When it come to bushcraft and survival, there are few skills as intriguing as making fire with simple tools, in this case, nothing but a knife. In this video I'll show you the finer points of using a bow drill to make friction fire. The old adage of "rubbing two sticks together" isn't far off! I'll make a complete friction fire kit using just a knife and my boot lace. For this kit I'm using elderberry for the fireboard, aka hearth board, and the spindle. I also collect fatwood, process the tinder bundle, and give you some important details for the friction fire making process. This is just another one of those survival skills that's fun to learn. Now get in the woods and practice those survival skills!
Don't forget to subscribe to the channel. We're uploading a new video each week that features one of the following topics: archery, bow hunting, bow making, survival skills, bushcraft, self reliance, primitive skills, primitive bows, hunting, camping, fishing, and a lot more!
Big thanks to our partners who help support these videos!
Lost in the woods, got nothing but my knife, need to start a fire. Let's do it y'all. Damn,
should have been a wrap. These salsify seed heads should make good tinder. So we've got some really
useful stuff here. This is a stump from a ponderosa pine. You can see all of this resin just oozing
out of this thing. This is fatwood and it is a ready-made natural fire starter. This is elderberry
and it's a fantastic plant to know. It's very widespread, it's got edible qualities, medicinal
qualities. It's actually been scientifically proven to reduce the longevity and severity
of viruses. It's also one of the best friction fire materials on the planet. There's a dead
branch right here. I'm going to grab that. So I was in here looking for a bow for a bro drill set
and I noticed all of this has been browsed. This is from a deer and you can tell that it's from
an ungulate versus a rabbit or a rodent because the little ends where they've browsed are torn
instead of cut. Rodents and rabbits will cut them at a 45, almost like you did it with a knife.
Service berries, nice. Fireboard, spindle, bearing block, tie a bowline knot. It's one of the most
useful knots you will ever learn. Very simple and it'll come apart every time so you can reuse your
rope. Ideally you're going to have some sort of lubrication on your bearing block to try to reduce
friction at this point as much as possible. Now if you've been in the woods for a couple days and
you haven't bathed you can get oil from the sides of your nose and your hair but if you can't get
enough from there you can use pine pitch which works okay. It's not great but it does work in a
pinch. That's what we're going to use today. So I'm just burning in my divot so that I can cut my
notch. That ought to be good. When you're making this notch you do not want to go all the way to
the center of the hole. You want to be maybe a third of the way out from the center. So at first
I'm not putting any pressure on it just enough to keep that in there. I'm not going very fast.
I'm just trying to heat up everything and create that dust. When that notch fills up with dust
then I'll increase the speed and the pressure to try to get a cold. So this may only take a few
seconds or it may take a minute or more depending on the moisture content of the materials you're
working with. So I can see some dust starting to form in my notch. Kind of a dark brown. So the
notch is overflowing with dust. Now we're ready. Once your notch is full you start getting good
smoke then you can start applying more pressure and speed. Should take just a few seconds.
So there should be a coal inside this dust here. You see you've got a got smoke coming from it.
There's no rush no hurry. So you can remove your fireboard. See that stream of smoke that's still
coming up. All right so I'm just gonna wrap my tender bundle around. Don't don't crush the coal
but give it give it a little love. You should see it start to grow. There we go. Take our little
fine twigs and put on there a bit of fat wood. Move your little bit bigger material. Don't burn
your fingers. So of course these are ideal conditions. It's been very dry. I had really
good materials to work with. And so once you get the technique down and know some of the finer
points of starting a bow drill fire it's actually pretty easy in conditions like this. And if you're
a beginner just getting started with this this is the kind of conditions that you want to work in
just to build your confidence. But once you advance in your skill a little bit
you need to start going out into the woods and practicing in less than perfect conditions
because I can guarantee when you're in the woods 99% of the time it's going to be less than perfect.
Now it's summertime in Idaho and we don't get a lot of rain this time of year. But if there's
enough interest in it later on this fall when we start to get a little bit more precipitation
I'll show you how to start a friction fire when everything's damp. All right I got to put my
boot lace back in my boot. All right guys I'm going to be here for a while. We'll see you on the next one.
