Video By T Jack Survival
Please support their channel by subscribing here

Transcription provided by American Preppers Network

Number of speakers: 2  (Matt, Tyler)
Duration: 15 min 56 sec

Wilderness Survival Skills Pt 3/4: Hand Drill, Tarp Shelter, & Resource Gathering

Hand Drills:

Matt: “Hi, I’m Matt with Boulder Outdoor Survival School and what we are gonna talk about here this early afternoon is hand drill fire. We are gonna go ahead and make a fire, I think its tea time so I think we are gonna boil up some water and make a natural tea. To do that we are going to use and hand drill set to light the fire.”

“Hand Drills are a very, very universal, very ancient way, to make fire by friction. Some of the benefits of making a hand drill over a bow drill are that it is much simpler to make. Not as many moving parts and not as fidgety. On the flip side of it is one of the cons is that it takes much more practice and really perfect material and perfect form to be able to perform hand drills reliably.”

“So, here are some various iterations of a hand drill set. What I recommend and what I teach in the field is usually starting with some sort of spindle that will be from arm pit to wrist length. Much longer than that and you will get to much play at the top. Almost like trying to spin a car antenna or radio antenna. It wants to whip around. Any longer than that is not ideal. Shorter than that is going to be harder for someone just learning. The material that I am using for these spindles is generally some sort of flower stalk that has a piffy center and this ones been used so it’s a little harder to see.”

“The other component we are looking for is what we call a hearth board. A hearth board is these three items here. You’re looking for generally looking for things on the softer side than you would for a bow drill. So, something like yucca or our local material, my personal favorite, is the root of the cotton wood tree. I am going to go ahead and do a demonstration.”

“With anything fire, it doesn’t matter if you’re using a match, or a lighter, or a Ferro rod, or a hand drill. Proper prior preparation prevents piss poor performance. (Editor’s note: Say that five times fast. Lol) The old military saying, so, everything that I want to make a sustainable fire needs to be ready to go before I start putting this into service.”

“So, we’ve got our tinder bundle ready, we’ve got kindling and a fire lay ready to go. I’m going to get myself in a comfortable, level position. Get myself in a nice comfortable tri-pod and I’m actually going to wet my hand slightly to give me traction on my spindle. Seat my spindle and then I’m gonna start warming the board. So, what I am doing, this technique is called floating. Floating is kind of a modern, aboriginal innovation as far as I can tell, but it is very useful. The reason being, I don’t have to migrate down the spindle and then quickly move back to the top. I can continue spinning just by adding a little rocking motion with my hand. I can keep my hand stationary and actually warm up the board and start creating.

You can see already I have a notch full of dust and it’s smoking pretty heavily from the periphery of the spindle. It’s not an ember yet. I am basically just building my heat and budgeting my energy.”

“At this point I’ve got a full notch and I’ve got some good heat so I am gonna go ahead and start adding some more speed and downward pressure. You can see I just have to move my hands back up to the top really quickly. And now, I have an ember and the reason I know that is because that smoke is coming from the pile of fuel I created. So at this point I am actually not in a hurry. A lot of people see that ember and get excited, they’re tired, out of breath, and their hands are probably shaking. “

“You have time with this. What I’m gonna do is gently pull the board away from the ember and let that ember collet into a nice solid material. Right now it is basically a pile of powder or piled dust.

If I gently fan it you can see it starts to glow. So I want to bring my nest to my ember. At this point it is held together well enough that you should be able to gently lift it up without it falling apart. Then I will gently tap it in to my tinder nest.”

“Here is where this little glowing ember becomes a flame. It’s got more fuel to grow into but it needs oxygen so I’m just going to gently start blowing on it. There we go.”

Making Teas:

Tyler: “To make tea one of the things we are gonna use is pine needles which has a lot of vitamin c in it. We have what’s called Brigham tea or Phedra tea, which is a stimulate and then some elder berry. This is a little prudent so they kind of balance themselves.”

Matt: “So there’s some wild tea brewed on a fire made with a hand drill.”

A-Frame Poncho Shelter:

Kirsten: “What we have here is an A-Frame poncho shelter. To start with you want to make a very taught ridge-line. I’ve connected it between two trees here. In general you want to start at at least a waist level in height. If it’s lower it will keep you warmer. If it is higher it will be a little more spacious but you’ll have more wind flow through it so it could be a little bit colder.”

“On each corner of this you want to pull out from the grommet to about a 45 degree angle, once again making sure your poncho is very taught so that you can have water slide off of this and wind not blow your shelter everywhere. So making sure things are very tight is important in any shelter but particularly in an A Frame.”

“I’ve gone ahead and tied off the hood. Tied it off so no water or precipitation can get in there, but also tied another piece of P-cord to the hood and extended it to the nice tree behind me, once again creating even more tension in this poncho.”

“With two ponchos like this you can fit about three people in there comfortably. The more you put in there the warmer it’s going to be from shared body heat, but two people, one person, this would be a good size for any of them.”

