In this episode of the Primitive Camping & Bushcraft Podcast, Chris Speir shares practical fire-starting hacks for quick and efficient fires in the wilderness. Covering everything from fatwood and ferro rods to unconventional methods like using a Fresnel lens or a water bottle, Chris walks listeners through reliable techniques to ensure they can always get a fire going, no matter the conditions.
Episode Overview:
Fire-Starting Hacks Covered:
Fire Kits and Their Importance:
Community & Engagement:
(upbeat music)
Welcome back to the Primitive
Camping in Bushcraft Podcast.
My name is Chris Speir
and I'm gonna be your guide
to enjoying the great outdoors.
So over the past several weeks,
we've been going through fire.
We've really been breaking
down how to make a bow drill,
how to build a fire
kit, you know, kindling
and your tender, how to start a fire.
And so today what I
figured we're gonna do
is we're gonna talk about some hacks
to get some fast fires when
you're out into the woods.
Now you can follow along,
it's gonna be a little
different than what's in the book,
but we're still gonna
use some of the methods
that's listed in the book on page 176.
So for those of you
that are just now listening
to the podcast, go
ahead and pick up a copy
of Primitive Camping in Bushcraft.
This book is basically the contents of
this entire podcast.
And so if you just go ahead
and pick that up on Amazon
right now, it's like $14.40.
And so it's not too bad.
Then, you know, right here, go ahead,
the channel along and
help the podcast pick you up
a couple of bags of the
Primitive Camping in Bushcraft
Blend Coffee, How Bushcraft Tastes.
Now this stuff is amazing.
I've got people that
don't even go outside
that they ordered this stuff,
and they say it's the best coffee that
they've had in years.
And so it is a fresh
roasted, fresh ground coffee,
and it's sent straight to your doorstep.
So what I got going on today,
we got rebranding or
redoing the fire kits.
Now these are the
Spear Outdoors fire kits,
and it's gonna be
something we talk about here
in the Fast Fires.
But inside this little
tin, it's an Altoids style tin,
and it has a few
pieces of fat wood in there.
It has a ferro rod in here.
And on the bottom of all
that, it has a Fresnel lens,
one of these little magnification lenses
so you can start to fire it that way.
And I tried doing it different ways.
I wanted to put some steel wool in there,
but it would just not make the,
no matter how I did it,
the contents would not
allow the lid to shut,
and so it wouldn't stay shut.
So I took the steel wool out,
and I just added a little
bit more char cloth in there,
and another stick of the fat wood.
Now with this fire kit,
you would be able to
start a fire anywhere
under any situation.
And whether it be dry tender,
whether it be a magnification fire,
whether it be with the fat wood
or the char cloth or whatever.
Now these little kits are pretty cool,
so I'll leave a link
in the description here
where you can pick those up.
But it's a perfectly little kit,
and I'm actually gonna
start doing the fire kit,
and I'm putting together
a fishing kit right now
so you have those two
kits when you own your person
whenever you head out into the woods.
But we're gonna talk
about that a little bit later.
First, we got firewood.
Firewood.
(laughs)
Hey, we got firewood.
Hey everybody, we got some
firewood going on over here.
Fat wood, you got fat wood.
And this stuff, it smells amazing.
Now, a different
company, Minuteman Stoves.
The guy from Minuteman Stoves,
I cannot remember his name.
I apologize if you're listening to this.
I deeply apologize.
But he is a, he puts
together rocket stoves,
and these rocket stoves are amazing.
He sent me one to do some videos with,
and I didn't get a lot
of views on those videos.
But I got some more videos coming up
with the rocket stove coming.
But he's included some of these,
what they call myostics,
but this is just fat wood.
And fat wood is amazing stuff.
And we have talked about it from day one
in the fire section here,
that fat wood is the
way to go to start a fire.
If you have no other way to start a fire,
fat wood is gonna start you a fire.
Now, fat wood goes by many names.
And I'm gonna read word
for word right here, okay?
So bear with me.
I did grow up in Mississippi.
(laughs)
Fat wood goes by many names.
