#firestarting #video with “fire rope” to make fire with the friction of rope on wood. A peculiar sort of rope.
on 02026-07-16new #Primitive-Technology video, building a new hut with previously fired clay bricks and mud mortar with a little bit of wood ash added to grout it. He makes a plumb bob and shows why he should have had it before. Also he shows an unsuccessful #firestarting attempt before the successful one, saying that this is common in humid weather.
on 02026-06-14#video o Kap Te’o Tafiti demonstrating Samoan fire dancing and culture at TEDx, demonstrating #firestarting with the fireplow method. He's able to get smoke in 5 seconds and finishes his ember in 15 seconds using hibiscus wood. He points out that Sanskrit “Agni” is very plausibly etymologically related to Samoan/Tongan “afi” “fire”, Hawai’ian “ahi”, and Malaysian/Indonesian “api”. Licks fire off his flaming sword. #Polynesian
on 02025-06-13#bushcraft #video on Kap Tafiti #firestarting with the fireplow technique, Samoan style, from “PolynesianCulturalCenter” with hibiscus wood and coir tinder.
on 02025-06-13#bootstrapping #bushcraft #video #firestarting with a standing dead snag, split into kindling with an axe and then shaved into a feather stick for tinder, then using ferrocerium to ignite the feather stick. #DIY
on 02025-06-13#bushcraft #video with #firestarting using a log to weight the bow drill. Uses a saw to cut the notches in his hearthboard. #bootstrapping #DIY
on 02025-06-13#video on #bushcraft myths (widely believed falsehoods), showing among other things the use of a tree trunk as a weight to put pressure on a bow drill for #firestarting. Also demonstrates using a sandwich bag full of water for firestarting. But the video is mostly about safe berry foraging. #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-13#video on 13 #firestarting techniques: rubbing a roll of ash inside a cotton ball between two boards, spontaneous combustion of “boiled” linseed oil (two hours of oily rags in a cardboard box on a cold day started to smoke, then burst into flames at 4h25m), steel wool and 9V batteries (or 3 AAs), a firepiston, KMnO₄ and glycerin, ferrocerium rods (with cotton balls, steel wool, jute twine, or magnesium shavings), fire-plow style (at which he fails), fire-saw style with bamboo (sort of an inverted fireplow) at which he also failed, beating steel on an anvil with a hammer until red-hot, a flashlight reflector as a non-imaging optical concentrator on charcloth, a bow drill (commercially sold with ball bearings, or improvised with paracord, which failed), and finally a hand drill, which he didn’t even really try. And then a rope lighter, which is like a cigarette lighter that uses rope for fuel. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#firestarting #video by #CrazyRussianHacker using the fire-plow method. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#firestarting #video where a Scotsman struggles greatly with hand drills. After many attempts with a bow drill made with his shoelace, he gets embers, which go out. Finally, after 8 hours of attempts spread over 6 days, he is able to start a fire, a feat he is then able to replicate on the beach later. #DIY #bootstrapping
on 02025-06-13#PDF #paper on prehistoric #firestarting, “Wood Usage and Fire Veneration in the Pamir, Xinjiang, 2500 yr BP”. “People also specifically chose inflammable Populus wood to make hearth boards and hand drills (both are used for making fire by drilling), rigid Betula wood to craft wooden plates.” The hand drill spindle isn’t very straight! #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-1325-minute #WIRED #video on #firestarting by an anthropology professor using hand drills or bow drills, with a notched hearthboard with a divot, and a spindle. He recommends using bone-dry wood, and not using a resinous wood for the hearthboard, nor anything that’s too hard, something you can dent with your fingernail, like basswood or tulip poplar or (contradictorily) cedar. For the spindle he suggests cattail, horseweed, mullein, or goldenrod, because it needs to be straight and also somewhat soft. He suggests splitting a stick to make the hearthboard, either twice, or once while shaving down the back. He likes cedar inner bark for tinder, and he uses birchbark under the notch to catch the ember. He breaks the spindle. “Son of a bitch.” He spits on hands to improve friction with the spindle. Looks exactly like Primitive Technology’s technique, except that he uses a tiny stick to remove the hearthboard safely from the ember without breaking it. The cinematography (cuts between spindle changes, etc.) greatly interferes with seeing the technique clearly. For natural fibers for a bow drill, he suggests dogbane, but prefers brain-tanned deerhide. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#TKOR #video on #firestarting by rubbing sticks together, linearly, fire-plow style. Not very convincing but he claims to have made it work. #DIY #bootstrapping #bushcraft