“So when you’re sleeping directly on the ground the biggest problem is the heat transfer from your body to the cold ground that wants to rob you of all your heat. The easy way to take care of that is to build up what we like to call a BOSS duff. This could be anything from dried grasses, leaves, pine needles like they have on the ground here. Bows of trees would do. What you want to do is create insulation to get yourself off the ground to slow down that transfer of heat and allow it to kind of sit around in those empty air spaces so the air pockets in the duff below you.”

“So now that I’m all set up, my shelter is taken care of, I’m gonna go walk the area and look for resources I can eat and use fore other crafts that I have in mind.”

Foraging:

“When we are in survival situations we don’t always have a book telling us all of the wild edibles of the area but those types of food may be really important in your diet if you’re only living off mice and a few greens.”

“So if you’re testing a new plant the first thing you want to do is take a tiny bit of it and rub it on the inside of your wrist and then you want to wait a number of hours to see if you have a reaction. If you don’t have a reaction, you believe it to be something edible you can take the tiniest of bites. Leave it on your tongue for a few seconds and then spit it out and then rinse with some water. See what happens after a few hours, if you have anything going on. If you don’t then maybe you want to take a tiny piece, chew on it, actually swallow it and take it down with some water. If you don’t have a reaction in a few hours go for a small, but larger gathering of that plant. Have that, and then wait a full day and see what your system actually does. Anything that gives you diarrhea, anything that gives you an itchy throat, anything that gives you a stomach ache maybe that food isn’t even poisonous but it is new to your body. If it is causing you harm then maybe you shouldn’t be eating it. That is part of the progression.”

“Alright, so here we have a Ponderosa pine that has been struck by lightning actually. A couple things that are great. One, we have all these fantastic pine needles here on the ground. Nice, duff material right? So we would gather all these perhaps in a large cloth, take them to our camping sight and have bedding material. If we take a closer look at this pine, we actually find that there is a lot of pitch wood on here. Remember that pitch wood is great for flames and making fires and holding onto it. Then throughout all of this we are looking at sap basically. Sap has a lot of uses. I will take pitch and fill in different wounds that I have, cuts or things that are bothering me. Just to patch it and be done with it. Then these pine needles themselves, these larger pine needles are very high in Vitamin C so when you come across this tree with green needles on it you can take off the needles and make a tea. It taste good to. It’s a little bit sweet.”

“So this is a great plant. This is a big sage brush. Its foliage is a anti-microbial. So just by rubbing this in-between my hands it is sort of like hand sanitizer which is fantastic. If I take a bunch of it and have a pile of it we are looking at some fantastic toilet paper and when you look at the shape of this particular one and find a larger example you will find nice straight pieces that don’t have the curvature of the older sage. This is what I use for my bow drill fire kit. Pieces of sage brush. It also has some nice pealy bark on it which we know is great for nest materials. A lot of uses from a big sage brush.”

Knife Sharpening:

“Nice. So this is a good example of something that is getting close, but not quite what we are looking for for a sharpening stone. Sand stone out here works great to sharpen our Scandinavian bevel knife anyways. But you want a very flat surface and of course you need to get to the grit that is appropriate for your knife. These would rip them up and not quite a flat surface. “

Tyler: “Can we grind them out?”

Kirsten: “Yeah you can do some grinding for sure to flatten it a bit but it is nice just to get the perfect stone. Nice, flat and easy to carry. We have so much around so if you keep your eyes peeled you should be able to find something naturally.”

“So when we are looking for sharpening stones a nice place to start might be in the bit of a washer or drainage. Something like this where there has been more abrasion from water. Until you can find smoother pieces, flatter pieces or potentially something you can sharpen your knife with. Consequently out here we are able to find a lot of silk stuff which we use for our socket rocks very frequently. It’s grind-able but holds enough durability that your spindle isn’t actually going to burn into your hands and through the rock.”

“Another thing that is great about these larger slabs of sand stone is they will work very well for dead fall traps. This isn’t a good size or anything but you can see it is fairly flat in surface so we should be able to have a solid drop against another hard, durable surface and really compress and compact the animal for a death blow. Then there is also a little bit of texture to it so I might be able to get my bait sticking in a little bit of a nook without having to use a knife tip or something like that to actually create a little notch on the bottom of my trap. So, our sand stone slab works very well for dead fall traps.”

Cordage material:

Kirsten: “We have some examples of milk weed here. I use this plant for cordage material but what we need to find is dead, second year stalk. This is a small example, but this is a second year stalk from a milkweed plant. So what it can do is crush the plant all the way up to the tip. Open it up, take one half, and bend off all of this hard stuff we don’t want. What we are looking for is the fiber right here and you just peel it off. Once I’ve gotten all of my fiber clean I can twist it in a reverse rap cordage method and ultimately come out with some rope.”

Hand drill:

Matt: “So I mentioned that the hand drill and the technique for the hand drill is deceptively simple and it is. It is basically rubbing one stick against another. But when you get into trying to do this and learn this, especially the beginner. It is extremely difficult to get the technique down and the muscle memory and also just the hand toughness essentially. It is hard on your hands and also hard on your muscles. There are muscles you use doing this that probably never get used for anything else. So, you have to kind of develop those muscles over time and build up to it and not burn yourself out in the process.