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Best Natural Tinder Sources | Identifying Tulip Poplar Tree for Tinder & Friction Fire

Description

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Today, we show you how to identify Tulip Poplar, a tree which is incredibly useful for fire. Even the leaves look like little campfires! The bark can be used as tinder, and the wood is soft and good for friction fire.

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Tags: Fire (Quotation Subject),Bushcraft,Camping,Tinder,Weekend,Fun,Summer,Survival,Travel,Tree (Literature Subject),Liriodendron Tulipifera (Organism Classification),Liriodendron (Organism Classification),woodcraft,Outdoor,Tent,Wilderness (Quotation Subject),Survival Skills (TV Genre),prepper,How-to (Website Category),Botany (Field Of Study),dendrology

Video Transcription

today we're in a forest full of tulip poplar would you actually don't often find in the forest where I'm from named after its tulip sheep the flowers this tree is one of the best for starting fires first thing you'll notice as the bark has the sort of cantaloupe looking texture and when they're older it almost resembles ash but the inside of the ridges are sort of white and orange and this bark is very very peelable supersets

you should try it okay you can turn this into a bunch of tinder if you just keep breaking it apart and working at it just make a nice bird's nest tinder bundle anything like that just break it into smaller smaller strands and even if it's late you can do this and then dry it out pretty easily sometimes you'll get these little bugs underneath em those are called snow fleas or I think scale bugs sometimes I find that when I'm drilling into maple trees to tap them but they're not really harmful or anything now

the melon shape of the bark that you'll see mostly on trees that are like standing up that are older but what you also want to learn to identifies the bark of twigs that you'll find on the ground because usually that's the stuff you need for the fire and that's all you're gonna find having this much tulip poplar crashed onto the ground is pretty uncommon but if you do find the tree you just look near the ground a lot of times that branches have a tendency to fall off and I sort of look for these cracked horizontal patterns along the bark there's all these little fissures that are just horizontal and sometimes they crack vertically along the branch sometimes it's also a darker sort of gray color but of course you can always just take a branch and test to see how easy it is to strip the bark off and then you know you've got the right thing and after that you can fluff it up and do a nice fuzzy tinder bundle the other good thing about this would when it comes to fire is that not only is the bark great tinder but the wood is very soft and it's great for friction fire so see this wood you can intent it if you take your fingernail and press it into it it'll make a mark and that's how you know it's soft enough for a friction fire now if you are making a friction fire set the way you want to chop your wood is first in half you're just gonna split it like that and then take one of the pieces and chop it into quarters and they'll carve this down so it's flat and this will become your baseboard and these will be your spindles and what you'll have in the end is a little baseboard like this in your spindle and these are both of the same tulip poplar wood and that way they can grind into each other evenly and create a lot of dust so we're not gonna do friction fire today because that's we're kind of running out of sunlight but uh well that's my excuse but I will show you that you can spark this bark up really well once you fluff it up get it all fibrous all you need is your Ferro rod might as well feather this a little bit and then you just take your Ferro rod and spark it up with munch until it catches

let's uh see if Robbie can do it we're gonna see we're gonna see if I learned anything from the smokies trip and it looks so easy when you did it that like you said the tip right here it's the key to do it fast yeah and it's like well some people do long strokes but I actually do short ones as if I'm scraping material off and sometimes I put my thumb right like on the tip of it so I'm more control yeah like this yeah well either a thumb actually works using your other one might work too I'm not sure I understand the mechanics of this so the back of the spine has a 90 degree and it just well if you want to use the sharp end that might be easier for you there's really fast like try it try having it perpendicular to the rod here maybe come show me again how you did

all right now now you want to move the bundle so that the flames go up into it yeah yeah I had to sing the Green Ranger theme if you're actually starting a fire you want a much larger tinder bundle yeah if you're actually starting a fire you want a much larger tinder bundle and a lot more wood small pieces of wood to you

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