Flint and Steel Char Cloth Tin - Does It Really Need a Hole?

in this video we're going to talk about making char and char cloth and we're going to test out a popular notion that you have to poke a hole in your tin before you can properly make char okay well folks welcome back to survival on purpose thanks for stopping by my name is Brian and today's video like I said it's going to be a little bit about charm material and making charm material and there's a very popular I guess the prevailing wisdom is that you've got to poke a hole in your chart in to allow this the gases that are created during the charting process to escape so I've got a couple of Altoids tenth and you Altoids tens here actually got a big candy tin which by the way this candy rocks if you can get some of this that's just and then I've got some some denim pieces of blue gene I'll explain why about that a minute and got a little stove here and the reason I'm using the stove in the denim is out to be as scientific as possible you know if it's other stuff in the fire there may be a difference in temperatures there may be a difference in whatever you know that then if you use char material and by the way we back up for a second typically I'm not going to use char cloth unless it's a last resort I think I get a lot better results from like using punk wood maybe some fungus cattails um fluff anything like then more natural materials I really like using those for char if I'm going to use char it just seems to be easier and have a more mass to it so you can actually have a larger spark and larger to a larger ember but I'm using this I'm going to cut these squares up I have an old piece of blue jean and I'm actually using these for control because that way there's no variation in the moisture content or anything if you're using natural material there may be variations in a lot of stuff so you won't get a true accurate comparison because what I want to do is want to poke a hole in one and we're going to leave one without a hole and we're going to put you know the same amount of these these come from the same pair of jeans so should be shapes should be real similar in composition I also want to talk about you see and i'll toys 10 well it's got hinges okay so i'm thinking these hinges may be enough of an opening to allow the gas to escape you may not have to cut pop a hole if you're using an Altoids 10 which is probably one of the most popular popular things to make char in in case you've never really dealt with char before real briefly what char is especially like you're making charcoal you want to get the whatever you put in here you want to get a hot enough to almost combust but you but by depriving it of oxygen because as you may or may not know for fire you got up three things you got to have fuel got of heat kind of oxygen so it's going to be the fuel the heats going to be supplied by the stove but what we're going to do is we're going to the private of oxygen by keeping it in a container and that's going to allow it to basically carbonize and turn into charcoal and charcoal will catch this flame a spark very easily and just glow and not burning or not burst into flame the prevailing wisdom again is when you do this whatever is not left it escapes as gas so typically when poke a hole to allow the gas to escape if you ever made this you can actually see a little smoke coming out of hole so I my thinking is which and I've not done this so we're going to learn together here is probably these little hinges are going to make enough of a gap we're going to do one of the hole one without a hole and then the other 10 we've got right here you see there's no hinges here it's just a pretty sealed 10 so let's try this one with no hole and just just to compare it's not going to be a strict comparison because it's a larger container but but that's about as scientific as I can make it and once all we do is we'll start with the one with a hole and see how long it takes it to to char the material and then we use that for control and do the other ones the same length of time because I know this works I've done it plenty of times but we don't I don't know about the no holes so let me get this set up and switch the camera down here we'll get started okay so the first thing we want to do is to make a hole in the south towards 10 and just going to use the gerber bear grylls survival knife if you've seen my review of this this is actually my go-to knife right now because I'm doing a long term test to see if this thing this is big a piece of junk as everybody says it is so far I'll tell you it's doing just fine so we're going to continue to do that and just to see how well it works sometimes if you just tried in the corner if you just pop down on it you want it with a dent but this knife sharp enough so we get a little hole here so we got a little hole not a big hole just a tiny little hole right there that should be enough to let the gas out and Gerber knife is still fine didn't break the tip so it's not made out of you know really really crappy steel or anything let's get started we're going to put I'm not sure how many how many of these pieces of denim I've got but obviously they're not exactly equal size I didn't weigh America you know cut them on a on a ruler I just kind of eyeball it but we're going to get as close as we can close enough for government works they used to say so we're going to put five pieces of char cloth in there not sure how long it's going to take to char that it's a pretty good bit of material actually but we'll see close it up get our stove here and again I'm using the stove just so we can maintain a very equal kind of temperature and we don't have to have any variables of the fire all right okay we can put it on right now and start the time I want to point out here now you can see flame gas coming out of the little hole it's also coming out the back back here where the hinges are which is I don't get my finger if you see my finger here and over here so in pay plus the paint's burning off a little bit but it seems like those hinges are doing a pretty good job of venting the gas so we'll find out on the next one okay well I just stopped my I screwed up and stopped my timer but it's been about 16 minutes we're going to turn this off and remove this from the heat and let it cool off before we open it up and we'll take a look at it in just a minute okay this thing's cool now just take a look and see what we got all right so we've got some char here and let's try it and see if it'll catch a spark before