Fire School Part 1 Bow Drill Lessons

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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

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what I thought we would do today is start a series called the fire school at the Pathfinder school fire is a primary teaching tool for every class from basic to advanced we generally start out with our basic classes in teaching ways to make fire with the items in your 10 piece kit generally speaking that is a lighter and magnifying glass in a large ferrocerium rod we teach people how to build a proper fire lei how to collect proper tinder and how to affect ignition using their ferrocerium rod using their cigarette lighter saving it even if it's been wet or cold and also how to use magnification to get solar embers and control those to blow a bird nest to flame but I thought what we do in this fire school series is start at the opposite end of the spectrum and start with primitive fire improving a fire is really the last resort in a survival scenario and the reason it is is because it's a complicated way to start fire it has lots and lots of input variables that affect the output and everything in survival just like in life is really a process the inputs always affect the output any variation within those inputs can also affect the output so what I thought we'd do is make a very in-depth detailed video today to start off this series on making a bow drill set and creating an ember from that bow drill set now that's not going to that's not talking about making a fire lay or making the bird nest or making the tinder bundle and all those things we'll go into those as we go I thought what we do today is we would talk about just creating the ember from a bow drill set making a bow drill set from scratch from what we find in the woods with a couple simple tools that we'd have in our backpack and then some of the variation that can be found within the bow drill set and some of the little simple tweaks that you can make to make your bow drill set work better for you and then also the correct inputs that will directly affect the output stay with me and we'll get started one of my favorite materials for bow drill fires in Eastern woodlands is the tulip poplar and tulip poplar tu Li p-pop

is really not a poplar at all it's actually a tulip treat and it's in the Magnolia family but it has very similar properties to all other poplars and poplar in general is a very good species to use for a bow-drill fire other species that are also in the poplar family that are good for bow drill fires are basswood Cottonwood regular everyday poplar Lombardy poplar and things like that

sawtooth Aspen those are all in the poplar family those will all work well tulip poplar is actually sometimes called yellow poplar but it is not truly a poplar although it has the same properties but it does have several things to its advantage in eastern Willows number one there's a lot of them number two they're very easy to identify number three because they drop their branches as they grow usually there's hanging dead to be available it's not always something you find on the ground you can find dead branches very similar to this one is hung up in the thicket here in front of me you can see how white that is from the bark rotting off of it or being torn off of it and that white color almost looks like deer antler is very indicative of a tulip poplar or yellow poplar when you're walking through the woods so it helps you to identify that type tree if you're looking around you see something it looks like deer antler color like that very bright very white looking it's generally going to be a tulip poplar you can then walk up and look at the tree itself look at the bark look at the consistency and that's what we're looking for is the properties of the tree it really doesn't matter what species it is necessarily to us what matters is doesn't have the correct properties and in our case what we want for a bow-drill fire is we really want the properties of this wood to be fairly soft we want something that we can push our fingernail into and it will leave an imprint that's a fairly good indication of how soft that wood is and that will be the right wood or a good wood or a good candidate for Vogel now the other thing they like to look at with this wood to see if it's what I'm looking for or the right consistency is like you just go ahead and cut into with my knife if you've been using your knife for very long you understand what wood feels like when you cut into it and how hard it is if would cuts like butter and I'm just using a more a bush craft block here really good starting bushcraft style knife works really really well for this again you don't spend a lot of money on squidly just got to have the right stuff but you got a good skiing and naveen edge on here if you shave that stuff down and you can feel it's really really soft and it's cutting almost like butter when you cut into it that's a pretty good indicator that this is going to be good wood for bow drill set so here's several branches of tulip poplar we've picked up off the ground in the woods you can see the bark is off of this one completely and the bark on some of these is different colors than the other barks and the reason for that is differentiating ages of decay if you find these ones that are very blackish colors like this they've been dead the longest ones like this that are more light colored on the bark generally speaking have not been dead as long and may not be as dry as others ones like this that have been found on the ground with no bark on them have most likely been dead the longest but if they've been found directly on the ground they may contain moisture this is a good straight piece right here from about right here to here it's fairly straight that's why I picked this piece up I thought that would make a pretty decent spindle now remember that we need really three main components but we need four components for our bow drill set we need a hearth board we need a spindle we need a bearing block and we need a bow generally speaking we can make a spindle and the hearth board from the same wood very easily it would be better to have green wood for both the bow and for the bearing block the bearing block is what gives people the most trouble and they don't realize it we'll talk about that we get to that point so let's look the wood that we have and figure out what we're going to use for our spindle and what piece we're going to use for our hearth would our hearth board first now I'd like to use this piece from my heart board because it's bigger in diameter it's going to need to be wider than our spindle or just a little bit wider than our spindle we could use this as our spindle and cut it down a little bit more and easily be smaller than a diameter of this piece of wood we also want to check the wood to make sure it's not rotten and starting to get real pithy feeling or spongy feeling as long as it's not doing that it should be okay but the longer it's been dead the faster it's going to burn up the least amount of time or the lesser time it's been dead the more chances are it's going to hold moisture the closer to the ground it was the more choice chances are it's going to hold moisture all of these things are important variables that we have to control so as we're cutting into this wood we're going to be checking for all of those things all right let's first look at what we're going to try use for a spindle and besides my bushcraft black I have just a Leatherman super tool multi-tool that's going to give me a small saw a bahco laplander would do the same thing but if your carry option is three tools especially in the beginning or when you're just starting out I would suggest a Leatherman super tool 300 a bahco laplander folding saw and a Mora bushcraft black those tools will serve you very very well for a lot of things and they won't break the bank buying them either let's take this thing and cut it off we'll be able to tell a little bit about this wood just by cutting it off with our saw if it's real real easy to cut it may be pithy and we can look at the end of this push our fingernail into that as well and see how pithy feeling it is see if we think it's possibly too dead to use for this purpose so let's cut the other end and I like my spindles about the span of my fingertip

