Make Fire Even in the Wettest Weather WITHOUT a Match! Friction FIRE!

there we go all right folks we're down here in Florida it's been raining all night long we've got a little break in the showers and so we're gonna head out in the woods and see if we can't get a friction fire started now these are some of the most difficult conditions to start a fire by friction not only is everything in the woods wet but down here in the Southeast you've got super high humidity and that translates into high moisture content of the materials that we're going to be working with this is a world of difference between down here in the Southeast and down in the desert Southwest where everything is bone dry and to make things even more interesting and realistic I'm using only my Leatherman P4 to get this done so I've got an Eastern red cedar here and this is a great great resource to find for making fire basically it has everything that you need to make a fire except for the cordage now what we're going to use this tree for is to find some dry tender the inside bark when it's dry you can fluff it up and it makes a great Tinder Ball but one of the biggest challenges probably the biggest challenge in building a friction fire in conditions like this where it's everything is wet is finding really dry really fine tender so I'm just poking around this tree trying to find somewhere that's sheltered from the weather and I look underneath these branches and it's rained so much and so heavily that the rain has just kind of filtered around the outside and ran around the outside and collected on the most of these underside of these branches and so it's difficult to find good dry material there but there's this little Hollow it looked like maybe at one time there was a branch that came out there and broke off but right here there's just a little bit of dry bark in there so I'm going to very carefully try to get some of that stuff out and then put it in my pocket immediately before it gets wet foreign oh that's gonna be good stuff right there so that right there is exactly what we need it's just it's even a little bit Dusty perfect so at the base of these Pines you can often find little scars and things where the sap will ooze out to help protect itself there's a place right here where we can get some sap now most people think of pine sap as being sticky and it is it's very sticky but it's also an oil and so when you get it hot it can actually act as a lubricant and that's how we're going to use this I've got a an Elderberry right here an Elderberry is a very very good for starting friction fires if you can find a dead piece and we got one right here I'm going to give this a try but I think it might be too wet so I can just looking at the ends of this I can tell the moisture has really soaked into it I don't know if you can see the color difference or not on the outside it's darker and then it gets lighter as it moves in all of that darker stuff is moisture that's creeped into this thing and so unfortunately I think the moisture content is in this is going to be too high just to use it for part of our friction fire set but I'm gonna go ahead and stick it in my pocket because I've already cut it we're gonna have to go back here and find a a piece of standing dead Atlantic White Cedar and just make our whole set out of that so what I'm looking for is a standing bed Atlantic White Cedar and I want it standing straight up or as straight up as I can find because something that's standing straight up is going to intercept less rain as the rain falls if you get something that's that's fallen over all that rain falls on top of that tree and it soaks in it's just going to be a higher moisture content in that wood and so finding something that's standing straight up is just going to be drier but I also need something that is small enough so that I can cut part of the way through it and then break it the rest of the way so I'm looking for something in the three to four inch diameter range [Applause] yeah [Applause] so this one right here looks like it might suit her needs it's standing relatively straight up it's maybe three inches diameter and it's pretty sound so I'm going to go ahead and see if I can't cut this thing maybe right here or right down here and break it off now I want to cut about halfway through this tree and then break it the rest of the way off because I'm trying to open up a split down the middle of this wood so I can get to that interior where it's going to be a little bit drier all right and that cedar just smells so good all right so I think I might have to actually try to saw it all the way into up here because the the top it's so thick in here that the Top's kind of caught up and I don't think I'm going to be able to put enough leverage on it to to get it broken down so I'm going to go ahead and cut the top completely off I'll bring you guys back when I get it done there we go oh oh let's go so all of that wood in there should be dry or as dry as we're going to get into conditions like this I'm going to go ahead and see if I can't knock this off too just to have a little bit more dry wood to work with all right so there should be enough wood in this and this to get a small fire going so we'll do our our fire board and our spindle out of this and then probably just split some of this remaining stuff up for uh for actual firewood in our Tinder grab my raincoat