campfires | | Page 2

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……

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.

The perfect meld of backwoods, backyard, and back in the day

Tag Archives: campfires

Bow Drill Kit – Primitive Fire

The H60 Firestarter