Bow Drill Monthly: February Pine
Jamie Dakota
The second of a monthly series we are creating here at Howl: A Bow drill set from scratch in the wild. Crafting a set, and taking ember to flame with tinder available on the day.
The month myself and Max stepped out into the tail end of storm Caira to employ the technique in difficult circumstances. Adding to this, we used Pine to build our bow drill set from. A species which can be quite reliable in wet weather as the natural resin content helps to keep the wood a little drier, but as a species that Max hadn’t really used before it also proved to be a good training session.
Rab Sil-tarp doing it’s thing
Today’s weather was very windy with gusts up to 50mph, with snow on the ground and intermittent hail. Temperatures around 0C, -5C with wind chill but not that cold really once in the forest. It had rained and snowed heavily for the previous day. Once again as we knew we were wanting a friction fire we began collecting a tinder bundle as soon as we entered the forest.
Unlike last month, there was no sun and no chance of drying the tinder out much before we needed it. Max put the collection of driest cleavers and bracken we could find in his main jacket pocket, hopefully some body heat would dry it a little. We then collected a seed-head from a stand of Reedmace (Typha Latifolia) to use as the core of the tinder bundle, again trying to select a dry one which I them placed in a trouser pocket.
We walked to a pine plantation without our woodland base, and looked for a fallen tree or larger branch. You can see the changeable weather we were having, as we collected the wood we had sunshine…it wasn’t to last though.
“The first piece of dead standing we sourced was slightly damp as it was exposed to the elements more than the limbs next to it. Taking another limb which was more upright than the previous and thicker, we used this dry section for our drill and hearth board.” -Max. You can see below the two different sections, the one on the left is wet.
We’d decided today to work together to produce a single bow drill set that we could use between us. For me one of the huge values of this techniques over others is that you can operate it as a pair, or even a group, to share to work and produce a reliable ember with minimum effort. We also had to set up a tarp as the snow started falling for readily, which gave us a clear space to work and keep the wood as dry as possible.
“We both worked to create the set with myself carving the spindle and JD creating the hearth.” -Max
We used a range of knife techniques, switching between them al swiftly to produce a set quickly.
”Once we had a set ready JD burned the set in as I prepared the dead cleavers and bracken ready for the coal to be placed in, making sure to be extremely particular with how dry each part of my bundle was to maximise success.” -Max
Burning in the set, aimed to char the entire end of the spindle before carving a notch. With the notch carved we got to work.
“Foot in place, wrist braced and spindle in bow. We both worked again in unison to draw the bow back and forth, making sure that the pressure was just right as to not polish the resinous pine ( which it has a tendency to do).
We created a large coal without much effort as we were working as a team, placing the coal into the prepared tinder, it took quite a while for myself to blow the ember into a flame as I was working with damp tinder and the outside temperature was in the negative.”- Max
As you can see in the video, once the notch was cut it took 13 minutes to get the fire. With the time to collect and carve the set it took a total of 1 hour, moving around and putting up the tarp included.
Thanks for reading! The next instalment will be from our Bow Drill day course in March…
If you’d like to learn this technique yourself, check out our wildfire course below.
In this detailed bushcraft course I’ll give you all the tuition you need to be successful in making wildfire from natural materials. This one day course is a detailed experience of hands on work enabling you to make fire from scratch this way in the wild.