Lighter not, fire pitched, fat lighter,
pitch wood, and many more.
Fat wood is great for fire
because once a coniferous tree dies,
the sap collects in
the dead tree or branch,
and the wood becomes rich
in flammable turpentine,
terpene, a volatile hydrocarbon.
The terpene evaporates,
making the sap extremely hard
and leaving you with
a very flammable wood.
There are roughly 125
different species of conifers
or pine trees worldwide.
So the chances of you
being able to find fat wood
in your location or your
geographic area is very high.
Fat wood has a very intense terpene smell
which smells similar to pine saw.
Has anybody used pine
saw to clean their house?
That's exactly what
this stuff smells like.
It smells like turpentine.
It smells like pine.
It's kind of, it's hard to describe
how intense the pine smell is.
So, and once you've smelled it,
you will never forget that odor.
It is one of those
that once you have smelled
what fat wood smells like,
you will never ever forget it.
Now, depending on the
amount of sap collected,
the woods color ranges
from yellow to dark gold.
Now this is a real dark
gold and you could tell
because it's almost luminescent.
Like if you hold a light up to it,
you could almost see the sap growing
or collecting in between
the fibers of the wood.
So I could see it
right here from this light.
I could see it real rich right here.
So these edges right here are very rich
and it has some stuff in there
that is really gonna start a fire.
Now, I'm gonna use my
old trusty, but rusty,
trusty but not rusty homemade knife.
I made this knife out of bed rail
and it has been an
extremely awesome knife
and I have tried to break it and I can't
and I've tried to bend it and I can't.
So this stuff is extremely
cool, throw sparks, you know,
but you're gonna use the spine right here
and you're just gonna go back and forth
and you're gonna collect those shavings.
Now I've done countless
videos of this on YouTubes
and TikTok and Facebook and all those,
but you just keep going
back and forth, back and forth
and you have a huge
pile of these wood shavings
and then those wood
shavings, you take your ferro rod
and you throw a spark.
I'm not gonna do it in here
because I don't wanna
light the house on fire,
but you throw that spark onto them.
The fatwood shavings
and you will have a fire.
And did I mention that
fatwood is waterproof
and it will burn in the rain.
It actually, it will, the
rain's not gonna put it out.
You know, a heavy downpour
might put out a small fire,
but I was on a camping trip with my son
and the only way that we
could get a fire to burn
was with fatwood and so
we ended up burning fatwood
the whole time.
It was about this time,
February, it was cool.
The rivers were flooded.
It rained every day for eight days.
It was miserable and you know,
it was just one of those
things to where the fatwood
was the only way to get a fire going.
And so that's what we did.
Now, in the book, it
says the bark pictured here
is scraped away and
the shavings were made
using a 90 degree spine of a knife.
Then you use a ferro
rod to generate the spark
in the fatwood and it
should erupt into flame
even if it's wet or damp, all right?
So a ferro rod is gonna
produce 5,000 degrees of spark
and with that 5,000 degrees,
it's gonna burn off
the water or the dampness
and it is going to
actually ignite that fatwood.
Now, you disagree with me all you want.
That's fine.
That's why we live in America.
And for those of you
that live in America,
that's watching from here
and everybody's got an opinion.
But I'm telling you now,
fatwood is the way to go to start a fire.
There it is.
If you had, that's why I
put this fire kit together
with a ferro rod, fatwood, char cloth
and a magnification lens.
Cause if you got those four items,
you can start a fire
anywhere under any conditions.
And I made the 10
because you're able
to make more char cloth
when you're in the field
and or charred material.
They don't have to be cloth.
They could be other
materials such as charred punk wood.
It could be certain leaves.
It could be certain plants and materials.
So now that was method number one.
So we use the fatwood to start our fire.
Now method number two is
going to be cattail fluff,
which I do not have any here,
but cattail fluff is a,
we talked about it last time
or one of the previous times
and cattail fluff is an
amazing way to start fire,
but it's called a flash tender.
What's going to happen,
you're going to throw that spark to it.
It's going to go, and
it'll burn like gasoline.
