Building the Perfect Tinder Bundle

let's talk real quickly about one of the things that I see a lot of people struggle with and that is building a proper tinder bundle if we remember the fire triangle it's it's heat its fuel its air all three of those working together your tinder is where that heat actually meets the fuel taking the time to make sure that it's ready you know that that fuel that smallest most well processed finest material you have is is processed in such a way to readily accept the heat will save you a lot of time and a lot of effort going back and and you know reengage in your ignition source especially when we're talking about friction fire you're going to put some effort into that I won't say that it's that it's necessarily as hard as everyone makes it out to sound especially as you get a few reps under your belt but it does take some effort it does take some calories so what you don't want to do is is end up you know going through that amount of effort spinning those calories and get in a nice little ember from from a bow drill for example and you know have that tinder bundle not be ready to accept that little ember and create a fire if you just take a little bit of time and process this down and understand how it should be constructed for any fire I think it'll save you a lot of time and a lot of effort you know going back and redoing it it's kind of that old saying you know we don't have time to do it right but you always end up having time to do it again when we're talking about a tinder bundle we're talking about going from the most coarse material to the outside all the way into a medium to a fine to even a super fine material in the very center and the reason we do that is because we're going to apply our heat our ember whatever it is we used directly in the center at the finest material as that heat is transferred and that tinder ignites it's going to ignite and or dry out you know if you have damper moist in tinder it's going to dry out the next larger size and on and on and on until eventually you're getting into your kindling and then you're getting into your sustaining fuel so with that in mind I've got some some dry grasses which you know are kind of unique and we'll talk about those and I've got a lot of inner barks and outer barks here let's see what I've got in here this is definitely some cedar bark in here put that to the side there's some cedar this is Aspen probably a mix of Aspen's cottonwood I don't see any tulip poplar maybe a little bit tulip poplar right here anyway so I've got some some barsen what I'm talking about you know the the coarse medium fine superfine I'm not so much talking about the density of material as it comes so I'm talking about how fine you're going to process it with one exception if I'm using grasses which down here I don't have a lot of access to you know the prime inner and outer barks like you have in other areas of the country so I'm kind of limited in how much actual bark I can get as far as inner and outer bark to make my tinder bundle so I'm forced to use some dried grasses a lot of times and you would think that these would be great and they are for coarse material but what most people don't understand is is that if you've ever felt a straw bale before our next time you see a dry piece of grass you can feel that and what you'll feel is a waxy cuticle and this is something that that land plants share in common and what it does is it prevents evaporation of water they're trying to retain moisture because they're you and trying to live on land so a couple things that does it prevents moisture from from escaping as badly so it makes it retain moisture on the inside as well the other thing is because it's a wax it's a solid wax it takes a lot of heat to turn that solid wax into liquid form so that it can ignite so knowing that up front I'm never going to put the dried grass towards you know medium or the fine or superfine material it's always going to be my outer coarse material because I've got that chain going from my superfine to my fine to my medium then it finally gets out to my course by the time it gets to this I've got a lot of heat built up in that tinder bundle and it'll have no problem igniting it'll be fantastic for that now if I was using an open flame ignition source like like matches or a lighter then that's a different story you know I could just you know make a grass bundle I could directly light that no problem for today we're going to be doing a bow drill a little bit later so I'm going to kind of show you how to do it with that in mind and just build a basic basic tinder bundle so my course layer becomes my outer layer and I'm trying to build kind of a bird's nest and incidentally a real bird's nest is almost perfect for this it sometimes has some mud in it you got to knock out of it but you know I'm trying to mimic that when I'm creating my bird's nest tinder bundle and when I get done with it you know it should literally look like a bird's nest you know it should look like a bird would be happy to lay an egg in it anyway so my coarse outer layer I'm going to use my grass because it has that cuticle this kind of a selection of barks here this is not necessarily as is I could put this on the outside and it would be coarse material but there are so many big kind of chunky portions of this it hasn't been processed down this isn't ready you know it's not finally processed like I want it to be it's not ready to accept that heat readily I might get lucky but I'm not trying to be lucky I'm trying to get this right so what I can do with this stuff is you know kind of these bigger chunks here and I'm doing this on a mat for a reason you'll see why in a little bit but I'll just kind of take those and I'll start twisting and breaking those up into tiny little fibers I want this tinder to be finer than frog hair and that's that's pretty fine so I'm breaking this down breaking this down kind of shredding it up and right now I'm working on you know going from my course to my medium material so I don't have to get too awful crazy with this but I do want it to be you know what I would consider medium so after I've twisted it a little bit I'll start pulling the fibers apart make sure I don't have any big chunks in there and this is really something you should take your time with it should take you a few minutes to build a proper tinder bundle if you rush it and you know try to shortcut it then you take a chance of your ignition source not taking and having to do it all over again so I just take a little bit extra time and try to get it right from the start and as you can see I got this this session mock down and it's actually catching all this super fine material that's going off that's coming off this bundle just keep breaking it down take your time [Applause] and when we're talking about our our medium material you know we're really looking at at you know pencil-lead size or so with some exceptions there's going to be some bigger pieces in there I've got this process down pretty good to what I would consider a medium material and because this is vark and not a dried grass it doesn't have a cuticle that I have to worry about and this is going to actually burn better than the grass because it doesn't have that cuticle and I'm gonna take that this is my medium material I'm gonna take that medium material I'm gonna stick it right down in that nest on the inside with the coarse grass on the outside now what I can do is just kind of gather this material up that broke off of it just kind of lightly go over it and I can add that to the pile as well and that's got all the little tiny pieces that fell off incorporate it into it and that leaves me with some really fine like dust that's going to be really valuable so a little more aggressive with this to get those little tiny particles up and I'm going to put those right in the center but I want to gather up all these goodies - the pine needles I don't want those gather up all this dust here cuz that dust is superfine I don't want to lose that put that right in there see if I can get this to go okay good enough now the cedar bark is is unique this is an outer bark instead of an inner bark that I got with all those other ones when I'm making my my fine material you really can't beat cedar outer bark juniper same family a lot of times the same tree as well people just call them something different about Cedars universe and the tulip poplars this is the stuff that you can really get nice and fine and you can see how long I'm taking to do this I'm doing this you know deliberately I want this thing to be perfect because this isn't the part that takes effort this is leisurely and when I'm talking about processing it down find this frog here I'm going to set off a little bit to the side this is what I would consider fine material right here process pretty fine that goes to the center and I set aside just a little bit more that I can process down even further until its hair like and then with that I'm going to place that in the very center let's talk quickly while I'm scooping this up nothing different than what I was doing before well I'm scooping this stuff up let's talk quickly about size of a tinder bundle for good weather like we have today I like to make my tinder bundles the size of a miniature basketball you know a little bit larger than a softball this is a good size for a for a fair-weather like I'm having today if for some reason the weather wasn't as good as it is right now then I would want to be about twice this size almost a full basketball size that allows this time to actually dry out and heat up and last long enough to get maybe some marginal some damp some moist kindling that would be my next step after this to catch so it's important to make your tinder bundle correct so that you don't have to waste time doing it again and once you're done with it it should be it should look like a bird's nest with Superfund material in the center that's what you're going for this is going to be a good tinder bundle

Channel: The Gray Bearded Green Beret

Views: 25,699

Keywords: Ranger, Green Beret, The Pathfinder School LLC, Survival, Bushcraft, Preparedness, Fire, Tinder, Tinder Bundle, Birds Nest

Id: 4YlBq8MgipI

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2018