Smokeless? Fire and Willow Windbreak - UK Bushcraft / Survival

Well here we are back again, the site of the shelter that I made with this fella or with the help of this fella about a week ago. I'm going to do the fireplace today and I'm going to try and make it smokeless. It's quite an easy thing to do but I'll talk you through it as I'm going. I'm just going to dig it out a little bit more and then I'm going to go in and source some rocks. Um, there is a dry stone wall about 50 yards away, but I'm not going to take any off the wall. Never take anything off walls. Don't pull fences down. Don't pull any sort of farmer's structures down. Only use the stuff that you find lying around. Otherwise, you will not be very well received, even if you've got permission to be on the land, which you should have anyway. That should go without saying. Right, we're about done as far as excavating goes. So now we're going to go away and get some stones. There's a place just behind me there. About there, where people have been camping a long, long time ago. And there's a few stones lying there, so that's what I'm going to use. Just a quick tip. That's where we're going to be working. So I'm going to be kind of sitting here, working in here. Place your stones up the bank from where you're working, so you're lifting them down. Don't put them down and lift them up. Saves a lot of effort. We've got loads of nice stones here. Looks like they've originally come off the dry stone wall. But they were all sourced from somewhere where somebody had a camp previous. We're basically just going to lay them around the edges but on this back end we're going to have one sticking quite a long way up and that's going to have two benefits. Firstly it's going to throw heat that way and it's also going to warm up and act like a bit of a chimney. It's going to draw the smoke up, hopefully increase the heat, increase the draw and make the fire smokeless. Even though it's a beautiful sunny day, the nights are going to be damn cold so we want as much heat thrown onto that shelter as possible. Right we're basically just setting these in so that they're nice and solid. Okay I didn't explain much whilst I was building it because I was just daydreaming, just concentrating on building it, but basically that's it. We've got a base stone, we've got a low point here, that's kind of our air intake. Hopefully the air is going to be drawn in here under the fire and when these fellas warm up along the back, which are much higher than the surroundings, they're going to draw the flames up, draw the heat up. Hopefully draw the smoke up, accelerate it and make it disappear. Time will tell though. That's pretty much it. Because this big stone at the back is angled towards the shelter, should throw quite a lot of heat directly back to the shelter. We're going to take this big pile of muck that we've dug out and pack it around the outside. To really make it not strictly fireproof but to give it a good defense against the flames because the last thing we want is on a dry day the fire blowing out and spreading all over the place. Yeah that looks okay, much safer. Now I'll get some kindling together, I'll find some birch bark and we'll light a fire, see if it performs as it should. I should just mention that the build time on this was approximately 10 minutes but most of the hole was excavated on my previous visit. Now this thing isn't an instant smokeless fire, you've got to wait till it gets warmed up a little bit and obviously it does help if you're using dry sticks. Now hopefully you'll be able to see the speed that the smoke's rising there and obviously building it in the pyramid shape helps but once this warms up it'll draw the air up through our little hole here and really Really fire the smoke up hot and get it out of the way before it chokes us. Takes a while for the stones surrounding it to warm up and start drawing the air in to make it smokeless. Because as you can tell, at the minute there's a load of smoke. The sticks aren't dry though. I've had a week of rain. We've had weeks and weeks of rain and damp weather. This is the first dry day in at least two or three weeks. So the stuff's very wet. It's not burning clean. We'll come back to it in half an hour or so. See what sort of a smoke effect we'll have then. Actually, we're only about five minutes after lighting the fire, and you can see that the smoke is diminishing already. The flames are really shooting up there, and it seems to be working as it should. Come back to it in another 10 minutes or so. There's our fire. That's after another 10 minutes. It's got a good hold now, there's a nice heart of warmth in there. See the air being drawn in there? Fire away up here. There is still smoke, but it's dissipating very, very quickly. Right, we've got the shelter just about where the camera is there. It's actually suspended in the tree next to it. But on this side, we've got a very, very steep bank. I'll just let you have a look with this camera. There's the camera in the tree, and it drops away really steeply down there to the river. If you fell over here, you would probably stop before you hit the river. But just here is a drop of approximately 30 feet directly into the river. So obviously, you don't really want to be falling over the side of here. Therefore, I'm going to build just a little fence here with some willow that I cut from my pond at the back end of last year. Actually, it was at the time when I made the willow fish trap. And if you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, check out the link