Char Cloth and Ignition Sources

Description

http://www.thepathfinderschoolllc.com

Tags: Pathfinder,Survival,Bushcraft

Video Transcription

even good

back in the woods morning guys

they've Canterbury the Pathfinder school we're going to do today is we're going to talk about making char cloth we're going to talk about different ignition sources for char cloth and we're also going to talk about how to build a proper bird nest that's one of the biggest mistakes I see people make with primitive fire whether it's a hand drill a bow drill or flint and steel or utilization of char cloth which is basically Flint steel technology most of the time but there are other ways to ignite char cloth we'll talk about hearing a little bit fact of the matter is bird nests are the biggest mistake I see people make getting an ember is not that difficult with primitive fire if you know what you're doing and you have proper materials it's building the bird nest that people fail out in the majority of the time so we're going to talk about how to build a proper bird nest but first let's talk about making char cloth we're going to use our new cup and bottle combination here for that I had some guys ask me about this yesterday

I have always advocated using your stainless steel bottle and cup to make char cloth to affect your next fire and to make char cloth you have to basically create enough heat to superheat the fabric inside release the gases but not providing oxygen so you're providing the heat you're providing the fuel in the cotton fabric but you're not giving any options so it can't burn it can only carbonize and that's what we want so what I do is I use my cup as my lid that lets gas escape because you don't get a perfect seal you get a pretty good one but you don't get a perfect seal and then the gas can escape but the option doesn't get in okay and what I'll generally do is turn my cup I'll put the material in the char cloth put the cup on and turn that upside down in the fire we'll talk about that in a minute so let's talk about material for char cloth you know an old t-shirt is a very good option if it's a hundred percent cotton you want 100% cotton material for this now another big mistake that I see people make is they put too much char cloth in at one time or they try to put too big a piece in at one time everything with fire and survival in general

if you just take surface area surface area can explain a lot of problems in a survival situation from fire to heat sources to shelter to you know a lot boiling water a lot of things have to do with the surface area that you cover okay

and what we want to do with char cloth is we want to create a lot of surface area to get heated up we don't want to heat up one big chunk we want to heat up a lot of smaller chunks so I'm going to take this thing and I'm going to tear it in several pieces just like this so we've got several bites at the Apple that's what you want to say because we're going to use several different ignition sources so I want several pieces of char cloth to work with it doesn't matter if I've got the edge on that t-shirt it's not going to charge fast because the double thickness of the fabric but it will char so we'll cut that off and get rid of it for right now so we've got a good demonstration here and then all we needs a good rip ruin fire we've got that so what we've got now is we've got three or four various sizes of char cloth here you know anywhere from two inch by three inch squares a two inch by about four inch square or something like that and what we're going to do with that is we're just going to take our bottle we want to make sure number one there's no moisture in the bottle so if we need to put this bottle in the fire to dry that out just all by yourself with no lid on it set it in there sideways in evaporate any moisture that might be in there out so I'm going to look inside it make sure there's no moisture in there feel around inside there with my fingers then I'm just going to drop my char cloth in there doesn't have to go in there any special way I'm not going to fold it up or anything I want to put in there like that put my cup over top of it and this is the direction that's going in to fire so let's go do that now okay we've got a pre rip snortin fire going on here so let's go ahead and just take this shove it right in here like this don't want to get it all the way in there but I want to get it in there by the heat then I'm just going to push my fire up on top of it a little bit here if I can get that cup superheated real good