So you have to have something else there
to catch fire quick.
So if you're going to have
that cattail fluff in there,
you got to have a real,
real, real fine tender
all the way broken
down to very fine fibers
in order for it to catch.
I'm not saying it can't, but it can.
In addition to being a
decent food auction in a pinch,
cattails can be used as tender.
The part of the top of the plant
that looks like the sausage
is called the flower head.
It's made of thousands and
thousands and millions of seeds
with fluff and this compact.
And whenever you, I've
watched a video with Creek Stewart,
him and his wife went
out and made pillows
out of cattail fluff.
And so they use the
fluff from the cattails
to fill their pillows.
And I thought that was pretty cool
is seeing somebody
actually go in the distance
as using natural material
to make pillows for them to sleep with.
Now this explained already that it is
called a flash tender
that once a spark hits it,
it will ignite very quickly,
almost like gasoline.
And it does just like gasoline, woof.
And I'm going to do it again, woof.
Yeah, all right.
So somebody can take that
and turn it into a little sound effect,
send it back to me, that'd be great.
That way I can be
right here on the podcast
and just go, woof.
(laughing)
It will kill me.
Am I the only person
that thinks I'm funny?
Let me know in the comments.
So with the trickiness
of this tender in mind,
you want another tender source available
when starting your fire.
Place the cattail fluff
on the top of your other
tender source to increase your chance
of getting steady flames going.
If you take a few tries,
it can absolutely
create a substantial fire.
So cattail fluff,
depending on the time of the year,
obviously, you know,
these sausages on the cattails
or the flower heads
are in the springtime,
they actually produce pollen.
You could take a Gatorade bottle,
like one of your little
20 ounce Gatorade jugs
and stick the flower head in there
and knock all the
pollen out and collect pollen
from several of them, several of them.
And you can actually
make a pancake or a biscuit
out of that pollen, use it as flower.
And so there's recipes out
there for you to do that.
All right, so moving right along,
we got two methods right here.
I included this Fresno
lens inside the fire kit.
All right, now the Fresno lens,
it was interesting
how Fresno lenses work.
If you look at it,
you see it kind of looks
like finger plant
prints all the way around.
So what that is doing is it's
taking the different lengths
of light waves and it's breaking it down
and actually concentrating them.
So they use the Fresno
lens to magnify the light
on lighthouses way back in the day.
So they had a, back
when it was candle power,
so they had maybe 10 or 20
or 30, 40 candle power light
or a bunch of candles lit inside there.
And they use the
invention of the Fresno lens
to magnify the light and shine it out
to make it brighter than it actually was.
So what we're doing is
we're actually taking
the Fresno lens and
we're gonna actually magnify
the sun's rays and use
it as a magnifying glass
to start a fire.
Now the real beauty of
a Fresno lens is that
it fits in your wallet as a credit card.
You know, it can be, it's
just like your credit card,
debit card or anything.
It's extremely flexible.
I haven't broken one yet, you know,
and it is extremely
awesome to start a fire with.
And these dudes are
amazing at starting fire,
especially if you have
some sort of char cloth.
That's why I teamed up some
char cloth in this fire kit.
I put char cloth in
here with the Fresno lens
and with the Faro rod
because you can use it
two different ways.
Now, when you're
actually using a Fresno lens
with some char cloth, the
dark side of the dark material
will actually receive the
concentrated sunlight better
and start you an ember.
Now, another method is a magnifying lens.
Now this little dude
right here is on a necklace.
I got links to this in the
description of the videos
on YouTube, on my website.
Nautica, I believe makes this dude.
It's like 12 bucks.
And it is a
magnification lens on a lanyard
or on a necklace that you can wear.
And you can use this to help you see
if you have a hard time
seeing reading or anything.
You lost your glasses, you need to be
able to read something
or see some, get a
splinter out or getting,
starting fish hooks and
putting thread through a needle
or something to that effect.
You can actually use this to do it.
Same thing with the Fresno
lens, it does the same thing.
But this little item is real compact.