in the video description because I was really pleased with that video. It came out awesome. Okay, we're going to pick up some of the thicker lengths. We're basically just going to push them into the ground where we want our little safety fence to be. We're going to space them about six inches apart which is about 15 centimeters. Right so we've got all our uprights in now all we're going to do is put the woven ones in. So we're basically going to start at one end and we're going to go in, out, in, out, in, out, all the way along so it weaves in and out of these uprights. When it gets to the end if you wanted this to grow you could plug the ends into the ground. I'm not bothered about this growth because it's a very dry bankside, so I'm just going to leave it loose. In, out, in here, that's about it. And then we'll just push that down. And we're going to continue that, basically build up like a woven fence here, using the willow. And if you weave it alternately, that is, if you went in on this one, you would go out on it with your next piece of wood. It'll make it ridiculously strong. So as I'm pushing that down now, I can feel the uprights bending and really tensioning, you know. I'll stick a few more in, and then I'll get a shot from a different angle, just so you can see the sort of effect that should be achieved. Just a quick tip, it's a lot easier to weave in and out the higher up you do it, so if you find it's very tight down here, just weave them in and out a little bit higher up, and then push them down at the end. Much easier. Also, some of these lengths are falling a little bit short as I'm getting up towards the end. So when I'm weaving the next ones in, I'm thinking, oh man, that's not alternate. It doesn't really matter. As long as you don't have like three or four all the same way, it'll be right. And remember, we're not going for perfection here. As long as it doesn't really look as rough as a badger's arse, it'll be alright. We want it to look kind of presentable. If you get pieces with multiple branches coming off, don't bother snapping them off. Just weave them in. It doesn't have to be perfect. And if anything, the multiple branches fill the space up quicker. Just another quick tip. Some of these uprights that I've put in are maybe seven to eight feet tall. And obviously we don't want our fence to be that tall. We really only want it two feet, two and a half feet. But don't chop these off yet. If you're working on a difficult bankside and you've already cut these off, you might have pointy edges. And if you slip, you might lose an eye. So leave those until very, very last. Hopefully you'll be able to see that they're weaved in and out of the uprights there. Now they're not perfect, but they are making a really strong structure, which looks okay. Right, that's just about level. Obviously it's higher at this end than it is at that end, but the ground drops away. So now, instead of cutting these top bits off, I'm going to bend them down and just weave them into each other to really make this structure pretty strong. Now hopefully if you've got a mind that's kind of thinking about bushcraft and survival, you'll be thinking, I could make a cracking little bed out of this. That's really what we should do for the shelter. Make something like this, just chop the bottom off, and then we've got almost like a raft that we can just put in there, keep us up off the ground, insulate us, that would work very well. Willow is a very, very good material. You can literally just tie this stuff in knots, it's awesome. Now really there's nowhere to put these middle ones, so we're just going to chop those ones off. Right, there's our little windbreak come safety fence. We've got the fireplace in. I think I'm going to make a door. for the shelter out of the remaining willow. I've just chucked the remaining stuff over the back of here for the time being and on the next visit, yeah on the next visit, I think I'll make a door. Time taken to make this was maybe 40-45 minutes so I would allow maybe an hour and a half if you have to actually source the willow. Luckily I had some lying around so I would give yourself an hour It takes an hour and a half to make that. It's approximately 3 meters long, which is about 10 foot. Bye! I think it was two feet high, which is 0.6 meters. Okay, hope you've enjoyed that. In this video, we've made the fireplace, put the fire on, made it somewhat smokeless, still had smoke, but the wood isn't very dry. It's set up like a smokeless fire, and we've put our little willow windbreak in there. Been here approximately an hour and a half today. Took about 10 minutes for the fire, and about 40 minutes for the willow. Now if you've enjoyed this video, the chances are you'll enjoy some of my other videos. So go onto my channel, scroll down, you'll see all the different playlists there. Click on one of the playlists and knock yourself out. There's loads of videos there on all sorts of topics. Thanks very much for watching. See you next time. Oh, there's a beauty of a rock. Give you some idea of scale. Oh, this baby's two foot six to three feet across. And by a good eight inches square, it's a hell of a size. But I would absolutely love that next to the fire for sitting on. So, I think I'm going to roll it all the way down there to the shelter next time. Right, so we've got all our uprights in. Now all we're going to do is put the wiggly, wiggly, wiggly ones in. But you used your hands, that's cheating, that. What, like trying to jump over? Mm-hmm. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.