and we'll just get going so we need a couple more things we need a hand hold and we need something to act as the bow for our bow drill and I think I can get both of those pieces out of this little privet here so I'm going to go ahead and cut this off down here and then up here and then we'll take all our stuff start working on things and building our friction fire set foreign so this looks like a pretty good place I've got this big overhanging branch and the underside of it is actually really dry and so I'm just going to scratch out a spot right here just a little level spot just to do my work and get the fire going once I get it going I'm going to move it away from the base of this tree so it's not raining real hard right now and so I'm just gonna lay my raincoat down here and as I get things done any kind of shavings that I have or when I get my spindle and fire board done I'm just going to tuck it in here to keep it dry plus I was about to have a heat stroke in there because it's about 115 percent humidity and about 85 degrees down here in Florida so one thing with these Atlantic White Cedar is 99 of the time they have a lot of twist in the grain as it goes up the tree just so you can see this one starts on a plane like this and kind of rolls this way and so we're going to have to flatten this off to make a fire board it'd be super helpful if I had a little Hatchet or an ax or something like that but I'm trying to do this minimalist and so all I'm going to use on this build is my Leatherman so I'm going to have to make a fire board where you have to make a spindle and hollow out our hand hold I'll take you through the whole process oh pop out my utility blade and so by doing it that way I save myself a lot of carving so if you're watching closely you're noticing that my the blade on my Leatherman is just kind of flopping around that's because I finally after years of batoning this thing and splitting stuff I broke the little locking piece off the back of the blade made me sad but this thing has taken a lot of abuse to uh and finally just kind of gave it up but still works I'll probably end up getting another one and just replacing the blade these things have a lifetime warranty on them you can just send them back or send them in and they'll send you a new one I think but I don't know this one's got some sentimental value and so I'll probably just suck it up buy another one take it apart put a new blade in there and keep rocking so these little shavings that are coming off here these are going to be super valuable so I just want to pick them up whenever I can before they get wet I'm going to stick them in my raincoat here keep them dry foreign so I'm about to get started on the spindle now I'm going to use my Leatherman the blade on my Leatherman and I'm going to Baton a piece out of this this is how I broke my Leatherman so word of caution uh this is not recommended but if you need to this thing like I said before it'll actually stand up to some pretty heavy duty abuse actually the reason I broke it is because I was trying to Baton a very hard dense piece of wood should have been doing it but that's what happened ah foreign so I'm just going to cut this mid section out right here and that's what we're going to use for the spindle this stuff will come in handy for firewood so some of you might have comments about this flopping around like that it's dangerous you know it could close on my hand I realized that and so if I ever do any kind of pushing down like that I'm very conscious of putting pressure back into the blade so it doesn't do that but I don't know I'll end up fixing it before long ha foreign I'm going to go ahead and take my fire board my Hearth board and just make a little divot in here then we'll have to burn that out and then cut our notch just going to put a couple little notches in them this bow to help hold the string now I'm going to go ahead and just use a piece of paracord if I didn't have paracord one of the things I always do when I get a new pair of boots is I replace the laces with a piece of paracord and so all I'd have to do is take my boot lace off use it start to fire put the boot lace back on but so I don't have to take my boot laces off I'm just going to use a paracord that I have in my pocket so I want the string on this bow relatively loose because I want to make at least two wraps around my spindle and that's going to help keep it from slipping when I really have to put a lot of pressure on this thing all right so we're all set up to burn our fire board in I've got my little divot I've got the spindle loaded into the bow now I'm just going to take a little piece of this pine sap that we collected earlier and just put it right into the handhold or the bearing block divot right there now that's going to be real sticky at first but once it heats up it's going to get slick it's going to help reduce friction at that point now I'm not trying to start a fire right now I'm just trying to create the fire board that might take a while because everything's really damp right now but we're generating heat and when we're generating heat we're also drying things out I can see I'm gonna have to get rid of that little piece of shrub right there so we're starting to get a little bit of dust and a little bit of smoke that's good all right so again being very careful keep everything dry I'm going to put my spindle back in the