on 02025-06-13#Bushcraft Filipino guy #Primitive-Life smelting iron to make a knife from natural materials, and I think Roman cement too. Lashes members to live trees to make a hut, which greatly simplifies climbing (no tripod needed). Early footage was originally shot in an interlaced format (1080i?) before upload to YT. This guy seems like he might be the real deal; no steel saw marks or backhoe marks visible. Bamboo is a huge win for cutting difficulty vs. stiffness, especially for drilling with stone flakes and for splits. Makes a green bamboo chair and table; holes drilled in bamboo enable a sewing-like lashing technique to secure butt joints, but lacking diagonal braces results in undue stress on lashed joints. Uses ground-squatting technique. Grass hut permits indoor work in the rainy season. Tropical climate permits outdoor work in rain. Fishing lines provide food to cook on spits over fire to serve on leaf plates. Bamboo water vessel permits boiling water next to fire; requires towel to grip. Firestarting technique not shown. Bow and arrow demonstrated. All that was from 02017. In 02018, river rock path and brick masonry well shown. Bamboo latticework fencing is built to protect what looks like a chicken coop. A score sawn with a stone saw around green bamboo facilitates clean breakage. In addition to celt axe, lashed-head stone axe is shown to split bamboo. Bamboo caps fit tightly onto bamboo pipes or other vessels with appropriate choice of diameter, making a nearly watertight seal. A gourd-bucket dipper on a bamboo handle is used to draw water from brick well with protective cement roof supported on wood rafters. Ramrods are used to break out internal partitions in long bamboo to make a long vessel. Stone saw is wedged into split-wood handle which is lashed tight to provide better handling. Some yam harvest is on floor; perhaps more is in large wicker and lashed-bamboo baskets. Hand drill is used not for firestarting but for drilling a round hole in large bamboo (side or partition); stone point lashed into split end improves drilling action. Split bamboo vessel permits melting adhesive (pine pitch?) over fire with charcoal filler; poured over bamboo–bamboo joints of small bamboo fit into round hole drilled in larger bamboo, it yields watertight joint seals for automatic vacuum-controlled trough for watering chickens. Chicken coop seems to be adobe (or, more likely, wattle and daub) with narrow latticework bamboo doors and windows, perhaps to keep out varmints; the door hinge is a round vertical member of the door in a round hole. Bamboo trowel facilitates plastering with adobe to hold trough in place atop bricks inside chicken coop. All that was 02018. He’s got an awful lot of bricks that look awfully gray, including what may be a water tower, and this video doesn’t show making them; these may be cheating. Bamboo rake serves to gather dry forest litter. Roof thatching clamped into split bamboo is shown; a smelting shelter with thatch but no walls has large river rocks around the edge of a raised floor made from red clay brought in in wicker baskets, then tamped down by beating with poles. Fire pit in floor is built up with adobe; flexible paddle hand fan (a cut banan leaf?) fans fire. Adobe grille over fire (presumably to permit eventually moving the fire on top of it so it can get fed with air from below) is initially supported by bamboo rafters. Yes; charcoal fire on top of grille is shown later. Then he uses actual anthracite coal for a smelt, which is possibly also cheating, but smelts many grams of iron. He seems to mixing the iron ore with some kind of a flux as well as crushed charcoal. He has a gazebo made of masonry with river rocks with gray mortar that must be close to a tonne; it’s unlikely he’s made that from wood ash! Fresh banana leaves serve well to support clay discs as they are rotated and moved from place to place. A second smelting furnace of a similar design is built next to the first. Severe cracking in the first suggests no fiber was added to the adobe, and too much clay. A conical hole is drilled in a river rock with another rock; the appearance of the dust suggests that the drillee is marble or limestone. The