Monthly Archives: July 2014

Bow Drill Kit – Primitive Fire

by Woodsbum

Ok… I have a confession to make that many of you already figured out. I am kinda lazy about certain things. Well, many things. To come to my own defense, however, I do try and work smarter and not harder. This being the case, I decided that I was too lazy to actually pull up long term memory or use trial and error to find the materials to build a bow drill set. In the past I would get a wild hair up my hind quarters and decide to go get some cedar and poplar to play around with just to show off. Since it has been a while I somehow fogot the “fingernail test” (knowing the right hard/soft wood combo) that I used to use to find the perfect drill/hearth combo. This made me decide to go purchase an actual bow drill set online so I had a working set to reestablish a working “fingernail test” for future field expedient bow drill sets.

WELL, it came in the mail today so I had to test it out……..

Here is the picture of the kit:

Primitive Fire Bow Drill Kit

The kit from Primitive Fire comes with:

1 Hardwood bow
2 Cottonwood hearth/fire boards
3 Cottonwood spindles/drills
1 Ceramic palm rock
1 Quart size bag of shredded jute twine
12′ Jute
1 Leather coal catcher
Instructions

Of course I had to play around a bit so I ran downstairs to the parking garage and got my implements of destruction ready.

Ready to play

Because I did remember the techniques and tricks showed to me as a kid, I did as I was originally taught. I drilled until I got some black powder produced and then dropped that back on top of the hearth.

A little powder produced

Once that is put back onto the hearth and you drill some more, it doesn’t take long to get smoke/embers. This was about 10 seconds of drilling to get this result. I am not kidding about the 10 seconds, either.

Smoke from a 10 second drilling session

As you can see, the embers can be shaken onto the leather piece for easier moving over to the jute bundle/tinder you want to ignite. This also keeps you from burning your hands as much. In the picture below there are two big chunks of burning dust. They are in the center of the picture and the large chunk on the right side of the picture, towards the back of the pile. I drilled much longer than I needed to and got a lot more embers than needed. This was intentional so that I could get a good picture.

Embers

Here is me poking the pile with my finger in an attempt to get you a good picture. For the record, I did burn the tip of my finger to get this picture.

Two embers

Here are my final thoughts on this:

The “palm rock” is awesome and I would have purchased this regardless
The kit works very well and is easy to use
As a kit to learn with, it is quite good
If you can remember the hardness/softness of the wood you need to make a bow drill set work, you don’t need the whole kit….. Maybe just the “palm rock.”
Extra, stripped jute is always a good thing…. Especially if you didn’t have to strip it.

I hope this helps you guys and you learned something. I have yet to pull out their instructions and look at them, but the whole idea is pretty straight forward. If you get one, I really doubt that you will be unhappy. Again, the “palm rock” really is nice……

Emergency Roadside Car Kit

Leave a reply

by Gunguy

A couple of months ago my car battery died. I was in the city and it was no big deal to get a jump with the cables I had and drive to the auto store and buy a new battery. At the time I didn’t have the portable jump starter. If the same thing happened while I was out in the woods or during a disaster I would be out of luck, especially if I was out of cell phone range. With potential problems like that on my mind I wanted to share the contents of my emergency roadside kit.

This kit doesn’t include any first aid or other preps. Just stuff that I would need to get the car moving again. Those other preps are included but not in the kit below. I have the contents in an old duffel bag and that allows me to take it with me if I’m going to use another car. If’ y’all have any suggestions let me know.

Flat Tire Repair
Heavy Duty Tubeless Tire Repair Kit

Heavy Duty Portable Compressor

Dead Battery
Heavy Duty Booster Cables

Portable Power Bank and Car Jump Starter

Stuck in a Ditch
Tow Strap with Forged Hooks and Clips x 2

4-Ton Dual Gear Power Puller

Bow Making Outing – Part 1

Leave a reply

by Woodsbum

This past weekend I met up with a few other guys and started a new project to build my first bow. The whole process is actually fairly easy and straight forward. Well, it was up to this point at least.

We used the following instructions to do our project: link but there were additional instructions at this link. The hardest part was actually finding the wood. I ended up getting a 10 foot chunk from Home Depot and cut the middle portion out. It is better than anything else I could find, but it is definitely not the quality needed for making a good bow. With a backing, however, it is usable.

The first step was to cut the wood to length. They recommend using the length of your “wingspan.” Basically measure from finger tip to finger tip with your arms outstretched. For ease of measurement, I just cut mine at 76 inches. This allowed me to divide it into 4 equal 19 inch sections. You can easily read the instructions that contain the measurements so I won’t bore you wit those details. I only suggest that you pick an overall measurement that won’t be a pain in the rear to actually mark out on the wood.

This is basically what we are building.

Bow we are building

Here is a side view of the bow, tillering board and the rasp I was using to shape the wood.

