Piston Fire and making Fine Tinder from Hard Bark

Description

A Fire Piston is a fun way to start a fire and is based on principles of compression which creates heat, enough heat to make a glowing ember which can be transferred to fine tinder and blown into a flame from which a fire can be made. Usually making fine tinder is easy, but occasionally good materials are not easily found, things such as hard bark can be made into an excellent fine tinder. Link to Fire Piston used http://trayerwilderness.com/store/multiflame-tools-and-trayer-fire-tool/

Tags: fire,piston,fire by compression,trayer wilderness,tinder,bark,processing tinder,ember,coal,fire making,poncho shelter,swinging chair,cooking tripod,lodge cast iron

Video Transcription

hey perry peacock here with wilderness innovation and not today doing a little done a little bit of stuff we got a state holiday here and just have a little fun in the outdoors today a little bit a little bit of a bonus this week be able to get out a couple times and I want to show you a little something having to do with fire starting and and show you some like a method for making some fine tinder when there isn't what it's not readily available sometimes now oftentimes in the area where I live you find this really papery inner bark and this can be on cottonwood trees or Aspen quaking aspen trees that sort of thing and and if stuff went when a tree is died the bark split off a little bit and the sun and wind can get at it this stuff will just gradually dry and and it will just start disintegrating into very very fine sheets of bark here they're papery thin like some of these I think you might take two or three or maybe four sheets of these to make the thickness of a sheet of type paper so this stuff is just so incredibly thin but this stuff is great for friction fires or or even just helping get in a regular fire going when you get when you get some of this stuff started throw some small twigs and sticks over the top of that this will get you going but what I wanted to show you today then is is when you don't have this kind of really nice fine bark but you want to get some fine tinder that you can throw a spark or an Emma or an ember into and get a fire going let me show you how you can use some bark that's less than satisfactory so sometimes you have a tree that's fallen that's diet or whatever and there are some areas that this force is very healthy and there's very little debt or damaged trees and and sometimes saw the damage whatever may have happened is very recent and the stuff is very this is very hard and stiff and but it still has fiber and still has layers and all that kind of stuff there we just have to be able to separate all that out in order to get a fine something fine enough to throw in a hot coal or ember into and get that thing to catch for us so let me show you a quick way that I sometimes do that so what I'll do is just make myself a baton or something like that and yeah it can be anything a lot of times I make one just for the heck of it every time I go camping what we want to do is we want to separate the layers and the fibers and that sort of thing out and in order to have fine material so what I do is I just start a lot of times if you can get a bunch like this and tip them up on edge a little bit we've kind of get things started quickly for you and you just kind of keep rotating them and that sort of thing and let it start softening up you can switch ends here put some of this stiffer stuff back on there that hasn't been broken down yet then you usually have some of the some of the bark that doesn't really want to break down so any of those thicker pieces that don't break down easily you can just toss those aside to show you can throw that as some of the finer other material on your fires you start to get it going so I got to do is just do this for just a few minutes here and I'll have myself a nice pile of fine has some very fine stuff capable of catching an ember and and bring making a fire out of that okay so now I've got it beat down I could I mean I can go more than that but that usually does pretty good for me I'll just take these course or fibers here that I've got started and see I just took me just a few minutes really but I just like to wat it up into a ball and just work it kind of like you're molding clay what happens is with fire with either either what am I either with flame or a number it'll always catch easier if it has a kind of afraid broken end to attach to and so so whether it's a flame or whether it's an ember if you have a you have a little something very fine a fine jagged edge for it to catch on to you why it will catch much much better much easier now you see right there that's really fine that's starting to get soft now this stuff out here that the light of the pile is very that's even finer and I can kind of work out a little bit I don't want to get it I don't want to get too fine because I can get to the point where it doesn't go very well because it doesn't get enough air to it so now let me show you my next step here so now what I've got some burdock leaf I'll just take that and I'll lay this I'll lay this wide right there in there I've got a little more I collected the kind of fell down around here and now this really fine stuff that fell out when I was kind of teasing that in my hand in a little ball then I do it I'm going to open that up a little bit I'm going to drop that stuff right there in the center so the very finest stuff is right there in the middle and now no go ahead and get us a an ember going here

all rights I've got a fire pissed i'm going to use today i got this from a trailer wilderness calm some friends of mine i know up in a montana area and i don't I D'Ghor Montana Kim ever anyway up that way and so I've got a little recess in here where we put some charred cloth in the end it's got a little pics lot in here where we can pick the ember out the hot ember it gets made and drop it into some tinder got it oh ring right here that gives us a good seal and then so that's the piston and this is the cylinder this part right here and so that these two together that slides inside of there the force of it creates compression compression generates heat and the heat will make the char cloth glow and then of course we'll put that char cloth into our materials so let me show you let me show you how that's done but I usually put a little vaseline or something's just some lip lotion or whatever whip cream chapstick just a little film of that on the overhang just so it makes its light good and you just get it started and you grip the end I put a different handle on they came from trailer with a round knob I changed it out for a t1 just because I like that better but anyway regardless doesn't change how it works as a piston so then all we do is we just shove that down in there

you see we got a glowing ember in there and we'll get that picked out so even though I lost a good bit of the ember to a little breeze that kind of kicked up here it doesn't take much because our material that we made here our bark was so fine at just the slightest bit of spark really really can make a difference now I could easily right now a couple of puffs I could blow that into a flame but sometimes you may not want to sometimes you may want to let the thing sit for just a little bit because maybe you got to get back maybe you got to get back to an area to light your fire maybe something's come up or whatever and you just you need to let it rest for just a moment it's not a problem I can leave that in there I can puff on it every so often and in this green burdock leaf will help keep it from getting enough oxygen to really flame up or whatever and I can just keep this thing I can just keep them so this thing situated as long as I need to till I'm ready and then I can blow it into a flame so you see right now this thing's just sitting here just lightly smoking I could leave that thing for probably probably 15 or 20 minutes perhaps longer without doing anything and this thing will not go out I can still build a fire with it without any problem and now I'm not inhaling it's getting kind of hot to hold here on the on the edge but I could do that i could with this thing sit for probably another 10 or 15 minutes before i do anything but i can also i can open it up a little

now one of the nice things about me letting this thing sit there for a little bit is this hole inside here is just slowly become a glowing mass and so now I expose this out to the air why I can make him pretty quickly I can pretty quickly have me some have something going here I'm going to put just a little more coarse material on top of that

and you see if now the this burdock leaf it allows my fire to burn a little bit slower I can control it instead of just having the whole mass suddenly turn into flame I'm just going to put some more bark on there because there's a lot of bark in this area a lot of Cottonwood bark and and it burns very nicely as well

you

a little bit of baked beans think I got them cooked just a little too much so what happens when you're out here trying to video at the same time you're trying to cook and you're trying to do two or three other things I'm not a very good multitasker we'll see how the next go-around Terry peacock again wilderness innovation