And I think this is
five or 10 times, five or,
I think it's five times magnification,
to be honest with you.
And so it magnifies
the sun rays five times.
It's enough to start a fire.
I've started plenty of
fires with this device.
Now I'm gonna read in,
when I was a little boy,
my brother and I
would sit out in the woods
and start fire after fire
with a big 10 times magnification lens.
Our mom, she gave us to use,
or actually she
probably didn't give it to us.
We probably took it.
So if she only knew half of the things
that we set on fire,
we'd been in so much trouble.
So creating fire with
a magnification mirror
or lens is a great option
when supplies are limited
because you're not using or
expending any kind of fuel
other than the sun's rays
and the sun's rays are free.
Now, I didn't put it on the table.
I didn't bring it in here with me today.
But the magnification
mirror I mentioned in here
with magnification is you can
get a 10 times magnification
mirror from the Dollar General
or some kind of little
store in their makeup section.
And these ladies use them
for putting on their makeup,
putting on their mascara or whatever.
And this is a 10 times mirror.
And you can use that
mirror to start a fire
just as effectively as you
can use a magnifying lens
or a magnifying glass.
Now, a magnification mirror
can be used in multiple ways.
That's why I always
included in my first aid kit
as you can use it for signaling.
You can use it for starting a fire.
You can use it for looking
to see what's in your eye.
You can pop your zits
with it if you want to
or whatever, who cares.
But there is a multi-use item
and it can be used
for more than one thing.
So a magnifying lens
and a magnification mirror
are great items to have in
your kit, in your fire kit,
like we talked about last week.
You can have it in your first aid kit.
You can have it in your fire kit.
You can have this in your wallet.
These are cheap.
You can get a pack of 10 for like $12,
something like that.
You can have actually $7, I think.
You get a pack of these, of 10 of these
and you can have one in your wallet.
You can have one in your first aid kit.
You can put one in your backpack.
You can put one in your fire kit.
You can put one in
everything all over the place
and have backups to the
backups to the backups
in the event that things break.
So now we're gonna get
into the last two items
of the fire chapter.
And these two items are,
one is the most controversial
and I did a hack from a book that I read.
I believe it was, I believe
it was Creek Stewart's book
that he did a hack about starting a fire
with a water bottle.
And I did and that was an
awesome method to start a fire.
I got a lot of people saying,
like you're gonna really find a water
bottle in the woods.
Let me tell you, anywhere there is humans
or anywhere on the planet,
humans have all kinds of trash and waste.
You can find stuff.
If you're in the
South, you go on the river,
you can find, I can
find any kind of anything.
I've found packs of light bulbs.
I've found packs of water bottles.
I've found everything in the South.
When the river's flood,
people's yards get all the trash
from these people's
yards end up in the river
and floating downstream.
And then when the water subsides,
all that trash is
left laying in the woods
and it happens all the time.
And I tend to do a lot of my videos
and a lot of camping
on the river down here.
And I find stuff all the time.
So the water bottle, if you could,
not water bottle, but the light bulb,
you take the light bulb
and you bust out the element
inside there, filament, element,
whichever you wanna call it.
And then you pull that
out and then you rinse out,
there's a powder on the inside
to either make it like a,
to make it where it's not so bright
or to magnify the brightness of it.
And it will actually,
it'll wash out as you
put the water in there
and then you fill it
back up with some water.
Now that water in that light bulb
will actually turn
into a magnification lens
and you can actually start a fire
with a piece of char
cloth or something dark,
a piece of dark newspaper or something
because newspapers are
predominantly black and white.
Anywhere the black ink is, we'll start,
you can focus the sun's rays on there.
Just anytime you're doing any kind of,
if you can help it, any
kind of solar or anything,
just make sure you got
some sunshades on or something
because it can damage vision
and all that gets real bright.
Now you could do the same
concept with a water bottle,
plastic water bottle.
Smart Water, their brand water bottles
are amazing for starting fires.
There's a reason why I
use those in the book
because they are actually the best way
to start a fire with a water bottle.
You can use a Ziploc bag,
you can use a chunk of
ice if you get down to it.
