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Welcome to the Kruger National Park
(Plummy Narrator) Hello, and
welcome to
the world famous Kruger National Park, home of big scary animals, named after Mr Paul Kruger, well known for his prominent facial hair.
Hello I’m ROBwithab and this is “101 Ways to Make Fire.”
Today I’m going to show you how to make fire
with the flint and steel. Now most of you will probably have seen a video on how to use
one of these ferrocerium rods
using a cotton ball soaked in petroleum jelly. Of course if you’ve seen the videos
you've also seen comments like this:
Yeah like where am I going to find wild cotton in the wild?
Loser! Ha ha
and it's a valid question
Even if you HAD packed some cotton balls soaked in petroleum jelly
by day three or four you will have used them all.
Now you might be carrying something around with you
that can work as an alternative to a cotton ball. In a previous video I
showed you how you could strip the ends off uh...
off an ear-bud,
and then make yourself a cotton ball out of that.
Depending on how long you've been in the bush you might also have built up a
significant amount of belly button lint,
which I'm going to… let’s see what we can get
(grunts and groans of exertion)
Ah man!
There we go.
So, yeah...
That'll work,
but today I want to go a bit more natural.
So where are you going to find cotton balls in the wilderness? -
you may ask. And the answer is: right here.
First thing you’re going to need is a cool hat
because frankly with a cool hat you’re always going to manage to pick up some fluff.
Let’s go and have a look...
And there it is: Cotton balls... in the wild! (sings) in dem old cotton fields
(sings) back home Wild cotton.
Basically, fluffy hairy stuff.
So... there, if you look carefully, you'll see it’s got the seeds. You can
remove those if you want to,
but there we have a perfectly acceptable cotton ball.
Petroleum jelly?
Now the truth is this stuff is naturally rich in oil, so you don't really need
what I call a
“wiquid”
some sort of wicking liquid to sustain the flame, but if you want to you
might well be carrying around something like... lip balm or what is this? Also some
kind of...
Hey! That one has beeswax
continuing the natural trend for today. Or something like this: Zam-buk
Brilliant stuff
You can chop your arm off you put some of this on it grows back.
We use it all the time over here.
Okay, that might be a little bit of an exaggeration.
I think today let’s use a little bit of the beeswax
stuff. Just going to...
rub that on my finger
rub some of that on there
and that’s just going to be like a flame extender.
Smells good too!
Right, now the biggest danger today might actually be setting five million acres
of
pristine bush alight, so I found a spot where there’s a little dry
stream bed,
some exposed rocks, and that's where I'm going to make fire quickly just to show you how it
can be done.
So, we have a standard ferro rod.
This one's called uh...
Fire maple.
It's got its own little scraper which has teeth,
over there, I hope you can see that, that allows it to pull bigger chunks off
the ferrocerium rod.
Basically the same principle as I showed you before with the
opinel knife,
using the pyrophoric properties of certain metals
and i actually have an opinel knife with me today
as a kind of weapon of last resort in case something jumps me.
I might put a link to the Harry Wolhuter story down in the video description.
This one is basically carbon steel.
this one...
is iron and cerium and magnesium.
The cerium has a
lower ignition point than the iron.
Magnesium is just to allow it to burn hotter...
... as far as I know. I’m not an expert. I’m not a metal-a-logist.
The truth is your ferro rod will throw big enough and hot enough sparks that
you can get almost any tinder going,
but if one had something like a cotton ball
with wax or
jelly, petroleum jelly, something like that, your tinder could be wet you could
basically make a fire in the rain.
My particular technique
is to hold
hold it like that
with my thumbs - get a bit of leverage
and throw some hot sparks.
There's no shortage of really dry grass about at the moment and dry sticks so
we’ll use a bit of that.
We’re going to make a really small fire.
We should be able to get this with a single strike.
Let’s see. On your marks, get set... 0:04:28.159,0:04:32.520 easy peasy
and we have and we have and we have fire
OONGA BOONGA BABY
and let’s make sure that we only have fire, and a small one.