jacket so it stays dry so the next thing I have to do is take my Leatherman and cut a notch almost to the center of this hole but not quite there now that's going to give our dry dust which is going to be the fuel for the coal a place to collect so we've got all of our components ready to make a fire except for our tender bundle and I've said this before in previous fire making videos but before you start your first attempt to make a fire make sure you have all of the materials that you need right here at hand and make sure that you have plenty of them because if you get halfway through if you get a cold going and you get your tender bundle going but you can't transfer that fire into a bigger fire to actually make something that's going to keep you warmer cook or whatever then you have wasted a tremendous amount of resources time energy and if you're in a real life survival situation that could be absolutely demoralizing especially if you've taken hours to collect what you've already got so make sure that you have enough tender now I'm pretty limited on what I can use for Tinder here it would have been ideal if I could have gone out before the rain collected some dry grass some dry bows things like that but that's not the point of this video and so I'm gonna have to make Tinder from this stuff right here and so what I'm going to do is use a trick that I've shown in a previous video I'm gonna stick this knife in here if I can do it without stabbing myself with this floppy blade again not a recommended use for a Leatherman but we're going to make it work so I've got this piece of Cedar that I split off now I'm just going to kind of take shavings off of this it's actually starting to drizzle a little bit more right now so I'm making sure that I've got everything covered up all right so I think we're pretty much ready to go I've got what I think is going to be enough tender and kindly to get the fire going I'm kind of cutting Corners here because I'm obviously not in a real survival situation and so I'm going bare minimum here because I don't want to spend all day sitting here processing materials but I'm gonna have one shot at this because if I burn up those materials I'm gonna have to go back and start the whole process over again preparing those things now one thing that I anticipate might happen is I might oops I may end up snagging the coat with the um with the bow here so if I do that I'm going to reposition everything now when I first start this I'm not trying to start a fire I'm just heating things up I'm drying things out and I'm trying to build dust once I get things dried out and it might take a little while once I get things dried up I'm going to start building dust in my Notch once that happens once my Notch is filled up with dry dust then I'm going to apply the pressure which is going to generate the heat which is going to make the coal so at first I'm just kind of going going slow saving energy just heating things up oops see that's what I was worried about dang it foreign start over nobody said this was going to be easy let's start over with new dust too all right my Notch is filled up put a little more pressure a little more speed do we have it I think so so I know I've got a coal in there because I have got a steady stream of smoke coming out of my dust now I'm not in a huge hurry here don't need to panic that thing's gonna burn for a while it's actually going to grow inside of that bunch of dust right there and so I've got time two get my Tinder bundle now the trick here is to transfer that coal into this Tinder bundle without dropping it I'm actually going to just put that right there carefully now I'm going to put this in here in case I do have to start over just keep it dry so I've got a little coal inside of this now this is a very small Tinder bundle so I'm just going to gently wrap and blow very gently I'm just trying to grow this coal oh hot got Flame oh nice I like it get that going take some of our kindling now this is admittedly this this part of this video is going to be very sloppy I wouldn't normally do it this way I would have I'd be much more organized if I were in the woods but I'm not so again if that was in the woods I was camping or in a rival situation or something like this I would have all of my firewood here ready to go but I'm just going to put this thing out I'm not going to build a bigger fire with it I just wanted to get a fire going so just keep that in mind when you're out there just make sure that you have everything that you need to get the fire going and then keep the fire going ready at hand all right all right so as I said it is it's probably close to 90 degrees out here it's really high humidity so I'm going to get away from this fire if you guys haven't get smoke in my eyes if you haven't subscribed to the Channel please consider doing so doing stuff like this all the time and we've got a bunch of great adventures coming up this summer and fall so see you on the next adventure

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 263,245

Keywords: friction fire, wet weather fire-making, fire making challenge, survival challenge, bow drill, fire, bow drill fire, clay hayes, bushcraft, bushcraft fire, fire in rain, survival skills, survival, survival tips, bushcraft survival, survival fire, bow drill friction fire

Id: _p2Uu7DlIBE

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023