Anything that's gonna
magnify the sun's rays
and concentrate the
rays on the other side
is gonna allow you to start a fire.
Now, are these my first go-to choices?
Absolutely not.
But if every other aspect of
starting a fire is exhausted
or I do not have a way to do that,
then I can get my hands on one of these,
then yes, I could start a fire.
Now, a lot of this is
just like tricks, hacks
and stuff like that.
A lot of survival is tricks and hacks.
The more tricks and hacks you know,
the better off you're
gonna be in the long run.
If you know a hack to
start a fire, guess what?
There's no wrong way to start a fire.
There's no wrong way to start anything.
If you know a hack
that's gonna get the job done,
do the hack.
There's no wrong way.
Nobody is going to look
down and say, you know what?
You used a light bulb to start this fire,
I'm not gonna sit by this fire.
You'll never hear that.
How about this one?
You used a condom to start this fire.
I'm not gonna sit by this fire.
That's not gonna happen.
The only on TikTok
will you ever get banned
from showing a video of you
starting a fire with a condom.
I've done that, you take a condom,
you fill it up with some water,
you tie it off and make a ball.
It makes a ball of water.
It's the same concept we're talking about
with the light bulb and the water bottle
and our zipwop bag.
You can use a condom and you
can actually use that condom
to start you a fire.
Condoms have uses besides their purpose
and birth control purpose.
Condoms are used to keep
water out of barrels of guns.
Condoms is used to
keep certain things dry.
You can use them to haul water.
You can use them to store water.
You can use them to start fires.
Condoms have so many purposes.
You can use them as a
tourniquet and a pinch.
Come on, give me a break.
I don't need to hear all the garbage.
(laughing)
I just say it in a pinch.
If that's all you had, I
would prefer you use a shirt
or a piece of bank line
or something like that
besides that.
Let's erase that.
I never said that.
People are gonna eat me up.
But anyway, there's
multiple uses for everything.
You know, the best thing to have with you
in a first aid kit is a
tourniquet and a proper tourniquet.
And I acknowledge that.
You know, don't try.
I've seen people use belts.
I've seen, you know, stuff like that.
It just use a proper tourniquet.
All right, so, but
anyway, moving along to next,
we're gonna have food.
But talk about two more
things as far as starting firing.
I cannot reiterate this as often as I do.
I mean, I can't overstate this.
You know, these fire starters,
all-weather fire starters,
you have an entire block
of magnesium on one side.
You have a ferro rod on the other.
And these are the most amazing fire
starters I have ever seen.
They will start a fire
in, just like the name says,
in all weather, the magnesium.
You scrape off another
huge pile of magnesium
and you're able to
get almost anything lit.
And so this is all, this
has turned into my go-to,
always use fire starter.
I love it.
I take it with me when I go camping.
I take it with me
when I'm going in woods.
This is in my kit.
This is the most amazing
fire starter on the planet
right now, in my opinion.
And, you know, I also
use Black Bear Fire Plugs.
These, those things are amazing.
I don't care how much they cost.
A little bag of those
fire plugs is always worth it
because you could put
a couple of them in.
You could put a few of them in a fire kit
if you wanted to take
them in the fire kit
and it's an instant fire.
All it needs is one
spark and you are done.
You're done.
So, you know, I told you I
was gonna get into this fire kit
a little bit more.
So, the fire kit itself is an
Altoid-style tin can.
And inside there I got four, maybe five,
depending on the size, pieces of fatwood.
Now these little fatwood sticks can be,
you take your knife and
you can split these down
even smaller.
You can take one of these
sticks and make more than enough
shavings from the back of your knife
and start you with fire.
Now these sticks right here,
you can easily split
these down into four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11.
You're gonna have 11 more sticks
out of these four sticks right here.
And, you know, you
could shave these dudes down
and turn these into a
fire, into several fires.
Just make sure you got
everything that you need
to start your fire.
You got a good tinder to, you know,
once you're using this,
you're gonna ignite this
and then you're going
to have a good tinder,
some very good kindling
and then some good fuel.