we go any further this experiment I don't have a piece of Flint I got a piece of quartz that's what I can find around here not a lot of Flint in Georgia I'm going to pull one of these out of here I kind of like the denim because it's a little heavier it's not as maybe it's fragile but it's still this looks like it's charred pretty well so the experts tell you to do it like this so you hold this on top and then strike find a sharp edge and try to throw a spark up up onto it so the turned over where it's kind of not molding let's try that if I doesn't work I just try to put it down vertically I'm doing this out of the camera range so I'm sorry let's try this way right here stop the old-school way I got one on there and you can see that yeah you can see it sure so we know this works and you can see the piece of denim is just got a little more heft to it and so it's going to hold its park a lot longer hold that Ember a lot longer and so piece of cords you can't find any Flint on a piece of quartz works really well okay so the next we're going to try the Altoids tin without without the hole in it okay so we've got five pieces of denim put them in the box here go ahead and get this thing started okay I'm just going to use a match this time because I've already put my Ferro rod back up and I don't want to fool with it alright so you see there are no holes on top of this one I think the hinges are going to function just as well though so set that on there my battery's dead we can give it a about 1516 minutes you've got to trust me on that I'm going to policy us I'm sure you don't want to watch 15 minutes of this okay so as you can see looks to me like the hinges are venting smoking gas pretty well it's coming out these hands area here you can see that so you can get a little close-up on it all right give it a few more minutes okay so we've got the got the other Altoids tin off and set to cool set about 15 minutes on there I'm going to take this pan now with no hinge and then put five pieces of denim inside here we'll have a flat like the other one's got a lot more air understand put it on there like so crank up the old stove and we're gonna put this on there for 15 minutes and see what happens so there's no hole and this when the lid fits reasonably tight see how it goes still kind of warm we'll leave that one alone for a minute okay so even though we got a reasonably tight fitting lid it's a smoke coming out all around the rim of the lid turn this off spend about 15 minutes okay so while while the last one is cooling off we'll go ahead open the one now it's cooled off with no hole in it you can see it was venting very well off the hinges take a look at this and looks like it's carbonated to me so let's see what we can get if we get a spark on it I'm sure we will it looks for it looks fine so probably could have done less than 15 minutes because when it quit smoking typically that means it's done but I just I was trying to be be consistent and I was actually shooting another video while that thing was burning so not quite as easy to use this big piece of Flint there we go got one on there it's not that hard you got a big enough piece here you can see there you go so work very well on out toys 10 with no hole last one to check would be this one when it cools off okay so I'm going to open this one up it's just a little warm but I think it's going to be okay and get it open soon and lucky there looks like char cloth to me again this one had no holes in it and you can see that it fits pretty tight I'm just not water tight obviously but if it's pretty tight and try it and see if how well this thing takes a spark just to make sure we've got the same test for everything we go what I thought we went let's try yeah then I get on the edge there we go there you go we got no hole we got Altoids ten with just the hinges and out toys ten with the hole you can see that all three work just fine okay well so I don't know how scientific that was to try to use the same size pieces and the same amount of pieces of denim use the stove keep all the the factors as close as equal as possible as you can see that the tin with no hole in it made char cloth just fine and I guess as did the other two with a hole in it and you know that the Altoid tins with just the hinge for that for the opening I guess my point is I'm not trying to say I'm right everybody's wrong cause some big controversy I just think it's important that you as a lot of times people watch videos and read things and they just take assume and take for granted that you know what they're hearing is the gospel and I encourage you to try things for yourself now there's a lot of people that have a lot more expertise than me to say you need to poke holes in the 10 so Who am I not putting myself up and saying that they're wrong I'm just saying check it out for yourself just use this if nothing else to encourage you to try stuff for yourself and check stuff out for yourself you should be doing that anyway because if you're if you're depending on the knowledge that you've learned from reading or watching a video to get you by when you need it well knowledge is not going to do it it takes skill and the skill comes from using these two things right here you gotta use this here but you got to transfer that knowledge into real-world skills and that's going to be what you need to do if you really have to use this stuff so as always I hope this has been helpful appreciate your watching thanks for subscribing survival on purpose channel thanks for giving it thumbs up if you liked it I'm not trying to make anybody mad please just forgive me if I did and you can check please check out my Amazon store below that supports this channel and I really appreciate all your help once again my name is Brian you're watching survival on purpose remember survival is not an accident so be prepared see you next time you

Channel: Survival On Purpose

Views: 175,418

Rating: 4.9276657 out of 5

Keywords: Flint and Steel Char Cloth Tin - Does It Really Need a Hole?, flint and steel, char cloth, fire starter, firestarter, fire building, campfire, how to build a fire, firecraft, charred punk wood, primitive fire, tinder bundle, Survival On Purpose, survivalonpurpose, survival videos, Survival, bushcraft, camping, bush craft, survival gear, bushcraft gear, survival tools, survival kit, Boy Scouts, bryanstevens, bryan stevens, brian stevens, survival is not an accident, survival skills

Id: tdPpC2knV8g

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Fri May 30 2014