How To Build a Self-Feeding Fire - Survival Instructor Dan Wowak

one of the absolute worst parts of camping is when you get next to a nice warm fire at night and maybe roll your wool blanket over you and that cool air is against you and you'll fall asleep and then you wake up because your fire went out and you got cold then you're scavenging around you're looking for wood and you're figuring out how to get that fire up the heat raises up again once the fire is going you get comfortable and then you'll wake up an hour later because the fire went out well today what we're gonna talk about is a self-feeding fire you're never gonna have to worry about that issue again [Music] the self-feeding fire is really quite an easy concept the first thing that we need to do is gather good materials though this fire is very material dependent when choosing your fuel source for this type of fire you want to make sure that you get something that number one is dead and number two that is of good size small little sticks are gonna burn up just as quick as they would in a normal campfire leaving you with just embers and ashes at the end of the fire [Music] next we also want to make sure that the wood we are choosing for our fuel is nice and round we're actually going to need this fuel to be able to roll down into the fire as it burns away what you're gonna see here in just a few minutes [Music] now once our wood is back at camp we want to take four sticks we're gonna drive them in the ground at approximately 45 degree angles these sticks are gonna act as rollers as we pile our wood up on each side this wood is going to feed downward into the center of the v-shape we are now creating as this wood pushes into the center it's going to catch fire and continuously feed itself via gravity throughout the night and our self-feeding fire is now set up and ready to begin so how this actually works is our fire burns in the center it's gonna burn away these lower logs so if I could pull this log out just like this you can see that the wood drops down and then the next log will roll on top of those embers and continue to burn all that we would need to do then is stack more lumber up the sides the longer we want that to burn down into the center [Music] now a few key elements to remember when it comes to these self-feeding fires the first is you want to scale the fire according to your needs remember just using small little sticks on these ramps they're gonna burn up just as quick as if you're just throwing them on top of a fire so you really want to get yourself suitable size lumber you see that I use something that was five to eight inches in diameter so it was quite large I needed a saw to process it you also want to make sure that the gap between your logs this way is at the proper angle if it's too steep the fire is just gonna climb up that wall so we want to make sure that whatever log is above what's burning so this one right here is not in the way the fire is gonna burn a little bit but we want to make sure that as we go up that ramp that stuff's out of the way and staying cool and lastly the biggest misconception that I've seen over the years with people attempting this fire is the fact that they think once this middle is ignited you just can let it go and the reality is you still need to fuel that fire a little bit until you really get a good base of Ember so it's gonna take some time it's gonna take some maintenance so if you really want to get this fire started you're gonna use it throughout the night start it way ahead of time and just keep it going throughout the day and just add more wood onto your uprights as you go and then when it's time for bed you're gonna have a nice bed of embers built for those larger logs to roll down into and burn away and that is a self feeding fire I hope you really enjoyed this video is a really interesting way to actually set up a campfire so I hope you get out and give it a shot as always check out usio gear.com for all firestarters can the lanterns and everything else awesome on the site and as we like to say stay let [Music]

Channel: UCO

Views: 130,444

Keywords: self feeding fire, bushcraft, survival, camping, dan wowak, alone, uco, fire starting, ferro rod, self-feeding, fire, campfire, bonfire, bushcrafting

Id: DUakK3voWrA

Length: 5min 14sec (314 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019