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Bushcraft: Light My fire

Bushcraft: Light My fire

Depending on where you are and what you are planning on doing, and what permission you have regarding fires on the land you are using – and of course the level of fire risk – your fire may be a stove of some sort, be it liquid, gas or solid fuel, a fire in a metal ‘fire-pit’, or an open fire. Commercial liquid and gas stoves will come with their own instructions and it is quite simple to build a DIY meths burner or a wood burning ‘hobo’ stove (I hope to touch on these at a future date), but for many, the ideal bushcraft experience centres on an open fire of wood gathered on site.

As I mentioned in the ‘Location’ article, you do not want to risk damaging your site with out-of-control fires, so preparing the fireplace is important: Clear the area of any ground cover that may accidentally ignite (leaf litter and such) down to a mineral soil and then either dig a fire pit (saving the turf to replace after you are finished with the fire), build an ‘altar’ fire or prepare a long-term fireplace for repeated use. Ensure no overhanging vegetation is going to get scorched by the fire, no roots are liable to be burnt or any wayward sparks can be easily extinguished, and you are good to go.

The Fire Triangle

To create the chemical reaction we call ‘fire’, you need three things – heat, fuel and oxygen. Without all three, you will not create fire. This is often described as ‘The Fire Triangle’. Remove any of the three and the triangle is not made. Strangely enough, wood is not what burns in a fire.

What burns is a gas given off from warmed wood, so you have to get your wood up to temperature to get a blaze going. If your wood is frozen, wet or full of sap, you have to provide more heat to warm the wood and dry out any water or sap before the wood can give off the flammable gasses. Incomplete combustion produces smoke; complete combustion gives flame and ashes.
To make it easy for a small source of heat such as a match flame, lighter flame, spark or ember to light a fire, you need to start with very thin tinder or shavings that are easily warmed to ignition point. The tinder or shavings will then provide more heat, easily warming larger pieces of wood, which in turn can warm larger pieces, until you have a fire big enough and hot enough to ignite your chunkiest fuel.

The best source of wood gathered wild is not taken from the cold, damp ground, but is found as deadwood that is either still attached to a living tree or broken off naturally and hung up above the ground in branches or low vegetation. Even if it is soaked by rain on the outside, ‘dead standing’ wood can be split down to reveal dry, seasoned wood inside. You will need to collect and prepare your firewood well in advance of thinking of starting your fire. There is little more frustrating than having achieved your first flame and then running out of suitable kindling and the flame dying, as you go off to get more fuel!

Making The Grade

It is a good idea to grade your fire materials: First tinder – small wood shavings, dried grass: Second tinder – bigger shaving: First kindling – sticks the width of matchsticks: Second kindling – sticks of under pencil width: Third kindling – sticks of finger-width: Small fuel – sticks of between finger and wrist width: Fuel – anything bigger than wrist width.

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If you are lighting your fire on the ground, you need to protect your first kindling from the cold and damp, so a layer of ‘small fuel’ size pieces should be used to act as a bed for the first tinder. A handful of small tinder should be enough for most conditions and on top of this I would put a ‘hatful’ of second tinder (being sure that you have access to light the first tinder). Once the second tinder has caught, you can feed in the first kindling, around a double handful of pieces around six-inches long, and when that is alight, start feeding in the second kindling and so on until you are happily burning your fuel pieces.

If you are lucky, you will find all the grades of wood for the taking, but it is quite possible to get everything from one log by splitting it down. First tinder can be scrapings from larger pieces, second tinder – shavings or fine feather sticks, first kindling – coarser feathersticks and fine split wood and so on. Good pickable first tinders can include dried grass, fluffy seed heads, shreds of birch bark and dry dead stems of other plants such as Alexanders. Fine birch twigs or larch twigs make excellent second tinders and thicker birch and larch twigs some of the best second tinders. Fine curls of birch bark and birch twigs contain oils that catch fire quickly, burn hot and strong and for a good time.

To light your tinder you can use a match or lighter, but many bushcrafters prefer to use a firesteel (AKA sparkstick or Ferro rod) – a length of composite elements that you strike either with a provided scraper or the back of your knife – or basically anything sharp enough to peel off shards of the sparkstick. I have even used broken crockery! A ‘Flint and Steel’ set is a plain or shaped forged carbon steel striker that is struck against a natural rock such as flint or quartz, with the sharp rock sending sparks off the steel to land on a piece of charcloth first tinder. You can even make fire by friction, with a bow drill or hand drill set.

With a sparkstick you can either hold the scraper still and pull the rod under it, or hold the rod still and run the scraper down it to shower sparks onto the tinder. The sparks are ferociously hot and should ignite the tinder with ease. Flint and Steel is a little more involved, but very satisfying. You will need to prepare a kit which in its basic form can be a piece of broken old carbon steel file, a sharp piece of flint and some charcloth.

Charcloth

Charcloth is like charcoal made from cloth – almost 100% carbon that takes a spark easily and makes an ember. To make charcloth, I roll a 100% cotton loop-stitch tea towel into an old syrup tin. The lid, with a small hole punched in it, is fitted and the tin put into a fire. As the tin heats it ‘cooks’ the cotton, sending smoke (and sometimes flame) shooting out of the hole in the lid. Once the smoke is reduced to a trickle, the tin is retrieved and the hole plugged (I often push the tin upside down into soft damp soil) and allowed to cool thoroughly. Once totally cold, the tin can be opened (do it too soon and the still hot cotton will be fed oxygen and complete the fire triangle and burn away) and the prepared charcloth brought out.

Hold the flint in a pinch grip in your left hand with your thumb on top, trapping a piece of charcloth with an edge of cloth about 1.2mm from the sharp edge. Hold the steel in your right hand in a pinch grip so you can strike the thin edge of the steel on the sharp flint. The action is a scrape of the steel on the flint, so that the edge can peel off tiny fragments of steel as sparks. Hopefully the sparks will land on the charcloth, instantly causing the charcloth to glow red. As the charcloth turns to an ember, drop it into a ‘birds-nest’ of prepared fine first tinder, snug the tinder around the ember and, gently at first, and then strongly, blow it to flame.

Once you have your fine tinder burning – from sparkstick or Flint and Steel – you can light your prepared fire with it, just as with a match or lighter. Once your first tinder is alight, you have the elements of the fire triangle together – heat, fuel and oxygen – but sometimes you may want to help the fire by increasing the amount of oxygen it is getting. Blowing on the fire, or fanning the flames using a hat, hand or something like a plate will do this, but start gently. Too much draft can simply blow the struggling fire out!

In really bad weather, homemade ‘Bushcraft Failsafes’ can help a lot. A tinder made from cotton wool smeared in petroleum jelly (Vaseline), strips of old bicycle inner tube rubber or a small container of alcohol gel (alcohol based hand sanitizer or commercial fire gel) can help immensely, while DIY firelighters of sawdust soaked in old candle wax get a fire going with ease.

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