From TEOTWiki

Fire, quite obviously, is useful for keeping us warm, cooking food, purifying water, drying things, telling stories around, insect control, and keeping animals at bay.

Contents 1 Easy Methods 2 Emergency Methods 2.1 Fire Plow 2.2 Bow Drill 2.2.1 What You Will Need 2.2.2 Bow 2.2.3 Fireboard 2.2.4 Spindle 2.2.5 Handhold 2.2.6 Coal Catcher 2.2.7 Burn a hole 2.2.8 Cut a notch 2.2.9 Tinder Bundle 2.2.10 Get your kindling ready 2.2.11 Make a coal 2.2.12 Blow the coal into flame 3 Sustaining the Fire

Easy Methods

Obviously having firestarting tools can be a great boon.

• Lighter
  • Pros- Simple, effective, cheap.
  • Cons- Can break easily, small explosion hazard
• Matches
  • Pros- Cheap, portable, versatile, can be waterproofed by dipping in wax
  • Cons- Some require a strike surface, easily lost, wet matches are ruined, easily blown out
• Flint
  • Pros- Durable, will work wet, long lasting
  • Cons- expensive, hard to find sometimes, heavy
• Lens
  • Pros- Lightweight, unaffected by water, potentially hotter than all other methods
  • Cons- Must set fire during day, can shatter

Emergency Methods

Fire Plow

A Fire Plow is simple fire making tool using friction.

It consists of a stick cut to a dull point, and a long piece of wood with a groove cut down its length.

The point of the first piece is rubbed against the groove of the second piece in a "plowing" motion, rapidly, to produce hot dust that then becomes a coal.

A split is often made down the length of the grooved piece, so that oxygen can flow freely to the coal/ember.

Once hot enough, the coal is introduced to the tinder, more oxygen is added by blowing and the result is ignition.

Bow Drill

What You Will Need

• Knife or sharp stone (for preparing the other materials)
• Bow drill parts
  • Fire-board (aka hearth board) made from a soft wood (such as cedar or basswood)
  • Spindle (aka drill) made from the same or a softer wood (such as cottonwood root)
  • Bow made from a piece of "springy" wood (such as ash, hickory, osage or any "green" wood) for an emergency bow
  • Cordage: Leather or rawhide lace (such as a work boot lace), a strong string such as 550 parachute cord, natural cordage that you make yourself from plant material.
  • Handhold (aka Socket) made from either a smooth, dimpled rock or a piece of hard wood
• Fire materials
  • Tinder (for blowing your coal into flame)
  • Kindling (to start the fire from your tinder)
  • Fuel (for feeding and maintaining your fire once you get it going.
• Patience and determination

Bow

You'll be putting a lot of pressure on the bow, and dead wood is more likely to break than similarly sized green wood; use slightly bendable wood for the bow. Your bow should extend the same length as your arm. Use as thin a piece of wood as you can so the bow will feel as light as possible, but not so thin that it will break. Lighter bows take less strength to push back and forth. It has to be stiff enough to not bend when you're using it. The bow doesn't actually have to have much of a curve to it, but curves work best. Tie a piece of cordage to the thinner end of the bow. A square knot will do, but you can play around with knots. At the fatter end, you'll want to tie a clove-hitch. The clove hitch works nicely, giving you the ability to tighten and loosen the cord if needed. Some people like to carve notches around the circumfrance of the bow for the cordage to set in. You'll need a little slack in the cord so that you can twist the drill into the bow.

Fireboard

For an easy, quick fire, the fireboard and the drill both need to be some kind of light, dry, non-resinous wood. The friction required to generate fire with two pieces of green wood or hardwood is enormous! The best wood for this won't have any sap, and will be light and soft enough to easily dent with your thumbnail without gouging. Shape whatever wood you choose into a piece about an inch thick, at least 2-3 inches across, and at least 8-12 inches long. You want it to be long enough to both steady with your foot as you drill and to provide you with plenty of realestate for burning multiple spots. Also, you want it to be stable and remain flat while you're working your spindle, as a rocking fireboard will affect how the friction surfaces contact.

Spindle

Your spindle can be made of the same kind of wood as the fireboard or a different kind. Just as long as it doesn't have any pitch in it, is light and fairly soft. I prefer fat drills, about 1 inch thick. Other people prefer more narrow ones down to maybe 1/2 inch thick. If you're little and light, smaller drills are better. Start with a stick about as thick as your thumb or index finger. It should be at least eight inches long, and the straighter the better. I whittle my drills until they are perfectly straight and perfectly round. It makes life SO much easier! What will be the top end of the drill should be shaped like the end of a pencil, the bottom end should be more blunt. Take some time to get the drill just right. It will pay off. The top of the drill must be sharper so that there is less friction.

Handhold

You can construct a hand-hold made of bone, wood, or rock. A fist-sized rock will serve better than a tiny one, as the friction can heat the smaller ones quickly. You need to have the ability to hold and control it. The deeper the dimple, the better. The smoother the sides of the dimple, the better. You want to avoid any and all friction between the socket and the drill.

If you can't find a rock, wood makes the easier hand-hold. Like the rock, you want it small enough for you to comfortably hold in your hand, but big enough that your fingers don't wrap all the way around it and touch the drill as it turns. If possible, make the socket out of hardwood (such as outter cottonwood bark), or use a knot in softwood as a naturally lubricated socket. Use the tip of a knife or sharp rock to drill a hole no more than halfway into the wood. Many people slip and cut themselves during this process, so pay attention! Of course, you can use other items as sockets. One person used a little glass lip balm container as a socket.

