Fire Kit Perfection JMHO

[Music] [Music] morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury what's up reliance Outfitters and the Pathfinder school what I wanted to do today was talk real quick about fire kits fire kits are something I see posted all over the internet I see them posted to social media to Instagram to YouTube everybody's got a video on their version or pictures of their version of a fire kit and lots and lots of them are overly complicated without taking into consideration how useful that kit can be if it is compartmentalized correctly I want to show you a solution to that today and show you my idea of the perfect longer-term fire kit and there's something to be said for long term versus short term when it comes to fire kits as well okay how are you going to store your fire kit well you could do lots of things with that you could put a container inside of a backpack or you can get some kind of a compartmentalized container or bag that holds nothing but your fire kit in this case I've chosen this telecon E&E pouch for no other reason really then the fact that it fits the container that I'm using for my fire kit very very well and it leaves a little bit of room inside for a small hand saw as well as an sak folding knife so all of that fits very easily into this pouch now there's some extra pockets and things in this pouch that you could use but I've chose to keep it as simple as possible and giving myself an option for a saw as well as a small sak gives me options to process tinder materials within this one kit so it's kind of an all-encompassing kit as far as fire goes now we'll set that stuff aside this is a French mess kit it's made of aluminum no I don't plan on cooking in this everyday I don't plan on boiling water in this container everyday or these containers everyday let's face it I'm not a lab rat aluminum's not going to hurt me in the short term I've eaten out of aluminum and drank from aluminum my entire life Donny however in emergency if I needed to I could boy water in these aluminum containers okay so let's talk about the beauty of a box like this for a kit first of all you have a metal container obviously you have something that contains your fire kit that you can also use to disinfect groundwater resources or cook food in an emergency situation this kit is really nice because this handle folds over and locks the kit in place but it also works as a standalone pan for cooking and as far as boiling water goes obviously something that is shallower and larger is going to boil water faster than something that's deeper and smaller in diameter because of the surface area the fire can actually get to on the bottom of the container this container actually is three containers in one it has the outer shell and it also has an inner that has the same type folding handle on it and then it has a bottom shell so you've got three metal components to this you can also easily use this to make charred material by putting the material in here folding it over and place it in a bed of coals to make charred material now the advantage of having a large container like this is that instead of having a small Altoids tend to put a couple pieces of cotton in or four small pieces of punk wood I can jam this thing full of large pieces of pumpkin wood out of the forest lock this thing down it's gonna have enough air space in it for gas to escape with no holes and I can take the cordage off of this which is just on there the Lark said throw this thing in a bed of coals and cook up large amounts of material for my next fire mentality the more of that material I have the less sparing I have to be with it if I have a marginal tinder bundle instead of having to pick and choose from a small little ember that I've got in my outdoor woods ten I can have something this long that's actually an ember in that container to pull out and put into a marginal bird nest okay so what are the nuts and bolts of this fire kit that fits into this small container in this container you can see by my hand here it's probably about six inches by maybe four inches something like that is a size of inner container again it's got a holding handle here that you can use it as a standalone pot if you want to what have I got inside this kit I try to keep things very very simple I have a piece of fat wood in here this is my wet weather fire-starting option with either my Ferro rod or with a cigarette lighter it doesn't matter both of them will ignite this all I have to do is make shavings off of it and I have two things in that bag that are able to do that because I have the spine of that silky saw which will also strike a ferrocerium rod and I have the saw blade backside of the saw blade of that multi-tool which will do the same thing but the silky saw is very effective or useless that you can leave it in the sheath fold it over just like this and straight shavings just like this so it works really really well and you can get some large shavings off of that thing very very easily to get yourself an open flame okay moving on with this fire kit again thinking about simplicity but also thinking a longer term I'm going to try to char as much natural material as I can throughout the process but if for some reason I can't or I can't find any Punk would I do keep some materials in here that are charl I keep a small piece of cotton cloth in here heavy-duty cotton cloth and I keep a piece of lamp wick and the lamp wick can be charred on the end ahead of time with your cigarette lighter and then be struck with flint and steel to give you a live ember