13 Ways to Start a Fire (No Matches or Lighter) - Fire Starting Techniques.

[Music] hey Luke here at the outdoor boys YouTube channel today I'm going to show you all the different ways I know to start a fire without matches now some of these methods are more primitive technologies survivalist style and others are more MacGyver style but all of these methods are fun and while I don't claim to be a master of all these methods I think you're gonna learn something new and you're definitely gonna have a good time okay the first method I'm gonna show you is my favorite it is so simple and it's awesome all you need is a cotton ball a little bit of leftover soot or ash and cement will grease and we're gonna make this thing burn I'm going to unwind the cotton ball just like that okay I'm taking a little bit of this ash and I'm gonna sprinkle it right down in here and roll it like a burrito as tightly as I can I'm gonna fold over the edges so it can't come out the sides I'm going to take about half the cotton ball maybe three quarters of the cotton ball and then just tear it off okay and then I'm going to take this other piece of 2x4 and we're gonna shape it just do this three or four times until it's formed enough that it doesn't unravel when you roll it the other direction now I'm gonna sandwich it between the two two by fours I'm gonna start rolling [Music] to tell you see smoke see ya hold it long boys like this it encourages the Ember to grow then there you go how cool is that so I've been trying this method on and off for the last six months and doing it with cotton balls is pretty easy I got it on like the third try with cotton balls doing it with paper towels or toilet paper it's possible I've seen other people do it but it's much more difficult whenever you're trying to make a fire from an ember you need something that's really highly flammable that you can put that Ember inside and it'll burst into flames okay jute works really well and you can unravel it and make it into a nest but I'm a dirty cheater and I like to do it it is ready to go you put an ember in that and that'll burst into flames there you go now I'm gonna show you a method on how to accidentally start a fire without matches now you'll notice behind me I have all these axes I like to polish them and preserve them with linseed oil just this basic boiled linseed oil that you get at most hardware stores and if you read the back of the label carefully it'll tell you to never leave oil-soaked rags laying about because they can spontaneously combust apparently what happens is when you soak around or a paper towel in linseed oil and expose it to air the chemical reaction occurs something called a polymerization or something like that and it gives off heat and that heat gets more and more and more until it bursts into flame and we're gonna see if we can make that happen without burning our house down alright got this whole kitchen towel here we're gonna get this thing smokin polish my spear just put a hole in the ceiling you know what this experiment needs more linseed oil now if you want to see me making all these Spears and axes definitely check out our playlist we have forging playlist and axe restoration playlist alright guys it's a cold windy day here we're gonna take all these oily rags put them in this cardboard box and sit up on the forge and see what happens it's been two hours 47 minutes since I put the rags in this box and it's starting to smoke actually look at that the smoke coming out I'm just gonna leave that here and we'll just see what happens well we're just past the three-hour mark and there's a lot of smoke coming out of that box so you can smell burning oil so we'll see we might have flames any moment now there we go guys 4 hours 25 minutes this thing lit up like a candle ooop starting to melt my GoPro and that is why you have to be really careful how you store and dispose of oily rags there's a lot of fun ways to start fires with batteries and hopefully I'm about to show you something you haven't seen before alright guys here's a classic steel wall in a 9-volt battery just put it like that there you go if you try doing this with any of the other standard type batteries they won't ignite the steel wool unless you take multiple batteries usually about three or more put an end end and then they'll light the steel wall next I'm going to show you the fire piston the fire piston ignites a fire by super compressing air when you compress air suddenly and violently it heats up to the point where you can ignite an ember you can see here this part slides in there and it makes a really tight seal in the tip of the piston is a little bit of char cloth char cloth is just charred cloth you take some of this stuff you burned it up make it into charcoal the hardest part about the fire piston is getting the ember from here into your tinder and getting it to a flame it's a very very delicate Ember [Music] there we go mmm now you can make these fire pistons out of wood there's lots of videos online on how to do that or you can buy them this one was made by a company called boosts cook I'm not sure how practical of the tool this is but it sure is a load of fun let me show you one of my favorite ways to start a fire now if you're in the woods in a survival situation you find this very specific type of tree look down into the root system and find where I've stashed a bottle of potassium manganate and glycerin and you can use this to start an amazing fire now potassium manganate is a very harsh oxidizer you can find in most hardware stores it's used for water filtration systems and glycerin is a common ingredient in homemade soaps and shampoos and things like that if you mix the two together you'll get fire now if you don't have glycerin apparently you can use sugar too but the results are not as good all right guys classic flint and steel here another great way to start a fire with flint and steel there's a couple things that work really well you got cotton balls they got steel wool and CEO the three the Juke probably burns the best now we've got three different types of flint and steel so first off this is the blast match you go and you put the steel on to the Ferro rod like that and works absolutely great and then you've got the kind with the magnesium strips here get it up into a little lie in there there you go now I've been a lot of you guys are wondering what happens if you ignite the entire magnesium bar one of the more challenging primitive fire building techniques is the fire plough method absolutely the bone-dry Deadwood you can't have any green wood you can't be wet at all so you can see I took the pocket knife and Whittle this down to a bit of an edge there make a little groove to run that rub the stick up and down so once you get a good groove going you need to find a spot to put your jute [Music] [Music] over the years I've tried this method a half-dozen times and I've come close I can always get smoke but getting an ember giving a number that's worth the darn is hard and it really is an upper-body workout but all you need is a pocket knife and the couple pieces of dry wood to give it a go so definitely give it a try it's a challenge all right I'm gonna show you another primitive fire-making technique the fire saw this is one that you use with bamboo and I just so happens and I have a 20 foot long piece of bamboo from another video I did get a long piece of bamboo and you want it long so that you can go and put your leg on then you