How to Start a Fire using a Bow-Drill

First things first, you must know how to make a bow drill before you can put it to use so here we are​

You'll need a​

• pocket knife

Step #1: Understand that a bow-drill; consists of four parts: the bow, the hand-hold, the spindle or drill and the fireboard. The hand-hold and the fireboard are held on either side of the spindle, which is spun by the bow to generate friction, heat and, finally, fire. Rub your hand together back and forth to understand the concept of generating heat through friction.


Step #2: Make your bow from a light sturdy sapling, slightly longer than your arm from shoulder to fingertip.


Step #3: Tie a piece of nylon cord from one end of the bow to the other, like a bow for archery. If you don't have a nylon cord, you can use string, a shoelace, a strip of cloth or whatever is available.


Step #4: Use a dry, soft wood such as cottonwood, willow, larch, cedar, sassafras, alder, aspen, poplar, box alder or basswood to make the other parts of the drill.


Step #5: Make sure the hold piece fits into your hand snugly and firmly. Carve a small depression in one side of the hand-hold for the spindle to ride in.


Step #6: Cut your spindle from a branch 3/4-inch wide and 6 inches long. It should be round and straight. Carve both ends of the spindle to a dull point.


Step #7: Make you fireboard about a 1/2-inch thick and flat on both sides. Make a depression in it, like the hand-hold, for the other side of the spindle to ride in.




Tips & Warnings

• Once you have a good apparatus, keep the pieces with you to use over and over.
• Always be careful around fire.
• Fire in the wilderness can easily get out of control. Keep your fire well contained in a fire-pit.

Putting your spindle to use, burning in your apparatus

Step #1: Place your fire board on the dry ground (no debris that could catch on fire) and place your left foot across it to hold it stable, with your right knee on the ground. If you're left-handed, do the reverse.

Step #2: Wrap the string of your bow around the spindle once.
Step #3: Place the bottom end of the spindle in the notch on your fire board. Hold it in place by putting the top end of the spindle into the handhold notch and pressing down on the handhold.

Step #4: Hold one end of the bow in your right hand, with the string side facing inward, toward your left knee.

---->continued

 

Step #5: Lean down over your left knee and press down slightly on the handhold with your left hand. Move your right arm back and forth in a sawing motion, causing the spindle to spin back and forth.


Step #6: Increase the speed of the sawing motion and the intensity of your handhold pressure until the fire board begins to smoke.

Step #7: Do this for a while to grease your handhold notch and "burn in" your fire board to prepare your apparatus to start a fire.


Tips & Warnings

• You only have to burn in your apparatus once.
• Make sure you mark your spindle so that the same end is always pointing up.

Starting your fire
Step #1: Prepare a small tepee of twigs in your fire pit. Make sure you have enough fuel readily available.
Step #2:Gather a palm-sized ball of dry fibrous vegetation, such as dry grass or inner tree bark. Wad the material together to form a nestlike tinder ball.

Step #3: Keep your tinder ball near your fire board and place your spindle in its fire board notch.
Step #4: Operate your apparatus until your fire board begins to smoke, give it about ten more strokes even after it starts to smoke.
Step #5: Lift your apparatus carefully away from the fire board. Notice that a small piece of coal has developed from the wood dust worn off by the action of the spindle.
Step #6: Use a small twig to nudge the coal from the fire board into the tinder ball, like an egg in a nest.
Step#7: blow gently on the tinder ball until flames develop.
Step #8: Place your burning tinder ball inside your twig tepee and carefully fuel your fire.

 

I'm a fan of a fire saw myself much easier than the plow and I find it easier than the bow too.

 

Good job, but it'll work better if you make a notch at the edge of the wood and drill next to that. Air is a key factor for fire, you should be able to produce a coal faster, and the coal will also fall onto the tinder from the notch. Then you just cup the tinder and gently blow on it until it smokes and makes fire.
Make sure the firewood is already set up so you can quickly put the lit tinder to catch it and make it blaze. Preparation is another key factor.

Making fire this way is easy once you get the hang of it, but to practice, use a wood that is too hard to make coal, this way you'll have to work harder to get the motion going, and when you use softer wood, making a coal should be a lot easier.

Peace

 

Birthday candles are small, easy to light, burn for several minutes, and will spontaneously relight in wind and rain. Cotton cloth is good tinder, especially if scorched or charred. Adding a little powdered charcoal or the power from an ammunition cartridge will improve it too. A plastic spoon will burn for about 10 minutes (long enough to dry out and ignite small tinder and kindling). For primitive methods to be successful, the materials must be BONE DRY.

 

Yeah man, but personally, I wouldn't burn any plastic unless in a survival situation... there's plenty of nature to use instead.
Got any potato chips or the like? They make great fire starter having so much grease in them, and the salt turns the flame green...pretty cool.

 

Ah. I was in a wilderness therapy program (for troubled youth) where bow-drill fires were required to pass weeks. I bet it would take me awhile to bust one out now though...

 

You might want to go check out the site Wildwoodsurvival.com they have lots of info and neat tricks.
Peace people

 

Hahaha man I love your how toos !!!

 

how long it will be burned...?

 

Kept a fire going in camp constantly, banking it up when we left to fish or turned in at night and then blowing it back to life from the coals. I honestly think we had three or four days' worth of fires off the first.

 

I went camping for 3 days in the mountains, and as always, I'm the only one who can make a decent fire... but the next night, we had a massive thunderstorm. I managed to get a 4 foot bonfire from wet wood and only one match.
Good to know I can do that when I need to... lol, so was the group I was with.