Tools and bow

You can see the tillering board, some of my junk in the background of the first picture, a couple blanks on the right side and a finished example of what we are building. The second picture really shows you the rasp to get for shaping the bow. I used this rasp and went mostly with the grain as opposed to the others going across the grain. My results were a rough shaped bow in about 2 hours versus the others not even having one of the 4 sides completed.

For those of you who want to make something all spiffy and nifty just remember that this is a basic bow. It won’t earn you any longing stares of envy from others at a shooting range, but it seems to be a great starting point to learn. In all reality, it isn’t that bad for something you are making yourself.

I do have a couple tips for you that I learned (the hard way) after shaving off the 2 ends of the board.

Be really careful of your lines.
Straddle the board to hold one end with the other end tied off/clamped down/etc.. This position gives you good working area and access as if it were a shave horse or something.
Use long strokes with the wood. It keeps the sides much smoother and cleaner.
Don’t rush.

Here is a good picture of the rasping progress after about 30 minutes. Granted, I got much quicker and better as I went along.

Bow being made

I only had a chance to work for 2 hours before I had to go back to see the wife before she left for work. Here is one end of the bow. The other end looks just like this.

Prepped end

There are more tools that I need to make to finish up this project. This is one of them: a scale and frame to attach the tillering board to.

Scale and frame to tiller our bows

I also have some more rasping to do. It will take a while to get everything done, but keep checking back for Part 2 of this build. Anything else I learn along the way, I will post up so you can learn from my mistakes.

This is a picture of all the books that Rick brought with him and has used to get to his current skill level in bow making. Several of these titles will be added to my collection eventually. This really seems like it will be a very addicting hobby.

Some books I will have to add to my collection

The H60 Firestarter

1 Reply

by Woodsbum

Being a complete gear freak has its benefits at times. I ran into a phenomenal piece of gear that I feel needs a post. During an outing with several BushcraftUSA members, I saw the absolute best firesteel I have ever seen. One of the people there works for a company that builds and sells the H60. It is absolutely incredible.

Let me start off by telling you a bit about the H60 itself. Here is a picture of what they look like.

H60 Firesteel

They have a magnesium rod on one side and a normal ferro rod on the other. The handle is made from wood and it includes a striker that is attached via a leather lanyard. What makes this firesteel special are really two things:

The quality of the product that allows it to produce the incredible sparks it can throw.
The warranty.

Here is another picture of the H60 with an Izula-II for size comparison.

H60 and Izula-II

As you can see, it is fairly large. This design gives you ample amounts of magnesium and wood to use to get a flame going. I have taken the H60 and shaved off the magnesium and wood handle into a twig bundle (Apache match) and ignite the entire bundle with a single strike of the ferro rod. This thing throws sparks like a fiend.

Since I couldn’t catch a good picture of the actual rod sparking, I had to grab a bunch of other people’s pictures for this post. Here is a SMALL set of sparks that the H60 throws.

H60 tossing sparks

The guy who sells these had his son running around playing with one. The son was able to strike the ferro rod and throw a spark, NO JOKE, 10 feet. The two of them were running around throwing sparks at each other like it was a water fight. The distances that these sparks were going was simply amazing.

When I heard about the lifetime warranty on this piece of gear, I quickly purchased one. The H60 has a LIFETIME warranty. This includes the following:

Manufacturer defects
Wear from normal use

Yes, you heard that right….. WEAR FROM NORMAL USE!!!

I have slowly gotten away from using a firesteel because I have gone through so many of them in the past. They wear down fairly quickly during my camping season and thus I picked up using flint and steel. I can find new flint/chert with relative ease and the steel strikers last forever it seems. Now that I discovered the H60, I have a great piece of gear that I can use when I feel extremely lazy and don’t want to blow an ember into flame.

The H60’s run around the $25 range and can be purchased through this link here. If you do end up getting one, please let him know that you found the information on this site. I won’t get anything for it, but it will at least let him know that people do love his product.

APEX M&P Duty / Carry Action Enhancement Kit Review

Leave a reply

by Gunguy

I purchased the APEX Duty / Carry AEK kit about a month ago. The installation was a pain in the ass because I did all the work on my kitchen table but the effort was well worth it. Keep in mind that you will not be able to install the Apex Ultimate Striker Block part of the kit if you do not have a bolted down vise or a SW MP Sight Mover. After you install the entire kit you will need a sight mover at the range so you can rezero your sights.

Before I installed the Apex kit the trigger on my MP9 was mushy and had a false reset. After the kit installation the trigger was smooth and the trigger reset was pronounced. The trigger reset was a 100% better but it’s not as defined as in my Sig 229. The greatest thing about installing the Apex kit was that my groups at 50 feet were considerably tighter. You can see the before and after results below.

APEX Duty / Carry AEK

: Before Apex AEK at Fifty Feet

After Apex AEK at Fifty Feet