Just ONE survival skill. Ah, I was setting aside this weekend to practice a few skills I have not done in a while. I need to work on my hand drill fire. My bow drilling is great but my technique while doing a hand drill fire start are fairly week. I need to practice since I will be demonstrating both methods in a few months. I also need to do some flaking and make a few slate or obsidian knifes. Since we are stuck in snow, I want to try an in snow fire, since that is rather challenging to get a working. We will see what I actually get done...
Fire lightin is a hard thing to do. It certainly take patience and time. It took me 10 minutes to get a good ball of lite kindling. Bow drill still works the best for me. Two pieces of dry light wood, a round dowl or stick, a bow stick, and a shoelace. The bow and lace wrap around once on the dowl stick. One piece of dry wood on bottom one on top. You work the bow back and forth to round off all edges. Then you take a knife and pit out a place for the dowl to rest on both pieces of dry wood. One piece sits flat on the ground. The other piece you support with your hand the dowl sits in between. Work the dowl with the bow back and forth until you have a smooth rounded surface on the two pieces of wood and on both ends of the wood. You then take your knife and notch out rounded hole that sits on the ground so that part of the rounded pit is open to the air. You put the kindling whether it be dryer lint or in my case torn up newspaper and hay. (All I had around the place at the time). Here is a secret. Once you are at this point take your hand and rub your natural oils over the end of the dowl that sits under the wood on top under your hand. This keeps this side from smoking and forces all the friction you can to work on the bottom piece. Then you bow back and forth for about 5 minutes or so until you start getting the piece of wood smoking like crazy. The skill comes in figuring out when to slow the drill down by half when it gets hot enough. A deduction in speed and increase in force on the very hot and smoking wood causes embers to fall into the kindling. The hardest part for me and most, is getting those small tiny little glowing embers to light the kindling. It takes very hard blowing getting the embers bigger and bigger until they will cach and ignite. It is not a quick process and takes some time. But, fun to learn if you have the patience. I tried the hand drill this weekend, but my fumbly fingers can't get it going as fast as the bow drill. Sometime I will take photos of all this stuff and post it or something. But thats a general idea of the process.
As soon as you have a chance, you can use another survival skill, which involves a .22 rifle and a bird feeder full of corn. That will probably prevent further engine patch jobs - and as an added bonus, you can eat squirrel for a whole week.I ended up using a very useful survival skill this last weekend. Squirrels had chewed up the electrical and vacuum systems in my work car.
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