The basic rule of camp craft is “if you’ve never actually done it before, you only think you know how”. This is never more true than with fire starting, and my efforts to master the bow drill aren’t even getting off the ground. I spend more time fumbling with the bow, spindle, foot piece and top piece than I do actually drilling. Compare theory with practice:
Theory: steady foot piece with left foot while kneeling. Place spindle in bow, put spindle bottom in prepared foot piece hole, put top piece on top of spindle, and begin steady back and forth motion with bow while maintaining moderate pressure on top piece. Continue until you get steady stream of smoke.
Practice: kneel down; get up again to get piece of gravel out from under knee. Repeat 2-3 times until pain is only uncomfortable instead of agonizing. Place spindle in bow; adjust too-tight string so spindle will fit properly. Adjust again now that it’s too loose. Have spindle fly out of your hand. Retrieve, try again. Restring bow after string slips off end of bow. Repeat with other end of bow. Try to place spindle again. Reach for top piece, lose grip on spindle, repeat entire spindle process. Begin drilling. Have string run up to top of spindle and jam. Start over. Have string run down to bottom of spindle and jam. Start over. Have spindle slip out of foot piece or top piece after 7-8 strokes. Start over. Keep going. Run out of breath and have arms too tired to continue just as you start to smell smoke.
Now, I am certain that if I actually had cerebral palsy I would have been diagnosed with it by now, so that can’t be it. Practice? I wish I could practice; maybe 10% of the time spent consists of actually drilling. And since “don’t be clumsy” is the most useless advice in the universe, I could use some encouragement. If you’ve ever actually gotten a bow drill to work (and they’re supposed to be the EASY way to start a fire by friction!), could you advise me on the hundred or so tiny things that instruction manuals never mention, to bridge the gap between theory and practice?
I know the material you use both the spindle and the foot piece are very important. Some types will form the dust you need quicker. I find sometimes I need to wrap the string around the spindle a couple of times to keep it from slipping and allow me to apply a little more pressure. I am not very good at it, I have only done it a few times in my life. One of the guys that attended one of our primitive bow outings was a world champion with a hand drill. It took him under 10 sec to get a fire. He talked about the importance of the right type of material as opposed to just two sticks. You can research it on line.
Are you steadying your spindle hand against your left leg? Have you lubricated the hole in the handpiece? Is the hole in the handpiece big enough? Oh, and I’m sure you know this, but make sure the spindle in its loop is on the opposite side of the string from the bow
I must admit, I’ve only ever done this (in Scouts) as half a pair, which is much easier.
Tried it once, decades ago. Failed to make fire. My dad did it though, but it took a lot of sawing away … a lot more than I thought it would. Probably because we were amateurs. Eventually, he got a small pile of powder with a glowing bit in the centre that we fed with scraps of shredded birch bark and got to burn.
It requires having the right materials, and that they all be nicely dry.
I find it difficult to believe that it would be possible to use this as an actual “wilderness survival” technique - as in, something a person dropped into the wilderness with a hatchet could make. Unless they knew exactly how to find the necessary dry, seasoned - but not rotten - materials.
Yeah, the guy from the Primitive Technology series can start a fire with a stick in about 20 seconds. Then there are the other people who can do it, but it takes them hours of cursing and blisters and cramps. Then there’s the other 99.9% of the world that can’t even do that.
No, and after I posted I thought of that, and that my spindle is probably too short. A big part of the problem is I’m so damn fat; kneeling hurts, my paunch is in the way and I can barely breath in that position. But at least I do know to get the spindle on the right side.
Seconded. And thirded, and fourthed. I can only cringe at the thought of being somewhere in the wilderness of British Columbia with just a survival knife. When it’s 35 Fahrenheit and it’s been raining for four days.
The big difference is that ferro flints produce a spark that’s above the flash point of most materials you’ll use; it can start a flame directly. Real flint on steel won’t. It takes prepared char cloth to make an ember, that can get tinder smoldering enough to blow into a flame. I’ve actually gotten pretty good at that.
You’d be surprised…
My flint and steel expertise puts me ahead of 99% of the world; I’d like to add another decimal place.
This makes me think of an imaginary Loony Tunes cartoon I once thought up: Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny as boy scouts. Daffy soaks a pile of sawdust in gasoline, adds some nitrocellulose flash powder, some napalm, some Thermite, and a 5000-volt electric starter- all of which produces a single tiny sullen puff of smoke. Bugs Bunny looks around for a moment, picks two rocks up off the ground and bangs them together; which produces a spark that instantly sets a large log ablaze. As Daffy turns incandescent with rage, Bugs remarks “See, he’s warmer already!”
My scout troop once had a competition between the patrols for who could start a fire the quickest using a firebow. My patrol eventually won, but only after we wore out three thongs and two shoelaces that boys sacrificed for the cause, and eventually just resorted to rolling the turning-piece between our hands. And you need really good tinder to make it work at all: IIRC, we used dryer lint. I’ve heard that there are some naturally-occurring fungi that work even better, but I don’t know how to find them.
The secret there is to use quite thick natural cord - in Scouts we used the standard rope we always carried on our belts for lashings - cotton sash cord.
Horse hoof bracket fungus is what you’re thinking of. The inside of the brackets is processed into a tinder called amadou, but the key word there is “processed”.
Not sure that this is the best material, but it has the virtue of being readily available, easy to get and dry.
Another fuel trick he showed me was how to get a fire going when everything is wet because it has been raining for days (not with a fire drill, alas. ).
The secret was a kind of wood taken from old apparently rotten pine stumps - they have lumps of solid wood deeply impregnated with resin. The resin is impervious to water. Shave that and it will burn no matter what conditions … only it is no good for cooking on, as its fire is incredibly oily and sooty. You use this fuel to dry out the better stuff, then burn that.
It certainly isn’t as good as the other, fungus products, but it is easier to find in the right condition when you want it … the trick is to shred it up really fine, almost into a powder.
At least in Northern Canada, where we liked to camp, it was pretty easy to find; old rotten pine stumps were common. So were weeks where it rained for days on end.
For what it’s worth: a distant relative of my wife married a military survival instriuctor, who also happened to have been on the show Survivor in an early season.
We met him at a wedding and talked about the experience. His comment was that making a fire without tools is made to look easy in TV and movies, but it’s one of the absolute hardest things to do in a real survival situation, (especially when you’re in a damp tropical jungle like Survivor).
The other contestants got pissed off at him when he couldn’t do it as easy as they’d seen it done in movies, so they voted him off.
Bottom line: you’re not alone, it’s a real challenge.
It’s also fun to think about how to make fire, without using any tools that needed fire in their making. Flint by itself won’t work-- You also need steel. Which was forged in fire. Using charcloth for your tinder? How’d you char it? A burning glass? First you had to melt the glass, and so on. You can do it with a bow or a piston, but even those are both a lot easier if you’re allowed to use fire-made tools. It’s no wonder that humans controlled fire for a long time before we were able to make it from scratch (we used to carefully carry embers with us from one fire to another, ultimately tracing back to a lucky find of lightning-started fire or some other natural source).
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