Wood for Making a Bow Drill Fire Starter

Series Summary

Starting a fire without matches is an essential survival skill. There are many primitive fire starting techniques to use to start a fire in the wilderness. Using a bow drill fire starter is a tried-and-true method of starting a fire without any incendiary device such as matches, lighters or flares. Learning how to make and use a bow drill is actually fairly easy with expert instruction. Start a fire without matches using a bow drill fire starter! Learn how to make and use a bow drill fire starter to start a fire without matches using the primitive fire starting tips in this free video series featuring wilderness survival expert Rocco Spinelli. Spinelli demonstrates how to choose the right wood to make a bow drill, how to cut wood to make a bow drill fire starter, how to make a spindle for a bow drill, how to make a bow drill fireboard, how to burn a notch in bow drill fireboard, how to start a fire with a bow drill and how to build a fire from a bow drill fire starter.

Video Transcript

"Okay, my name is Rocco Spinelli and this exercise, I'm going to show you the steps to make a bow drill. Throughout the Americas the Native Americans used the bow drill to start fires. It's actually one of the easiest ways to make fire. So I brought some woods here, some of the softer woods which you want to use when you start out. Which is this is the sycamore and this is a cedar. Very medium woods. A wood like this wood, which is a hard oak, you want to avoid. Because until you master the bow drill I'd stay away from hard woods, or woods that have pitch in it. So we're going to put this wood aside, because this wood we don't want to use. This is oak. We want to stick with these two, this is a sycamore as you can see. And this is cedar, which is really I would say starting out is probably the easiest wood to use. I'm going to put this oak aside right now and let's start with this cedar. Cedar is definitely my choice of wood to use. And it is present right over here. So I'm going to put this down and what we're going to do now is we're going to start from point A, which is the actual gathering of the bow itself. And we're going to walk around here and find the actual proper shaping for the bow."