How to Make a Friction Fire | Live Free or Die: DIY

[Music] I want to talk to you a little bit about friction fire. The tools that you need are: you need your hearth board, you need a spindle, and you also need a nest. With the nest, I like to start out with my longer fibers, and I'll just twist those around to form a little bit of a pocket.

With the tender nest, you want everything pretty tight. So at the spindle and hearth, you want something fairly light, but most important is the grain structure. If you look at this one, you would see little grains, almost little holes and pores in here. So you want to make a starter hole.

So I make a divot in [Music]. There, you can sit on your butt like this, or another technique that helps is you get up on above it, either on both knees or one knee. You can sometimes put a little bit more weight on it. This [Music] way, with the starter hole, you just want to get it to that point where it just starts smoking.

So the notch, basically, I start by cutting at the top 'cause I can see it, and it's basically like cutting out a piece of pie. What it's doing is allowing the punk to accumulate in one spot. Once you have that prepared, you want something to catch the coal, like this wood chip or a leaf or something. Set it down nice and secure.

Once you're ready, you want to make sure your hands have enough friction on the spindle. You can either spit on it, or if you run out of spit, you can have a little bit of water nearby. Rub that in your hands. The key is, you're putting a lot more pressure on it than you realize.

So I'm actually pushing really hard inward and downward at the same time, and that driving force is what's going to produce the coal. So as you're going, once you see that basically you have smoke coming out of the pile of punk, at that point you can stop. Tap any leftover punk on it. It'll keep building, you see it's red high, and then you drop the coal in the nest.

Seems counterintuitive, but you want to squeeze that nest and really cradle that coal way down in there. Deep breath. You want to increase the breath hardness as it starts spreading. That's it. You want to turn it on its side towards the wind, and you got a fire.

And that's it. That's friction fire in a nutshell, right? [Music] There.