Now, the Ferro rod is about a
three inch by one eighth inch
or a quarter inch, it
looks like quarter inch.
Ferro rod and this dude is
pretty good at starting fires.
It comes with a good scraper here.
So if you don't have a knife,
now the beautiful
thing about the scraper is
that you can use this
scraper to scrape your fatwood
and make your shavings off of here.
You can use this scraper
to just scrape this thing
and you can have all that
you need to start a fire.
Now you got tons of char cloth in here.
Now these were old denim jeans,
which I find is the
absolute best char cloth
is using denim jeans.
And you got tons of fire
starting potential in here
with this char cloth and
you know, you can use this.
You can even take a couple rocks,
hit a couple rocks
together into the bucket.
You know, you're just
dropping the sparks down in there
and a spark will land on this
char cloth and it will ignite.
It will, you will get an ember.
Then once again, down
in the bottom of the kit,
I have the Fresno lens here.
Now the Fresno lens is like,
we've just spent a whole
episode talking about it,
but that will start you a
fire no matter where or what,
as long as you have a bright sunny day.
Now here in
Mississippi, you always hear that,
oh, if it's the winter time,
you're not gonna get a solar fire.
Yeah, you will.
You just have to be a
little bit more patient.
You will get a solar fire.
All right.
So, down we go.
In we go.
Now that is what is inside these kits.
So if you're interested in these kits,
go ahead, leave me a
comment, let me know,
and I will let you know where I can,
or how to get them to you.
You know, I added
stuff in my Shopify store,
but then all of a sudden my
Shopify store gets disconnected.
For some reason, I don't know what going,
look, I do all this myself.
Everything that you see is done.
Everything, any spare outdoors,
anything is done by myself.
You know, with the
exception of the coffee,
that is ordered at through a company
that does my own private label, coffee.
All right, and it's
great coffee, and it's great.
The book was published by a
subsidiary, McMillan Books,
Topics Lab, or Media Lab Books.
Then, like the mugs here,
where the coffee cups are,
this is done through, with all my
T-shirts and everything,
through Spread Shop.
But as far as everything else,
everything else that
you see on spare outdoors
is done by myself.
The website's done by myself.
All the editing is done by myself.
All the video is done by myself.
All the photos is done by myself.
So you get it.
I'm a one man shop.
I'm a one man show.
And pretty soon it's gonna be,
I don't know what to do
with it from here on out,
because I don't make enough money
to hire somebody to help me,
but I can't do it by myself no more.
I can't to that point.
So, but anyway, before we get too deep.
Hey guys, I really
appreciate y'all joining me today.
These are just a
couple of real quick hacks,
and I don't wanna sit here and rant,
but these are quick
hacks to start a fire.
And if y'all got any
questions, leave a comment.
Go to the Facebook page, Primitive
Camping in Bushcraft,
and the group, join the group.
We got 7,000 members in the group,
and leave a picture, leave a comment.
Just come get involved, get involved.
And if you like the podcast,
I don't know what we're
gonna continue doing from here,
but if you like the podcast,
go ahead and leave a
review, leave a comment.
Let me know what you think.
If you don't let me know what you think,
I don't know what to continue to do.
And if I feel like
nobody is getting involved
or nobody wants it, then
we'll just scrap the whole thing.
And if you like it and this
many people are liking it,
and I'm getting some constant feedback,
leave thumbs ups and
comments on the videos.
Share the video, share the podcast.
Help me out because I
don't know what you guys want.
I don't know what you guys like,
because there's no feedback coming in.
Please leave me some
feedback and let me know.
And by seeing that,
I'm gonna get by maybe two
or three people that do it.
Hey, and for you two or three people,
if that's what it's
for, that's what it's for.
And I really appreciate your help
and I appreciate your support.
So, but anyway, pick up a copy
of the "Premier Camp
in the Bushcraft Book."
It's on Amazon right
now for $14.40, all right?
Thank you so much for joining me today,
and I'll see you next time
in the next video or podcast.
God bless you.
(upbeat music)