Super Matches, Fire Reflectors, and Space Blankets

so a couple things that people have asked me about this is a good time the show of the first one I'll show you because this remind me of it is the super match if you've never seen that before and will actually fire one up here so like when conditions are as bad as they are right now and everything's wet your chances are unless you've been gathering tinder like I have some in a wax haversack I could use that and that's got you know birch bark chai I got all kinds of stuff in there which is it's kind of a key takeaway I always carry some sort of tinder bag that I can hook to my belt you know so as soon as I hit the wood line even if I'm walking around anywhere if I see dried tinder it's a habit of mine I put it in my pocket and you know by the time I get home every night I've got pockets full you know and if you walk into my laundry room like on the way the garage my washing machine is covered with a big pile of tinder and every once in a while I'll take that out in the garage and pack it away and bring it to class or something but not yeah so it's just a habit of mine I'm always in that half of gathering natural tinder of course I take some sort of man-made emergency tinder for conditions just like this for when I don't have time or I'm not mobile anymore and I have to use what's within arm's reach a lot of times you can't get to it so I like to always gather natural tinder when I can and keep it dry and I like to use natural tinder anytime I can but also at the same time you know I don't I don't count on that being what I'm gonna have so I was carry some sort of some sort of treated cotton and that's why I really like carrying a you know a pocket full of the first date tinder packs open flame ignition sources for me the usually the only time I'm going to use it is in conditions like this it's kind of it's like when you really need that fire kind of a right now from fire kind of mentality I need that fire right now or I'm gonna have problems so I carry two different types if you think about how important fire is and how it goes kind of across the gamut of the survival priorities and facilitates everything it's that important and to me it's the most important with that said the the most reliable ignition source the worst conditions are your open flame ignition sources so if you're going to be redundant anywhere be redundant on the thing that's most likely to save your life and that's why I carry both the lighter and windproof storm proof matches you know the the longest burning ones I can get because yes I can rescue a lighter in probably 15 seconds if you've taken our fire class you we teach you how to do we make you do it would make you start a fire with it it doesn't take that long but you know when seconds counting and you're starting to use your loser your cognitive ability and fine motor skills man it's nice to have a light a match that you can just strike and go super match it's kind of like I packed these in my kids kids too but what it is is you can make these out of different size but I like the you co matches I did a review on them I use them for about I'd say about 2 or 3 years before I did a review on them and did kind of an extensive video I tested it kind of applied scientific method type things you know and I basically took some broom sage tender bundles and I stuck him in a creek in front of me and let him also for the same amount of time and I had all three different sizes of the Yuko matches you know they they call these the titans which is the biggest ones and these the ones that get my kids usually because if if I'm thinking about if my kid is starting an emergency fire you know at 12 for 8 or definitely on my daughters they're two two years old and like two weeks old but when they get to that age this is what I want to kit I want the best chance they can have so with these it's it's your it's your emergency tinder and your ignition source all balled into one and it's waterproof and that waterproofing I use wax so that you know that is also the fuel how I make it as I take four of those tighten matches or take four of the you co storm proof or four of the you co survival matches the little guys I bundle those together take four of them then I take square cotton or you can use any kind of cotton ball doesn't matter I dip that in liquid paraffin which is lamp oil and that's kind of a wet fuel it's not gonna solidify so I want my my cotton soaked with that then from there I'll take just a peach or a piece of masking tape to cover the heads to try to keep some of the wax off of that it's not perfect but it keeps some of it off so I'm not having to mess with it to expose the striking surface and then I'll dip the entire thing in melted paraffin like a solid paraffin but melted dip the whole thing both sides you know so that's nice and waterproof and I'll let that dry normally to speed up the process I'll put it in the cling wrap wrap it up real tight and I'll throw it in the freezer for a while just to solidify that wax again and keep everything where I want it I did a test burn to test burns on them and it's it's somewhere around 15 minutes so it goes from all of your match accelerant basically shooting out like a like a road flare and then once it burns down past that it turns into a candle from here down and it's just a nice slow little flame that lakes you know so the goal of this is to be able to scratch up you know a pile of really fine stuff that I know will evaporate quickly to get the water off and it'll dry out and catch on its own and so by design I could take all this you know and even if it's soaking wet and I can pop one of these and just angle it up in there and shoot that flame in there and then move it inside and let it act as a candle and that's gonna dry you know all that out and eventually it'll catch and then you have the chain reaction and you get your fire in an emergency normally I'll take the Yukon matches they always come with extra strikers and I'll take one of those and I'll put it on the outside there okay absolutely I don't know it's a good question I'm sure that somebody's thought of it but I'm not sure and a rogue player actually works really well by keeping my vehicle kids not only the mark but also you know you can use it for a signal