or my thumb tip to my pinky so I go up in here somewhere and cut that dude off and again I'm feeling see if how pithy that thing feels or how rotten it feels it's fairly straight it's not too bad it's got a little bit of a warp right here but we're going to shave this thing down anyway so we'll see what it looks like when we get a shave down a little further that will tell us more about the consistency or variables within the spindle now generally speaking I never use the knife on my multi-tool for cutting I saved that knife razor sharp that's part of my first-aid so I'm always going to use this more knife to cut with and carve with instead of using that as I'm cutting into this I'm trying to feel what the wood feels like is it carving off pretty smooth is it coming off chunky it's coming off chunky that could be a pretty good indicator that's too rotten if it's coming off fairly smooth that's okay but you can also feel dampness as you go this feels really really bone dry we've got a little bit of a knot right here we're definitely going to use this for the top end of our spindle and we'll talk about that in a little bit as well but I'd rather have the top of my spindle harder than the bottom if that's possible so that it doesn't shoulder out on my handhold

it does feel a little bit chunky to me coming off of there but that could just because really really dry it doesn't feel smooth smooth gently equates to Greenwood or moisture it doesn't feel smooth it feels a little bit shock you can hear that when you're cutting into this and all of those things are important to understand when you're doing this stuff you can look at your shavings on the ground and see what they look like after you've taken them off of your spindle do they look like chunks or do they look like curls they look like curls you're usually pretty safe if they look like chunks probably got some pretty rotten wood that you're working with or starting to rod now we need to get this hump out of here to kind of make this a little bit straighter get a little bit of a hump on this backside the straighter the spindle is the better it's going to spin if this thing is crooked it's going to wobble if it wobbles in the socket it's going to be releasing heat it's not going to run smooth and you're going to have friction in areas you don't want friction so you always want this thing to be smooth as you can get it and run as smooth as you can make it run and we'll look down this thing and see what we got not too bad off it's looking pretty good the other thing I want to look for as I'm going down through here is I don't want any cracks in the end of the spindle or checks if I have cracks and checks as soon as I heat this thing up it's going to open those cracks up and again I'm going to lose heat because heat rises so when this thing is down on the board the heats rising up from the friction and the downward pressure and heats rising up through the crack and it's not staying where I want it that's all important things that I have to think about now let's talk about the shape of this spindle for a minute we want this spindle what I tell my students is the diameter of your spindle should start out about the diameter of your thumb so this one can be shaved down a little bit further than this and the profile overall profile of the spindle imagine a number two pencil those big fatty pencils used to have when you were in grade school that you're about ready to take to the sharpener and you've already used the eraser aren't a few dozen times so you've got kind of a rounded over end and you've got a semi pointed end that you're getting ready taking put in the sharpener because it's getting dull this end is bulldozed over like the eraser so this thing needs to look like that number two Ticonderoga pencil you had in second grade when you're done right now I'm just going around I'm reducing the diameter to get it to the diameter I want and making sure I'm getting rid of those humps to make the exact size I want and keeping it as round as possible so that it will run smooth and won't wobble

okay now I can do a lot of this heavy heavy chunking stuff just off the cuff like this hold it in my hand when I want to start doing something a little bit fire with this thing I'm going to change my tactic a little bit and go to more of a knee levered hold where I can just kind of draw the piece toward me like this take off very controlled amounts of the material just like this steady rotating

this is a very controlled way to carve something it's also a very safe way to carve something I'm not changing anything here if I have to change any angle I just change the angle that I'm pulling the wood right there dry hump is app it's not too shabby as far as the diameter goes that's pretty good remember we had our knot right here so this is the area that I'm going to use for my point now when I make a point on this I generally like to think about this like I said as a number two pencil that's just about to the point of going to the sharper so I'm going to back off of this thing about an inch start to pull in here like I'm serving a tent stake and just keep rotating it around you can see what I'm getting here preparation with fire is 90% of the success failure of a fire so the more time you take to make this right to begin with the better your chances are of getting a coal the first time around and that's really important because it takes a lot less energy to sit here and carve this set then it takes to work that bow drill and if you don't get your coal the first time you start to run that bow drill every time you do it consecutively after that you're going to have less and less energy to accomplish the task you may have marginal chords that you're using or cords you had to fashion off the landscape and you may only get one shot so you really need to take your time at this to get this part right so you have the best chance of success the very first time don't rush this now I'm looking at this thing to see how much pith there isn't a center because that will crush in the handhold so I'm just going to kind of bulldoze this over a little bit right where that pith is and I'm going to be a little bit more dull again that's just getting used to understanding the material I think there's a pretty good amount of pith right in the middle of that thing so to circumvent that a little bit I'm going to make that thing a little bit bigger around then I may generally make it because I know that's going to crush as that crushes I'm going to start to shoulder out inside my socket for my handhold which is going to cause friction in the top instead of the friction being

the bottom now the bottom of this needs to look like an eraser basically so I'm going to start taking chunks just off to the side just like this I'm just kind of going in an angle at it all the way around and if I have facets on there because of that that's okay with me it was fast it's not going to hurt anything they're actually going to add friction once they go all the way around I move up a little bit about half way and they just keep knocking that off and moving up and knocking it off and moving it up and knocking it off until I get a nice rounded shape on there again very similar to a used eraser as even as I can get it that looks pretty good again I'm seeing pith right there and that concerns me a little bit but not a ton it just means that the spindle is going to wear down pretty fast but I'm only planning on having to use it the one time that's part of the progression of fire I don't want to keep making bow drill sets or keep making bow drill fires I want to make one and then never have to make another one my progression of fire will allow me not to have to do this twice