now we'll just wait and this is going to take probably ten minutes you can already see smoke starting to come out of the seam right here a little bit that's what we want move some of this so we don't mistake the smoke here because we want gases to escape so we're going to have smoke coming out of there build our fire up here a little bit right here you don't have to sit that bottle straight up you can lay it on the side like I'm doing right now not going to hurt it a bit again you're giving yourself surface area by doing that because you've got a larger surface area in the fire to heat that up faster than if you stood it on end it's all about surface area okay you can see our fires burnt down pretty good now that's a pretty good sign to me that that's probably done I'm just going to give it a couple more minutes anyway then we're going to pull it out okay now getting this out of the fire is just as important as putting it in the fire we cannot let oxygen into this container so what we're going to have to do is another reason for putting it on the edge of the fire like this get myself a good flat spot right here I'm going to bring this over and stand it up at that point I'm not letting the oxygen in there now what has to happen is this has to completely cool down before I can open it if I open it and let oxygen in while it's still superheated it's going to burn I've just added oxygen to my triangle of fire and then I'm going to have fire and that's not what I want I want charred I want charred cloth okay and you could use inner Punk of plants and plant material you can use punky wood you can char a lot of things you can even use sometimes you get some of this stuff out of the fire before it burns all the way down and snuff it out you can use that to affect your next fire this is just an easy portable way to do it it's quick and easy so what we're going to do is we're going to take this away from the fire so it cools down faster okay guys so once our bottles cool down to where we can touch it we can open it up and dump our char cloth out now you can see some of this isn't done by that light brown color on the cloth well the beauty of that is you can't overdo char cloth unless you let oxygen in there and let it burn so we can actually put that back in there if we want to and finish it up but for sake of what we're doing here for this demonstration I'll just take those pieces off that are not quite done which I would put back in and do later real situation but for now I'm not going to worry about them they'll burn anyway they're just not going to catch a good spark but they will burn so we'll set that aside for a minute we'll look at these pieces we have that are pretty decent all right now we're going to talk about ignition all right there are several ways that we can ignite this char cloth let's talk about ignition prior to talking about birdnest the first and good method that I think you can use for igniting char cloth is just a simple magnifying glass okay this Hudson bake tobacco tin we saw on our website comes in a magnifying glass built into the top of it it's actually made for was designed for holding tobacco and then you would use the magnifying lens to light your two back on your pipe a lot of people keep fire kits in these things you can keep your flint and steel in there just like the flint and steel kit that I have here you can put your flint and steel in your char cloth and things inside there and have a built-in magnifying glass a magnifying glass will work pretty good and all I have to do is point that thing toward the Sun and it takes seconds and you can see that that's already on fire a char cloth is already burning and that just took a second to make that happen okay we want to put that out we can just put in the tent and snuff it out starving it of oxygen again put it out so any magnifying glass Fresnel lens anything like that is going to work fine for you now you could go with the very traditional method of using flint and steel which just involves a hardened piece of steel that's been quenched this one's made out of a file it was hand forged we're going to do a segment on making one of these in the yurt later on this week and a piece of hard rock like flint shirt or quartz that has a hardness of 7 or above at that point you just want to make sure that you can strike sparks off of your striker it looks like it's throwing a few sparks then you would set your char cloth down in front of you or in your 10 or you can put it on top of the rock you can do it a couple different ways you can take that char cloth and you can put it on top of the rock like this and strike the striker against it and throw the sparks on top of your fabric like this in which case it's very simple to effect that as well okay so we'll put that back in the box here put it out but most folks are going to be carrying something like a ferrous IAM rod with them a pharisee m rod will ignite char cloth in a heartbeat okay when I do that I just take my ferrocene rod it doesn't matter whether it's your Pathfinder fire starter just a blank rod your your light my fire any manufactured fire steel will work like this and I just set it right in front of it just like this and push down on to it just like that and again I already have my char cloth wet very simple very easy I didn't take any time at all okay one little scrape is all that took we'll put that into tin we'll put that out that leaves us with these two small pieces here all right now one exotic method that you could use to light this char cloth if you were carrying a flintlock gun with you whether it be a rifle or a musket because it's built on flint and steel technology you could ignite it with your fire lock as some people call it and I'll show you that now okay so here's my flintlock what I would do is I would just cock it put that piece of char cloth right into my pan and close my hammer over the top of it and pull the trigger at that point again I have char cloth that's on fire very easy very simple

so if I'm carrying a flintlock I have a method for starting fire as well as a method for taking game one big advantage to the flintlock over any other weapon okay this is a Fresnel lens that you can buy it just about any Walmart you can get these for free at most optical stores even the optical stores in Walmart have them they won't give them to you there but if you go to a pharmacy like a Walgreens or CVS and ask them for a Fresnel lens they'll give them to you for free here's a small piece of char cloth here again all I need to do is concentrate the Sun on that you can see it's already smoking it takes almost no time whatsoever to get that to light up you can see that's already boldly on fire there takes no time at all okay the Sun is a very good renewable resource that you can use over and over again you're not expending much energy that way it's very simple and easy to do so if you're in a situation where you're hurt or injured this is a very easy way to affect fire if you've got highly combustible material like a char cloth with you that you make after you have affected your first fire you