Fire Starting: No Matches, No Lighter - The American Frontier

[Music] we're here today we're out in the woods and we're talking about how to stay warm how to start a fire Nicholas Cresswell and so many of these other guys that are in the wilderness they have to stay warm they have to build a fire I've got Dan walk with me today he does wilderness skills instruction and we're gonna be talking about fire so tell me about fire how to make it what they would have had well they're performed method of starting fire would have been flint and steel that's the technology a would have used but before I even get to that it's very important you know the triangle of fire so the triangle of fire is heat oxygen and fuel if you have all three elements you'll have fire if you lose any one of them elements you don't have fire so it really is broken down that easily now fire is much more complicated because there's a lot of factors that go into it but it always boils back down to that triangle of fire so even when we used our Flint striker flint and steel set it's all about that triangle of fire so let's look at a flint and steel set here so flint and steel technology is it's quite simple actually it's a hardened piece of metal and a piece of flint and when you strike this it's going to create a spark so when I strike my striker off my piece of Flint we're creating spark now what a lot of people don't realize is that how this actually works is we have a hardened piece of steel but we have a harder rock so this rock is removing metal from our striker every hit so when it removes that metal its combusting in the air and that's giving us our low-temperature spark so with this alone we can't have a fire these sparks aren't just gonna just like he said we have tried it in it wouldn't you're not gonna do anything so we need a medium to create an ember and that's where either charred material of what's around us or natural char or some type of char cloth and that's what we're gonna start with first is charred cloth okay so let's look at first the technique of actually how we're gonna ignite this char cloth we want to think about our piece of Flint as a razor blade and that razor blade is removing metal from our striker so at a 45 degree angle upward is going to be most ideal and when you hit this with your piece of metal you want to think about removing that material so imagine your use his razor blade to slice that off so you don't need a lot of pressure and it's more of a slicing motion than it is a hitting motion so we're just slicing downward and the majority of those sparks are rolling over the top so at that point we would take something like our charred cloth and we place that on top of our Flint that's at a 45 degree angle and then what we can do is begin to strike this oh and you caught it right there give it a little bit of oxygen and we have a little char cloth where heat we have you know we've got oxygen but we needs a fuel really up so yep we have an ember there and now we need some fuel so that's where a bird's nest or a tinder bundle come into play so let's look at actually how we build that and then we'll reignite a piece of this and blow it to flame okay there's a multitude of different ways we can make bird's nest so starting with just tree bark we can look at inner bark from tulip poplar inner bark from bass wood even bark from a cedar tree or what I collected here earlier is some birch so all of that will work really well and it's always great to team different things up together so not only the inner bark but you can take something like some of this dry grass that we found down near the pond and then something like this cat tail which fluffs up really well it doesn't ignite too well but it's a very good ember carrier so it will extend our Ember so adding all this into a bird's nest is really well once we place our ember inside and we add oxygen and that triangle of fire we now have heat from the Ember fuel from our bird's nest and we add the oxygen and we should at that point have flame Frank so let's get let's make a bird's nest okay one thing that is very important is when you create a bird's nest you don't want to make it that it looks like a bird was sitting in it you want more depth this way front to back rather than really big so you can see I have that when that I have some thickness there so when that ember starts to burn in and has somewhere to burn into right so let me grab a little bit of this cattail and I'll put this in here just as a extender just like that now if you can give me some char cloth one thing that's always important with char cloth too is you can always make more we can always make more out in the field so if you ever think that the material is a little subpar just grab a little bit more cloth and we know it's been a little wet out here so we can take a little bit extra and then we can always make some after the fact so I'm actually gonna let you hold this okay while I ignite the charcloth same technique that we just looked at a second earlier we're gonna keep that piece of Flint at a 45 degree angle put our piece of char right on top of it and get this ignited always put your fire-making device away and now I'm gonna place that right in the middle at birds nests and I'm gonna begin to give it some oxygen now as that burns and grows larger I can start to close that in because we want to trap that heat and more and give it more fuel around itself [Music] [Music] as soon as we have flame we never want to blow an open flame and then of course turn it on itself like this yeah because that's giving it more fuel we know heat rises so we would take this and place it into inside our fire leg right and then once that's inside our fire lay we want to think about how are we gonna do this again so that's where we're gonna start to make more charred material now to make our charred material what we want to do is first get some type of tin so this is just a plain tin container we're gonna actually place this into fire once we put our material in it now if the tin doesn't have any type of vent we need to vent it somehow right if it seems like it has a hinge or anything like that it normally has enough air flow out of it that it's going to be fine okay so we just opened up our tin and we can place our material into it now material we have a bunch of different options any type of natural cotton material will work just fine we also collected some punk wood while we were out there so punk wood is just that spongy would it start in a rock but it's not totally rotted yet we just placed that inside cattail works fine also any kind of pithy plant material that's dry will work good we're gonna place this in the fire and allow it to start to cook you might see some flame and some smoke coming out of there that is just the material we place inside becoming carbon at that point so it's really important we just keep it in there long enough you can't overcook char but you can under cook it 10 minutes will probably be enough for what we have here and then we'll test it out now our char material is off the fire for a good amount of time we really want that to get to just room temperature and sense because if we open that up ahead of time we introduce oxygen and that triangle fire it will ignite into into an ember and I'll burn up and yeah so we don't want that to happen so we have to let this cool a good rule of thumb is if you can handle it and hold it it's fine so we open that up and we look everything has been charred from our punk wood to our cloth and we are ready then to make our next fire and if it doesn't get all burnt up properly then you can just put it back in the fire and just char it a little bit more so it's not rocket science it's just very simple so it looks brown or there's any color left in the material put it back in and let it cook a little bit more okay so you mentioned earlier if we lost our flint and steel we don't have it what are our other options I've got a flintlock here so flintlock is flint and steel technology right so we can use the char cloth right in place of where the powder to be of course you want to make sure that your guns are loaded right but we could just take a swatch of this place it right down there in the pan yeah we close it and then we can just ahead set it off and shoot ignite here we go our cloth there you go it's it ignited and we can just take that right out and put it into our bird's nest yep and that would be it so I mean it's a very simple process and there's multiple ways to do it right and we don't have to have an extra piece of equipment no we can just do it right there no I want to thank Dan for bringing all this great information about fire fires it's one of the most important parts about surviving in the in the woods and these in these outdoor environments we have to stay warm we have to cook so this is really the important stuff we got to know how to do this thank you Dan for bringing all this great information if you're interested in learning more about surviving in the woods in the wilderness and all those kinds of things you'll definitely want to check out Dan's YouTube channel and his wilderness school tell us just a few seconds about that yeah the Appalachian Bushman school we're located in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Pennsylvania you could check us out a coal cracker bushcraft comm for all our classes and everything in between we'll make sure to put a link down in the description section and if you're looking for fire starting materials you need a flint and steel because you do make sure to check out the link we'll have to our website with all sorts of fire starting equipment thanks for joining us today [Music] you

Channel: Townsends

Views: 610,625

Rating: 4.9609289 out of 5

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, flint and steel, survival skills, primitive skills, primitive fire, wilderness survival, bug out bag, survival gear, fire starting, survival tips, survival guide, bush craft, make fire, char cloth, how to make a flint and steel fire, fire striker, how to start a fire, how to, fire without a lighter, how to start a fire without matches

Id: qjV_lRjn_eI

Length: 9min 37sec (577 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018