Testing "Ashcloth" As a Firestarter

Description

I've become more and more interested in "ashcloth" as a charcloth replacement. Here I run some tests and give more background and instruction on this method.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

[Music]

hello my friends this is a follow-up video to the starting your pants on fire video and it has to do with what I'm calling ash cloth could this be a replacement for char cloth I don't know that's what today's experiment is for so come along with me and let's see what we discover now we all know char cloth is magical stuff right you can hit it with a tiny little spark and suddenly it's gonna extend that heat and that's the power of it it can extend that heat out so that we can get something to start on fire this video I want to show you how to make it how you can use it as a replacement for char cloth and answer some of the questions that you had in the in the pants on fire video so the first question most people are asking is how does this work I do not know how this works well over one of our forest monks who's staying with us he's on a big track right now maybe for a couple of weeks I'm not sure when I'll see him back but he is a chemist when he gets back I will ask him and if he knows or can explain it I will put it put it in the description of this video so keep checking back in the description if you're interested in that and the mechanics of this if any of you know how it works please explain it down in the video how did I learn this this so the first time that I ever realized that ashes and cloth could do something together was on a youtube channel called boggy creek beast and he was showing this thing called a Ruettiger fire roll where are you you know it's a really neat fire making method and I won't go into how it works right now but basically you're creating a friction with this piece of cloth or other material that is impregnated with ashes so clearly there was something happening with a mixture of the ashes in the cloth that creates more capacity for it holding heat now to take the leap from that to using it as a char cloth replacement that was not my own there's a buddy of mine who showed me and suggested it he doesn't have a YouTube channel or anything but but he was the first one that said hey check this out so that was not my original my original was thinking you could use your clothing for this just the edge of your clothing as I showed in that pants on fire video these very pants right here I've searched the internet a little bit since then

as you might imagine I don't get much time to watch youtube videos but it looks like David West if you know him he does a lot of fire making videos and he seems to have shown I didn't watch the whole video but he seems to have shown how you can use the ash and the cloth together and that it will make a my char cloth replacement again I'm just gonna call it ash cloth but again in this video I want to go a little bit deeper show you how you can how you can make this skill your own the other day we're out frolic with the forest monks we came across an old campfire now that campfire had everything we needed to make the ash cloth because some of the people had cotton clothes and the cotton clothing plus what we could get from that fire and we could have ash cloud now char cloth and ash cloth both have the liability that they kind of need a prior fire in order to create them but it with the char cloth that fire has to be yours you have to you know you've had to be there physically making the char cloth in the fire where the ash cloth the the bonus of you could come across somebody else's fire and get the materials that you need char cloth also can be pretty delicate I'm when I'm teaching it to little kids flint and steel you know whether they're holding it on top or they're trying to strike down into it they're new to it and they're they're hitting and often that char cloth breaks up the ash cloth is as strong as the original material and so it it is just more resilient - cloth it also you know we make char cloth we are losing a fair amount of the substance there and so though it burns hot it doesn't have as much length of burn as the ash cloth so the ash cloth also has that advantage okay I've got a bunch of materials to mess with here here's some gray ash and the first demo of this with a fire steel and plain cloth so watch what happens when we hit the plain cloth with the fire steel okay

so I can get sparks to go down in there but I cannot get them to catch now I'm gonna take some of this gray ash what I want to do is really just get that mixed up in there really really well pushing it into there now I'm gonna hit it

and you can see one hit and it's behaving completely differently than the regular cloth did I can let it sit there it's going to go on its own well I can blow and get it to generate quite a bit of heat that's with gray ash no gray ash is you're only gonna find that in really fresh fires so what about the black you know charcoal that we're more likely to find in an older fire I'm gonna take piece of black charcoal sometimes this stuff can be hard to break up I want a powder that's going to go into the material again

and we'll hit it with the truck with the fire steel

so we can see the black ash does not have the same power as the gray ash but once we get it going it is still going to retain that same power to know you'll continue to grow and get stronger I feel like this is just way more delicate see how the sparks are going out if you're familiar with blowing a tinder bundle into flame you're kind of losing the heat there in fact it actually went out I mean

we'll see what it does a little bit so what I found is that the gray ash is much more powerful than the black ash but the black ash is functional let's see if we can actually get it to do something here

a lot more singing care to get that to go but again it'll work in a pinch I highly doubt that we're gonna get putting steel to take in the black unless you had a really really good steel and got some just a perfect spark don't think that's gonna happen

we go back to the gray he's gonna add a little more here give myself a good striking surface

so here's where it's not working as well as traditional charcloth you guys I'm not getting that to take know sometimes that can be our cloth here's another type of cloth adding in some gray so I don't think that it is performing as well as we would hope final piece of clothing this is my wife's pants they no longer serving her yeah she knows that I took them and let's see what we get maybe somebody better front steal than me could get it to go I think with a firesteel

we're going to get ignition and that took a lot again this is a demonstration of how we could use just clothing that's char cloth so is this gonna replace regular char cloth maybe not but I think that it has its own place as as you know with a fire steel there's a lot of great things out there to use if you need to get a fire started

among them punk wood is that is always our go-to but here I'm keeping a little tin and I'm putting some pieces of cloth in there and just like a char cloth container I can just keep them in there coated with ashes and if I can't find any Punk wood or other viable materials then this might just come in really handy especially in conjunction with a fire steel the little sparker that I used in the last video so it's really not more powerful than a lighter so that would be another option is that that spent lighter so so here I go and got my little ash cloth tin just like with char cloth I can spark right down into it pull out the piece I'm using and start myself a fire everything around here super wet so I'll probably speed this up for you a little bit you

finally at last someplace just pour it on a slate just earlier so maybe not a replacement but I believe this has its own place in the annals of bushcrafting and wilderness skills and lar and I really haven't seen many people talking about it I hope other people experiment with it and take it to new new levels and tell me if you try it out tell me if you find uses for it I know that it has come in useful a few times when do not have other options available thanks for watching my friends and can't wait to see what you have to say in the comments