so that's just an extra bonus that doesn't take up a lot of room it's not really expensive and it gives you another option for a live ember I see lots of guys that have lots and lots of stuff in these fire kits that really doesn't make a lot of sense to me something that's Chara Balai this can be ignited with the fair cerium rod with a lighter or with a magnifying glass from the Sun and even if your lighter is spent and it will still spark you can ignite something like this so these things are more important to me that a lot of other gimmicky fire starting devices that require open flame or heavy-duty strike from a Ferro rod to get them to operate I always keep some semblance of a tinder bundle in there if it's just unprocessed tulip poplar bark that I've picked up off the ground it usually whatever I didn't use in my prior birdnest I throw that in here to keep it dry so that I have it all right Casa mentality I went to the woods the last two days looking for mushrooms didn't find any mushrooms that sucks but I found loads and loads of bark tenders possum mentality says pick it up take it back let it dry out in your shed then put it in your kit so that you can use it when you need it okay once we get past that I have a small piece of fuel line tubing that you can pick up in any auto parts store and a piece of scrap copper tubing and you can pick this up at almost any hardware store they'll probably give it to you you could probably get both of these for free to be honest with you what this gives you is a way to blow on a number in the morning in a fire to get a fire going again it also gives you the ability to control the burn of an ember if you're making a spoon or a bowl or something like that but really the most effective reason for carrying this or the passion for carrying something like this comes from that morning fire when you're down to embers you've slept really well and you haven't fed your fire all night and now you need to start another fire remembers concentrating the oxygen level or constrain the airflow to one spot will allow you to do that very very quickly okay let's talk ignition sources three ignition sources I always carry no matter what even the smallest of fire kits I have a bit lighter wrapped in duct tape that gives me an instant flame plus something I can stand the flame with if I want to watch some that duct tape into a tinder bundle that's a little bit marginal and light it on fire as well protip ferrocerium rod this is a fairly small one I would generally carry a larger ferrocerium rod in a kit but I feel confident enough with this kit and all the ignition sources that I have that a little bit smaller rods okay I have a lot of experience with this more if nev rod and i know that it works well it's soft which allows me to remove maximum material all right let's face it guys the object of the game is to get the most hot ember material into our tinder bundle that we can the softer this rod is the more material we can remove very easily to get lots of lots of sparks where we need them those afterburners are what you're after okay that's what you want you want that stuff to be burning on the taste almost got the table on fire with my fault the third item that I always carry for ignition there's a magnification lens of some sort now you can have this on your compass I profess that in the 10 C's from multi-functionality to make sure that your compass has a magnifying glass on it that is capable of igniting charred material however a larger magnifying glass with more surface area something that is convex on both sides is going to collect more light it doesn't necessarily mean that's more powerful it doesn't need to be very powerful to be able to collect enough light it just needs to be larger something like this is a good ad this is nothing more than the bottom off of a pair of cheap binoculars from a yard sale so I got two of these for a quarter three dad this is a fishing hook tin right off Amazon with fish hooks in it at some point or another and I just saved a 10 I'm like dad I keep everything okay last thing flint and steel this is the self-reliance Outfitters edition or the Pathfinder edition of a fire steel very much like the SE fire steel some of the other fire Steel's that are out there they have a bow drill socket built into them so that it makes it easier for you to make a primitive type friction fire by bow drill and don't kid yourself one of the most difficult portions of making the bow drill set is the socket itself the bearing block it burns out faster and shoulders out on your spindle faster making it more difficult for you to be able to operate that bow and you can't conserve your energy that way and concentrate your efforts on downward pressure where it needs to be on that hearth board something like this will allow you to do that it's also made to be a twin striker or just fine okay why do I carry this flint striker when I profess that your knife should be carbon steel and you should be able to drive sparks off the back of that knife with a rock because that is an absolute emergency scenario I'm not banging rocks off the back of my knife every single day and destroying the back of my knife that is an emergency scenario for practice for flint and steel for teaching students for using this as a bearing block to practice bow drill fires this is much more simple to carry it's much more effective it's very simple to use the curvature makes it ride on the stone very well to throw good sparks and it has a 90-degree edge on it as well so it will strike a ferrocerium rod now well