take some of your they're tender or jute you slide it under there you want it to be packed up in there so that it's touching the top you're gonna start sawing you just we go nice and easy just kind of groove once you feel like you got good groove then you start having pressure [Applause] [Music] for years in making YouTube videos has not prepared me physically for this we can see it burned the tinder really well almost made a amber came darn close to igniting it but my arms are just toasted oh the Firefly method in this just ruined me today there's another technique for the fire saw that's a little bit easier for the back you take some shorter pieces of bamboo like this and you get a jacket or something to act as a pad and you lean against a board a tree trunk whatever you can then what you do is you take your tinder you put it right in there hold it down with your thumbs and then start working it oops you see I can char it and do a lot of songs but I'm not getting a good ember okay so this fire starting technique is kind of cool it was used by ancient Japanese sword smiths to start their forged fires you take a cold piece of steel or wrought iron and you would beat it until it turns red hot [Music] oh I'm really getting a workout today it takes a fair amount of pounding and you really need a high-quality anvil I do not have a high-quality anvil and I have put this massive dent in my anvil right there it just is horrible but there you go that's how you start a fire with a hammer and a piece of steel another great method of building fire is to harness the power of the Sun we've all used magnifying glasses to burn leaves and ants and that sort of thing and if you go online there's tons of videos about people using ice or bags of water or even polishing the bottom of aluminum can to focus the energy of the Sun and build a fire unfortunately I picked the absolute worst time of year to do this part of the video because it's the dead of winter and we haven't had a sunny day in weeks but I'm going to show you one method that you might not have seen that's pretty cool you unscrew the flashlight and pull out the reflector take a piece of the charcloth watt it up and you're gonna put it in there then you're gonna tilt the reflector until the sun's rays are focused on the charcloth go get it burning get an ember going and then you'll dump it in to your tinder probably the most well-known method of starting fire without matches is the spindle and board method I've got this little store by spindle and Borden kit here just to kind of demonstrate for you and it's got this bamboo bow here with the the rope wrapped around it and it's even kind of ball bearings and a little handle here and you hold this see this is the trick when you get smoke coming from your ash pile that's when you know you've got it there you go all right we're gonna try to find some wood and do the spindle method for real for the spindle you need something long straight not too many knots it needs to be bone dry and it needs to be the right diameter I tend to like to get something a little bit thicker than I want and then take my knife and Whittle it down you're looking for something that's a softer wood like spruce or pine or even some of the types of reeds you can use if you're going to be doing the bow method you can get away with about five six inches of spindle if you're doing the hand method you really need 18 to 24 inches of spindle all right I got a little piece of wood in the drill we're going to do a test piece and see if we can get an ember we can't get a number with the drill not could get an ember by hand all right so we made fire with the drill we know it can be done all right we're gonna take the thicker pieces and cut them into boards now only I had an axe aha all right there we go there's a board all right there's a spindle looks good really straight gonna make another spindle here a little bit slimmer a little bit shorter but very straight so I took a piece of green sapling and strung some paracord between it for a bow and I took this little chunk of wood and burnt a depression into it to make a handle and we're gonna see if we can't do the bow and spindle method [Laughter] I've been at this for three hours I've been getting tons of smoke I've burned a lot of holes that's all I got left of my spindle and my arms are jelly so I think I'm gonna call it if you want to learn how to make fire in the woods with just a pocketknife in your bare hands learn to do the spindle method without the boat just using your hand put your thumbs on the top of the spindle go like this all the way down put lots of downward pressure then reset your hands and repeat you want a really long smooth spindle it's got not today it'll to up your hands if it's not long enough you'll have to reset too often I spent two weeks in law school just doing this over and over again with all sorts of different types of wood to try to do this and after two weeks while doing it in my living room I succeeded and burned a hole in the carpet my wife never lets me forget that but what I learned is that when you have the right type of wood and the right technique in the right conditions it happens very fast you only have to reset about six to 12 times before you get an ember it happens quickly if you don't have everything just right you can do this till the Sun sets and you will never get it so it's all about technique and which materials you use not brute force there's always something new to learn and I've just recently discovered a new method I was done videoing almost done editing this video and I saw something online that was really cool there's something called the Rope liner and it's an old-timey liner that uses cotton rope it's basically just a flint and steel and a rope dispenser and you CH are a little bit of cotton rope and then flick some sparks onto it and it creates an ember on the tip of this rope and you can store it and use it to light things and then when you're done you can go and cap the rope snuff out the Ember and store it in your pocket apparently it was used in like World War one and by sailors and anyway it was super cool and maybe I'll go and buy one of these I just found some on eBay and show them to you guys in some future videos but just wanted to throw that out there well I hope you really enjoyed this video I sure had a ball making it not all of these methods are super practical but they're all a lot of fun so thanks for watching and don't forget to click subscribe we put out new videos every Saturday morning if you like this video don't forget to check out the outdoor boys YouTube channel where we have hundreds of videos just like this and don't forget to click subscribe so you can see other great videos every Saturday morning and hit that Bell button so you'll get notifications thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Outdoor Boys

Views: 2,313,486

Rating: 4.8501291 out of 5

Keywords: How to start a fire, how to build a fire, fire, survival fire, fire building, fire starting, Fire starting without matches or lighter, Fire starting techniques, Fire roll, flint and steel, fire plow, fire saw, friction fire, potassium manganate, fire piston, How to start a fire with a fire piston, how to start a fire with flint and steel, How to start a fire with potassium manganate, how to start a fire with a battery, how to start a fire with flashlight

Id: X3-Tpf1KPSs

Length: 20min 39sec (1239 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019