Experiment with the materials you have available. Lubricate the socket with resin, chap stick, ear wax, plant matter, whatever. (Do not use water or spit.)

Coal Catcher

Last but certainly not least, you'll need something to catch the coal that you create, keep it insulated from the cold ground while it becomes a coal, and carry it from the ground to the tinder. You can use a dry leaf, sliver of wood, piece of paper, bark, etc. Make sure you choose something you can pick up without fumbling around and dropping.

Now you're ready to make a fire!

Burn a hole

At this stage everything comes together. You need to know where you will drill the fireboard before you cut the notch. Take the fireboard and mark a spot about 1.5 times the drill's diameter from one of the fireboard's long edges. Dig a crater there about 1/4 inch deep and about as wide as your drill. Put the fireboard on the ground. (Reverse the following for lefties). Put your left foot on the fireboard about one inch to the left of the crater. The arch of your foot (not the ball or the heel) should be over the fireboard. Make sure the ground is pretty flat or bed the fireboard into the ground; you don't want it to wiggle or rock much if at all. Kneel on your right knee. Make sure that your right knee is far enough behind your left foot that you make all 90 degree angles. (More about that later.) Hold the bow in your right hand, drill in your left. Put the drill on top of the string with the pencil-sharp end pointing right, and twist it into the bow. If it's too hard to do, loosen the string a bit but the string must not slip once wrapped around the drill. Put the blunt end of the drill on the crater. Put the socket on the drill. Grab as close to the end of the bow as you can. Put some downward pressure on the socket and start to pull back and forth on the bow. It's a delicate balance between putting too much and not enough pressure on the drill, and having the bow string too tight and not tight enough. Most likely something is going to go wrong; troubleshooting later. For now let's just assume you're amazing and things go right. You'll saw back and forth with the bow faster and faster, and put more and more pressure on the socket, and finally you'll get some black powder down around the bottom of the drill, and some smoke. Excellent! Now stop and pick up the fireboard.

Cut a notch

Use your cutting device to make a V-shaped notch that reaches from the edge of the fireboard almost to the center of the hole you just burned in the fireboard. There's discussion as to whether a U-shape is better than a V-shape, and whether wider is better than narrower. The most important thing is to make sure that it's not so wide that when you start spinning the drill in the hole again, it just slips out through the notch. About a "sixth of a pie" is good. Also, make sure you don't cut right to, or past, the center of the hole, but you do want to get close to the center. Like Goldilocks, you want it just right.

Tinder Bundle

The final stage before you begin driving involves making a tinder bundle. You can use any dry, burnable substance for this.

Get your kindling ready

Set up your kindling in the shape of a tipi or "house" out of wood. If you like, make a floor to absorb moisture. Putting sticks at right angles works well. Remember the order tinder, small sticks, larger sticks, larger, larger... do not forget to leave a hole in your house to put the coal into and spaces between sticks so your coal can "breath."

Make a coal

Now it's time to make fire! You do everything the same way you did when you burned a hole in the fireboard, just don't forget to put your coal catcher under the chimney. Start pushing and pulling on the bow, and pushing down on the socket. As you get into a rhythm, saw faster and put more pressure on the socket. Eventually you'll get black powder collecting in the chimney. Keep going, and you'll get some smoke. When you've got smoke coming out of the punk all over, you've most likely got a coal. If you're not sure, keep going until you just can't go anymore. If it starts to squeak, you're starting to glaze the set and need to push down harder while keeping up the speed! Sometimes you'll actually see the tips of the punk turn white (or if it's getting dark, red) and then you'll know for sure that you have a coal.

Blow the coal into flame

Carefully remove the drill and lift away the fireboard, using a twig to hold the new ember down if it gets stuck in the notch. Use one hand to gently fan air over the coal, making it bigger and more solid, using up more of the punk. Don't blow on it unless you blow very gently, as you might knock it off the coal catcher. This isn't necessarily a disaster, as the coal usually won't fall apart. But if the ground's wet, it'll put the coal out, and if you're not careful picking it back up you might put it out. Once you're sure the coal isn't going to go out, transfer it to your tinder. Raise the tinder in front of your face and slightly overhead on the downwind side, and begin blowing softly through the bundle while gently squeezing the tinder around the coal. As more tinder catches, you might have to turn and/or reshape it to keep the ember spreading into more and more of the tinder. Keep blowing and working with the tinder bundle until you get actual flames. Put it on the ground where you want your fire. Keep blowing if you need to to keep the flames going, and add the toothpick size sticks on top of the bundle, then the pencil sized sticks, and bigger and bigger stuff until you have your campfire.

Sustaining the Fire

Once the tinder is lit, it must be transferred to a larger tinder, such as a bundle of dried grass and then blown gently until a flame is created. Then it is necessary to put this lit bundle on the ground and then twigs or other small tinder be placed above it, then small branches and large twigs and so on until logs can be sustained in the fire. Most fires that fail are due to trying to shortstep the process of stepping up the size of the fire; one can't light a log with a match.

It is important to increase the size of the wood slowly, as a small flame cannot heat a large mass enough to cause it to emit combustible gases. In addition, it is important to ensure a proper airflow to bring enough oxygen to the process without displacing the flame from the gases or cooling the fuel too much.

Once a fire is well underway, it is then possible to add fuels with more water or sap content as the heat may be enough to boil off the water. In wet weather, dry fuel can also be obtained by splitting dried out logs. Although the outside might be wet, the freshly split inner surfaces should be dry.