you can use a start fire so it's kind of when I'm dual purpose items that I really like so that masking tape kind of keeps some of the wax off the head but you still may have to scrape it to expose but once you get one going this thing's going how nice that is everybody see that you know so I kept that wax off of there now I wrapped the whole thing and wrap it in cotton and then I dip that whole thing in liquid paraffin because it's not going to solidify so there's there's liquid fuel encased in this solid fuel on the outside the first time I tested this I tested it in my garage imagine my surprise and for the rest of this time let's see if I can get it propped up so it done the rest of this time it'll just kind of go like a mat or like a candle I'm sorry about 10 to 15 I think they're usually about 15 but uh I miss it's a lot better than a regular storm-proof match and I'm instead of carrying a big canister of regular matches I'm carrying one big match because if if I can and the conditions are good I'm gonna try to use that lighter first but I mean if if I don't even have time to mess with that and I want something quick because I mean you can't hold a lighter down for for 15 minutes you know to dry out everything and get that reaction going but this is another reason why and my kids that carry candles and that brings up another point that I could tell you about did some testing on on candles beeswax candles I started carrying your normal bic lighter it's in my pocket but your normal bic lighter you get something like 300 one and a half second flicks with it is what they claim is something crazy like that but it's it's a lot you know why don't I have seconds isn't enough for all the time you know so three beeswax birthday candles I did a test on those those one beeswax birthday candle burned for over 20 minutes so when I'm talking about a lighter extender you know I'm using that birthday candle just something that small I can like that save my resource and that candle is gonna burn for about 20 minutes that little birthday candle just carrying three birthday candles is equivalent to carrying an extra lighter you know as far as time that you actually you know can plan on so having your having your lighter in kit a lighter that's in my kid I'll take three birthday candles and kind of put it with that and that'll extend that lighter as if I was carrying two and it's a lot less space so yeah these guys will go for for quite a long time we're about halfway down as far as the candle action and what's interesting about these two is once it's even once it's done you still have an in-breath yeah so if for some reason you didn't get it you know and you had some something something stashed you still have a little ember to work with it you can blow so yeah that's the super match I'm pretty sure I've uploaded this on our YouTube channel how to make it I think it's on there well you see it on there yeah yeah so I had this on my workbench you know which is got shelves that come up to it so it's about this much space you know it's where I do all my live feeds and everything there's like waxed canvas behind backdrops for it's like a little mini studio for live feeds and then there's burlap like covering up my shelves you know so you're not you know having to stare it on my junk and I set this dude up I fired it up right there and you saw it like get going it sounds like a jet engine going off yet oh I'm like I know where to put this thing so I sat it down and kind of propped it up you know and I'm just watching everything I'm like don't catch you know I've got burlap here and waxed action it might be an oil cloth hard blind okay next time so the other video where I actually did a further testing on it it's actually like the garage doors open so and it's like way out there close to the edge of the garage but uh yeah so even the I've made them with the storm proof matches they're smaller to kind of the mid size which is what I normally carry and my stuff for for packability reasons they burn for a really long time too it works just as well and even the little tiny survival matches which brings me back to something let's get the head on in that yuko matches review video that I did I had all those in the water and I figured out that I needed about 15 seconds that Bruns edge out of the water and then shaking it off you know I think five times I did for the test and then you know stacking it into a feet from TV and striking that think it was about fifteen seconds is what I came up with you need like minimum to get it going so I think of those the Yuko matches the the little ones might only be twelve seconds and I think the storm proof for about fifteen which is adequate and the Titans are normally about twenty five I think which is more than adequate really you know so that's why my kids kit gets those so that thing will probably keep going and we can keep talking about other things but I mean that's that thing's crazy you know and I'm carrying for matches but this is my my life depends on this I need it right now like that's what I carry that for and it's compact so I can put it in this belt pouch and I'll put like a you know the larger the rest of the Titan matches in the case with extra strikers I'll put that in my backpack you know kind of back to that layering concept that we talked about but that'll dry out some tinder and that'll get it going for sure so play with them there are a lot of fun and I think it's a good way to really make a really effective match ridiculously effective in my opinion so I got for that the super match is still going unless you guys want to see just how long it goes like watching water boil yeah you can see like this stuff was soaked and it's it's only in the proximity and then I went up you guys familiar with the the three-way and I majored in biology so I'm its scientists and I think we have other scientists in the room but you guys familiar with the three ways that a fire heats us yeah then I I'm not sure if we've talked about it when we're talking about shelters I may have and I remember now so conduction as far as when your fire using your fire as part of your shelter and creating that microclimate you're trying to trap that heat obviously so those are the three ways that a fire actually heats conduction convection