Cutting Wood for a Bow Drill Fire Starter

Video Transcript

"Here's the cut bow I selected. And as you can see if I put it up to my armpit, to my hand it's almost just right. The length. There's some people who actually will select a bow that sometimes is too short. You can see I selected the bow that goes right to almost the end of my finger. And you can see the curve. The reason why I keep stressing this bow, a lot of people will get a straight stick. This is a sycamore by the way. They'll get a, this is not really straight but this is a sample. They'll try to bend it, and what they'll do is they'll actually get some nylon string right here, and they'll bend it, and it creates extra stress when you doing the bow. The whole thing about doing a bow drill is it's not supposed to be some exercise that involves massive amounts of calorie burning and sweating. It's supposed to get your heart rate going, but you're supposed to create a bow that is relatively a exercise that gets the job done. It doesn't create a lot of calorie burning. So this you want to get rid of, you don't want to use straight sticks to make a bow. And another thing I want to show you real quick. When you're doing the bow drill you always want the bow on the outside. You never want the bow on the inside when you start to do the bow drill, because you're going to be hitting your ankle. It's almost like playing the violin, you want the bow positioned like this, and I'll show you this in some other exercises coming up. And you want to create enough tension in this nylon cord to create a smooth motion, not a stressful, back breaking exercise where you're sweating and you're burning calories. The whole thing about wilderness survival, the key to wilderness survival is you take in more calories than you burn. That's how you survive in the wilderness. If you, if it takes me all day to make a fire, I'm going to in the long run be in big trouble. So let's go on to the next exercise."