I'm not a huge fan of this pocket boy saw in and of the fact that it's fairly small and there like a bigger soften in the process firewood for something right around camp or in emergency you know it's got about a six-inch blade length on it so you can cut down plenty of saplings and dead standing and things like that you need to process for firewood easy enough and the fact that it has a good sharp 90-degree spine on it that allows it to strike a ferrocerium rod or process material makes it a bonus tool to have it any fire kit okay the last couple of things in this little tin I do have a dedicated chart in within these tins why more for storage than anything else yes it does have a hole poked in it yes it has been in the fire yes it can be used to make charred material but it's a very good place to store charred material so that it's not laying loose inside of here getting banged around and destroyed and then one more piece of cotton material at the bottom doesn't take up any room doesn't hurt anything to have it in there okay all of these things and this is a lot of material for starting fire don't kid yourself if you can't start a fire with all this no matter how much stuff you carry it's not going to make much of a difference you just need to get skilled in a few different fire starting methods and you'll be fine all this stuff stores in here fairly well takes a little bit of organizational skills which I'm not real good at sometimes to be perfectly honest with you and I'm not very patient on top of that but all of this needs to be below the level line at the top of this container when you're done because if it's not the container is not going to shut correctly so I've made a mess of things it's okay it all fits it's just a matter of making it work this hose seems to be the most difficult part to get in there to stay flat so I'm gonna put it in before hand this time and kind of tuck things in it around that that's possible see if we can get this lighter tucked in there somewhere flat then we can water lamp-wick up put it in here as well just like this doesn't matter I need tiny that really is and then this cotton cloth obviously is flat squeeze things down fold our handle over see we're out as long as that handle folds flat on there you're not gonna have a problem still got a juicy tender right there you're gonna want to put this I'm sorry inside of this and again it has to lay flat this handle has to lay flat so that this can close completely over and this handle can come over and trap that catch right there okay pretty close pretty close not gonna be a problem when we put this thing inside this kit tuck our saw in there just like that on the side close up E&E pouch up from Helicon and again this could be any pouch that this fits in it just happens to work well in this patch okay so where did I come up with this whole deal at well here's the deal sometimes you have to just find things by accident and some of that comes to just trying different pieces of gear for different things and that's why we accumulate so much stuff and then we pare it down to the things that we use every day and then we can whittle our kit down but you have to take the time to figure out what works best for you and I saw these Frenchmen best kids at a survival show in Paris they were two for 11 pounds and one of the dealers within that show and I looked at that box and I said man that's got fire kit written all over it and I picked up two of those when I got home I just happened to find out from one of my facebook subscribers or one of the people on one of my groups on Facebook that that tin fit perfectly into the EAD pouch by Helicon and I just happen to have that pouch here at the house so I checked it out there was a little room left over I thought hey be really nice to have a saw in there be really nice to have a multi-tool in there a small knife of some sort let me add those to the kit and then you come up with something that is an improvement over what you might have that may still not be the perfect thing because everything takes time and it's going to take you a long time to figure out what the perfect kit is for you but for now as far as the long-term as far as teaching goes and having students understand the different components of a good fire kit for me this is almost perfect alright guys well I appreciate you joining me today for this quick video I don't know how quick it really was but for this video on a good base camp or a longer-term tight fire kit I appreciate your views and I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for my school for my business self-reliance Outfitters I'm for my family for all my instructors affiliates all of my sponsors and all my friends do me a favor go click that subscribe button click that notification bell so that every time I put a new video up you get a notification and we can keep on putting out information keep on learning together and spreading the wealth of survival and bushcraft knowledge I'll see you on the next video guys

Channel: David Canterbury

Views: 131,262

Rating: 4.9343405 out of 5

Keywords: Bushcraft, Survival, David Canterbury, Dave Canterbury, Pathfinder, The Pathfinder School, Archery, Hunting, Fishing, Camping, Primitive Skills, Fire, Water, Shelter, Navigation, First Aid, Search and Rescue, Signaling, Prepper, Preparedness, Self Reliance, Survivability, The 10 C's, Knives, Axes, Saws, Bow Drill, Ferrocerium Rod, Ferro Rod, Tarp, Hammock, Canteen, Cooking, Longhunter, Trapping

Id: y2HNDFOHv5k

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 17 2019