clay discs are wood-fired in the second furnace. A drill bit is ground onto the end of a stone and lashed into a split bamboo rod. A centrifugal blower similar to the Primitive Technology design, but using a split bamboo shaft, is installed in the floor to blow both furnaces, using the conical hole as a bearing, resting on a ground stone point. The fired clay discs are used as blower cover and flywheel; the fan shaft is driven with a pullstring mechanism similar to a yo-yo, with a bamboo pull handle on the end of twine. A second smelt also produced iron. Later a horizontal chimney extension was built (not shown) supported on a river-rock masonry wall with adobe mortar, perhaps in order to be able to cover the top of the furnace. A skimmer apparently made from wicker or a tiny lashed bamboo lattice serves to remove floating debris from the water in a clay decantation pit; levigated clay is removed off the top with a pottery dipper, which seems to be fired from a white ball clay or kaolin, neither of which I’ve seen him dig. The dipped-out orange clay is decanted in a pot to get a smooth, pure, highly plastic clay (with a lot of contraction on drying). He seems to be firing it without any temper! But, miraculously, the pieces survive; these are his crucibles and molds for trying to cast what looks like hundreds of grams of iron prills into a knife, edge down, and a chisel. Unbelievably, this does succeed, and he grinds them sharp on a rock afterward, a huge upgrade for his woodworking. Further heating in an anthracite forge made of river rocks enables some forging, using split-bamboo tongs and rocks as hammer and anvil, forming a tang that permits the attachment of a handle to the iron knife with the pitch-like hot-melt adhesive; the iron knife edge can shave bamboo. All this was in 02019. In 02020 his grass hut had fallen down, but at some point he had built a masonry pool or cistern next to the well. He makes a straw-style broom from bamboo splits using the new knife. Finally at 54'35" he shows #firestarting, with a hand drill and pine needles; he’s using a sharpened wood stick. He removes two trees by building fires at their bases, then pushing them over with a long pole. At this point he’s removed the thatched roof over the smelting furnaces; he repairs their cracks a bit with more adobe. Two wicker carriers suspend wicker baskets from a pole over his shoulder, permitting him to carry a greater load of river rocks back from the river. He breaks up a lot of big limestone rocks and burns them to quicklime, which he uses in a heap of sand (brought in in baskets) to make mortar to build a stone house from river rocks, so maybe all that cement I saw before wasn’t cheating, but that mortar sure does look a lot more like portland cement than it does like lime mortar when wet; but it seems to set pretty white. He makes a third celt-like axe, this time with half a bamboo bent double around the head before lashing tight. Splitting a log with stone wedges and wood stakes is a lot of work. A ground-stone wood chisel (much wider than his iron chisel) is surprisingly precise at surfacing wood, raising quite a respectable shaving, and between the two chisels he cuts some quite respectable mortise and tenon joints for the stone house’s doorframe. Doorframes, plural. He builds a third furnace from the materials of the first two to burn still more lime; when the stone walls are finally done, they have peaks for a pitched roof and notches in them for rafters. Over a packed dirt layer for the floor he lays lime mortar, surfaced it with large river rocks. For troweling the mortar flat before adding the stones, he uses a stone trowel. Bamboo bars in the windows are evidently designed to keep large varmints out, held in place with lime mortar, stones, and lashing. He gashes several pine trees at the base with the bamboo “celt” to produce pine pitch, placing palm leaves to collect the pitch. Young hardwood logs are mortared in place atop the stone walls as rafters. He chisels a round hole in the doorway’s threshold, and a corresponding one in the lintel, for a hinge. After harvesting and splitting numerous three-meter bamboo poles, he pounds the splits flat, then weaves them into several three-meter-square mats. Combining the tapped resin, foraged resin, and pounded charcoal, he makes his glue again, this time in a ceramic pot on a three-stone stove, and paints it onto his bamboo roof panels to be installed in the lower layers of the roof before installing them on the roof, perhaps to stick the layers together. #video (99 minutes long)
on 02024-04-05