fairly well and I carry flint strikers and things like that and some of my teaching kits and more primitive kits and things like that when I'm out doing you know historical type trekking and things like that but as a general rule I don't carry a flint striker with me now with that said if you could have a flint striker that would be multifunctional and when I say multifunctional I mean it has to perform three tasks in passable fashion everything that I carry needs to do that if it's an extra piece of gear obviously if a Ferro rod will make fire that fire has a lot of things that it can do for me we've talked about that in past videos but to carry a flint striker means I'm carrying another tool to make fire with sparks above and beyond a ferrocerium rod and as long as I've got a good knife with a ninety degree spine that will drive material off my ferrocerium rod I really don't need anything else

this is backing up and not going forward type of thing if I carry a bit lighter if I carry a magnifying glass and I carry that good heavy-duty ferrocerium rod I should have everything I need but going back to our progression of fire we first talked about the bow drill set and this is the bow drill set that we used in those videos and the hardest thing to reproduce with a bow drill set is the bearing block 90% of failures that I see with bow drill sets at my school during classes are because the bearing block is not correct or the bearing block shoulders out before the person gets the Ember and that goes back to trying to get it right the first time because once you start to burn into this bearing block it's going to start shouldering your spindle out very quickly and what I mean by that is it tends to rub the spindle and cause friction here which reduces the amount of friction down here and also makes it more difficult for this spindle to turn causing more work on you to push the bow to rotate the spindle there are a lot of companies out there that make a bearing block hole in their knife handles and I've experimented it does quite a bit and the problem with most of them is they're pretty awkward to handle most of the time you have to have the knife out of the sheath which means you've got an exposed blade which is not a good thing to begin with or they're very awkward if they're in the sheath to try to operate as a bearing block and then even with micarta or wood they're going to wear it down with time very quickly now I've also seen lots of guys put a bearing race of some kind either from a skateboard wheel or something like that buried into a block of wood buried into a piece of bone but then again you have a one purpose tool if you want something that's multifunctional you need to have that bearing block do more than just be a bearing block and on the knife it's a good idea because if you have a high carbon steel knife that you can strike Flint off of it's got a good 90 degrees spawning that you can drive material off the ferrocerium rod and you have the bearing block for a bow-drill fire you have a really nice three-in-one tool there for making three different types of fire my opinion of those bearing block holes and knife handles is they're not very safe and they're not very comfortable and they do wear over time because generally speaking they are a material whether it's micarta whether it's linen whether it is g10 or whether it is wood it's going to wear with time if you use that very often now if you're using it for a one-time emergency maybe that's a different story but if you're going to use it over and over again or you have to use it five or six times in an emergency because you don't get your fire right the first time it may change the game a little bit a regular flint striker looks like these and these are 18th century reproductions here's one that's got kind of a dragon head on it and this is the regular C shaped striker that we saw on our website and all of these are high carbon steel all of these have been heat treated throw sparks well I'm really impressed with the way this one throws sparks that would care on our website it's just a laser-cut piece of metal it's been heat treated in a furnace and it works really really well so for non hand forged cheapy striker to practice with or carrying your kit it's a good option what I want to look at is I want to look at a couple of improvements to strikers this one is the SE Rowan that I showed in a past video and it's set up to do a couple of things number one is set it to be a bearing block which is not going to wear away so it's going to polish the top of that spindle and you're never going to get that friction in the top it's also meant to be a flint striker for making sparks and I believe that the intent with this design was to have a good 90 degree spine so that it could also be used destroyed a rod now I've used this a couple of times it heats up pretty bad I'm not real impressed with the amount of sparks that his drives off of ferrocerium rod because the edge is not quite hard enough I told Jeff Randall I was going to rip this off basically and I was going to design my own and he was fine with that so what we've come up with at the Pathfinder school and again this is a prototype these are not for sale yet but it's in the shape of an arrowhead like the Pathfinder logo it has a divot it has really hard 90-degree spines on it and it's been fire hardened to throw sparks as well we've got this divot in here and it's a little bit deeper than the SE Rowan is not much just a little bit pretty close to the same dimension there we made it wider so that it doesn't heat up as bad so you've got a larger heatsink here and because it's wider spread your hands out a little bit more if furby makes it more comfortable depending on how you want to hold it this is a pretty comfortable hold with your two fingers right there to slide that Arrowhead just like this it's a pretty comfortable hold that way it doesn't seem to heat up on me very bad either I like that we were really careful to put a really hard 90 degree spine on this thing so that it would throw a lot of Sparks and you can see the difference between this and this this is just kind of rounding off a little bit because it doesn't have that hard edge I'm not so sure that this was designed to ever do this anyway but I thought if it's going to be a striker and a bearing block it really needs to be a striker for a Ferro rod as well that way I get three bangs for my buck I get three multi-functions for this item and it can be worn as a pen that if you wanted to and put your kit I carry mine in my fire kit so what I want to do is I want to show you the difference that it makes using something like this as a bearing block versus something like this [Music]

pretty effortless with that be honest with you you can see the burn you're getting with that what I wanted to try to do is get you guys a good kind of a bird's-eye view of what's going on here I think I'm going to try a little trick here I think I'm going to try to get this fire board facing forward so you guys can actually see this notch and see how things are reacting and see how that coal is being formed up close but to do that I'm going to have to figure out a different way to put my foot on this board so that we're not getting one side of it stuck up in the air I think that will probably do it right there you guys ought to be able to see that I would think see by zooming this camera in a little bit more okay now if I can keep them hitting the camera tripod movements just a little bit

to see all the little shadows here while I'm doing this spindles getting pretty short okay if we can twirl up and ever here remember what I said the first thing we're looking for is downward pressure and smoke we've got that now we're looking for that not to get full of material and we've just about got that once that happens then we can speed up all right there we go folks i'm david cameron with pathfinder school and i promised a young man in Lake Okeechobee Florida I would send him this bow drill set I'm not going to use it anymore in this series we need to make another bow drill fire I'll just make another set we'll go from there I don't know if this video is going to go up tonight or tomorrow but please remember that tomorrow is national Autism Awareness Day and if your family's been touched by autism you understand where I'm coming from if not please go to Autism Speaks to work and support those families who have been touched by autism I'm Dave Canterbury at the Pathfinder school I thank you for your views and thank you for your support on the back another video is in I can

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