radiation so conduction occurs in a fire it occurs at the point where the the gaseous part of the fuel is actually ignited and the the fuel that isn't ignited like that's the very point of conduction you know that's that's a colder object touching a warmer object and the heat transfer the heat gets transferred from higher to lower temperature along the temperature gradient so what does that do for us in our microclimate in our shelter not a thing because that's that's that's its thing it doesn't do anything for us it so the second way is convection and the science behind that is is you know the convection always goes straight up by design that's what it does by default the only way that you can take advantage of convection for your microclimate is if you have something over top of that that catches it and redirects it so if you have a fire out in front of your shelter your convection is going straight up you know all that convective he's going straight up it's just that's what it does it has no choice unless there's an air current that changes it bends it so unless the wind is blowing it into your shelter you're not getting anything from convection so the majority of what we can take advantage of is the radiant heat and the radiant heat is what's going out in you know 360 actually probably 180 because it's not going through the ground it's actually getting soaked by the ground and any biomass that you have it's soaking it up as well the advantage to biomass which brings you to my next point because I don't think we'll have time to actually build one and show you it I was going to talk about firewalls commonly kind of a misnomer but they commonly are called fire reflectors and in a way they do reflect there's two types of reflection there's specular reflection there's diffuse reflection like your walls in your house like that eggshell you know when you turn that on turn your light on it reflects that back to you if it didn't reflect then you wouldn't be able to see it because that's how we perceive it's all you know a matter of reflect reflected light and wavelengths but anyway then I want to go too far down the rabbit hole diffuse reflection is common with stone wood with surfaces that are not shiny specular reflection reflects it back at the exact same wavelength that it went out you know so that's why mirrors work because it's reflecting back the exact same wavelength of light and that's why you see it so a shiny surface does reflect better obviously but diffuse reflection does happen but it's such a low extent that it should never really that's why I don't think it should ever be called a fire reflector and I always cloud a fire wall even though there's a little bit of reflective heat it's not much it's really you want you gain from a fire wall is the biomass is ability to absorb the heat and then reradiates your environment cools if that's hotter and the environment next to it is cooler it'll pull that back out because your temperature is always going to constantly you can constantly be trying to reach an equilibrium so they're valuable in that is the long that's a long way of saying the valuable in that that's the short version so I was gonna show you how to do one that we're starting to run short on time there's other more important things but like that lean-to shelter if you put a fire reflector fire wall maybe two paces out and then put a long fire like Reiki valkia or a long fire something that goes the full length of that shelter you know kind of midway between you'd have something you know pretty I think you'd be pretty cozy in that shelter so with the but their walls is it also something based on color not just the surface like a white object versus black object yes yeah but it's it's not gonna be something that yeah the the diffuse the diffuse reflection you're gonna get four natural materials is so minuscule but it's it's hardly noticeable like if you tried to measure it with a thermometer it'd be pretty difficult but it does have value and that it heats up and releases that back to the environment slowly but things along the lines of like a split log instead of the dark and bark on the outside of door bang it if you could split it and get the white inside at that actually I think it would yeah I think it would I mean it makes sense because you know snow does that it reflects light differently and more intensely and obviously shiny objects too as well so I would think it would yeah conduction doesn't do anything for us convection doesn't do anything for us unless we have like we talked about I think on when we built the lean-to where we had that awning kind of going over if that if your convective heat goes straight up and hits that it can bend it down and get it back into your circulate into your shelter so that can help you can take advantage of that but the main thing we're capturing is is the radiant heat from your fire yeah any other questions not did you ask that one so those little cheap space blankets that's a true specular reflection that's actually everything is other than a mirror or a mirrored surface a polished surface is is a mixture of both but that's what it would be more specular for sure and they work great for that no that's another thing that's a value of one of those space blankets is like that lean-to would be a perfect example tied up on the inside and man that radiant heat is going to hit it and and you're gonna feel it in like Alan said the other day you were you want to talk about what you said the other day about the let's face blankets yeah you know and move shelter if you have to do it hastily like if you just kind of drape the thing around you and kind of leave it semicircle shape you'll fill it instant rush of heat I mean it's almost like you just got put in the furnace mm-hmm and that's that's a way that you can warm yourself really quick and those things occupy very little space you keep in your pocket that's one way to maximize your fire if you didn't have such a shelter [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Gray Bearded Green Beret

Views: 27,857

Rating: 4.9599333 out of 5

Keywords: Ranger, Green Beret, The Pathfinder School LLC, Survival, Bushcraft, Preparedness, Fire, Shelter, Camping, Hunting

Id: qrmVRSG_OkI

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019