Fire by hand drill

Fire by hand drill

Wednesday 28 September 2011

Transporting fire

This Ganoderma species will hold an ember for several hours smouldering away. It gives off immense heat and cannot be carried by hand. I fashioned a branch holder to carry it.

When you want a fire just put it against a tinder bundle and with a few blows, due to the intense heat you will have flame.

Excellent stuff. It means if you manage an ember from a hand drill you can prolong the ember for a few hours and even dry out tinder on it.

A very usefull resource.

This stuff can also be used to make amadou, however it needs chemicals which are hard to collect and process in a short space of time so I don't bother.

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3 comments:

Perkunas said...

Hey buddy,

here in our country, amadou was made by peeling the layer out of it, then hammering it gently into thin as possible plate that was then boiled. The boiling stuff was a simple. You just burned amount of birch, collected all the coal and dust it left, and then you boiled the coal mixed with water, in some pot on other container.Then you poured the liquid, through cloth in to another pot and the boiled the amadou in that liquid. Then just dried it and its ready do suck those sparks from flint and steel. The better amadou was made like that too but after it was once dried, you drowned amadou in to jar of human or animal pee, for few days and then dried it in the sun and wind. It somehow works better, ive noticed, the urine as it dries, turns into something that catches the spark and lits better.

Perkunas said...

The smouldering horseshoe fungus was also carried, before time of flint & steel , wrapped loosely in moist moss, that was then stuffed in leather bag,pouch or similar, that had a few small holes in the bottom and cord adjusted mouth, so man could easily adjust the airflow to moss insulated fungus, to keep it slowly smouldering , protected from rain that might put end to the smoulder, and also, from wind that wears the fungus too fast,as it isnt so common here and you could not replace it always,not to mention the difficult process of lighting it up again. That was hard once, because flintstone is something you dont find in our nature,it was all brought sales item. Nowadays you can find flintstone, quite lot of it, at large river banks and old sailboat docks & harbours, as the ships carried flintstone unintentionally among the ballast weight that was often dumped into shores. So you gotta just know old harbour places, and gather the flintstone from shore.

Andrew Boe said...

Really interesting mate, thanks.