Fire Making with Pump Drill

ok today we're going to demonstrate how to make fire using the pump girl the pump girl is a pretty clever device that goes back at least to the time of the Phoenicians possibly earlier was also used in Rome and in India seems like wherever it was introduced and spread pretty fast including in the Americas so the way this works is you have a spindle with a counterweight on the bottom counterweight keep some momentum going to keep this thing rewinding itself what happens is the spindle just rotate it like that that causes the rope to wind around the spindle now when you push down on this it's pulling on each one of these ropes on either side of the spindle and that causes the spin a little rotate so as you push down you get the rotation and it rewinds the string as you can see right there that's basically it it's a simple machine but the guy who invented this was pretty clever really this can be used for fire making it can be use for drilling holes and all sorts of materials by putting the stone bit on the end of this thing it's even used today by some jewelers especially in other countries and stuff where you don't really need power in order to drill things ok Radia makes them fire with a pump drill better fire board all ready to go you see so I've got a burn in a little bit there and get the notch cut take our spindle put it down into the hole first thing you want to make sure that your handles level if it's cocked to one side or the other when you're operating the drill it'll rub on the hole and the handle here and that will not create extra friction next thing you want to do is make sure that your spindle is centered in that hole that's important and it usually will be to hit this level okay then you want to whine your spindle you can do it like this or you can just take the handle which is what I usually do and spin it like that one make sure it's fully wound all the way to the top like that when you start out so you get a good rotational speed going down on your first bump to keep it going and we're ready to go there you want to make sure you don't get too sloppy on your upstroke so your strength-wise properly picking up some drag now - pretty sure word and close to an ember okay I think we got it now you don't get a nice hamburger Yury now I'm using a Juniper Burke mark birds nest and I've got a little bit of a cat tail down in there will drop gamer down in there I get it to release here stick into the this piece of work here all right we've got it in there I'll just blow this thing into flame her all right and we have flame disassembled the hand pump just four components you've got it handled you've got a rope we've got a counterweight and a spindle using sandstone here for my counterweight or my flywheel a lot of people use wood that's fine I prefer the stone because it's heavier and it keeps your drill spinning a lot better you drill a hole in the middle of it you want to make sure the hole is just a little bit larger than the upper end of your spindle the upper in your spindle fits in like this and then it's a pressed pick you need a pretty good tight press fit otherwise your stone or your flywheel can spin around on the show it's important to have your kind of way down toward the bottom of your spindle that puts a lot more stability in the system for the handle I'm using a piece of bamboo you can use any type of wood you want the bamboo is nice and light fits the handle really comfortably essentially you just drill a hole right smack in the middle of it make sure it's larger than the diameter of your spindle so that it'll fit in there like that next thing is put your handle over your spindle you've got your rope tie it onto one end of the handle you've got a little hole over here in the very top of your spindle it just goes through there you can also just put a notch in there if you wanted or a groove it doesn't really matter I prefer a hole because it doesn't come out very easily just put your rope through the other end your handle here and then in order to adjust the amount of slack you lift that up you want to make sure your hands have plenty of clearance here at the bottom of the stroke so not like that you can tie a knot the bottom however you want to secure it doesn't really matter and once it's secure basically that's it you're ready to go just wind it up and start pumping now it's important when you're operating this and you keep a good steady stroke like that and you want to not be sloppy in the upstroke because if you are I'll demonstrate here you can see how whines itself in correctly and then it's gonna kind of pop on the way down so you don't want - the other thing is to make sure that your handle is fairly wide you don't want a very short narrow handle you need that that with there in order to create those pointing forces on the shaft if it's too narrow you won't get as much and it's just not going to operate very efficiently so what you want here is basically an equilateral triangle mine's probably a little bit short here I should probably have a little bit wider this about right it's pretty close to right one final comment about the pump drill it's a pretty efficient machine it doesn't require much physical effort so if you've got kids or your wife or somebody and you want them to actually it's what it's like to make fire I recommend the pump drills it's definitely the easiest way there is to make fire it's a lot easier than the even the bullet drill which is probably the next easiest way one of the things you can do if you've got small children and you're trying to have them operate this you can put a smaller flywheel on here that makes it a little bit easier to push down on they keep it going you can make fire with this as well I've done it this way is about a half a pound this one here weighs about pound and a half just to give you some idea what we're dealing with here now you want to size your pump girl according to its intended use if you're going to be using this like a jeweler wood or something for tiny little objects you could have a really really tiny little pump girl if you're going to be drilling large holes and wood or bone or whatever you might want wanting a little bit larger than this for fire making this is working really good for me you don't really need to go any bigger than this so I'm going to do another video here in the near future and I'm going to show how to make one of these things and we'll put some stone tips on the end of it and we'll test it out see how girls do would some other materials so give the pump girl a try it's a lot of fun and let me know how it works for you if you have any questions just put a comment down at the bottom of the video thanks for watching

Channel: paleomanjim

Views: 492,879

Rating: 4.9021044 out of 5

Keywords: Fire Making, Pump Drill, hand drill, bow drill, paleoplanet, tinder bundle, birds nest, fire plow, bamboo fire saw

Id: c6wRLJWfjFw

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Tue May 06 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/paidinboredom]

I have a question about wood on wood firestarting methods. I had heard somewhere that if you put sand on the hearthboard that it helps get an ember quicker due to the added friction. Is this true or a load of crap?

[u/hazeleyedwolff]

Definitely a cool machine, but I'm not sure how practical for survival. I'm not packing a stone with a hole drilled in it when there are so many fire creation tools that are much more convenient, and I don't think I could create one in the field unless I had some sort of primitive drill, leaving me with a chicken/egg scenario.

[u/RKRagan]

Now that was pretty cool. Makes that method of fire starting so much easier it seems.