It's raining outside and dark, so I couldn't give you any authentic in the woods photos, but I went down to the basement to poke around in the scrap wood piles and found some suitable pieces of scrap to make a miniature bow drill setup.
These Tin Knives are so small that you can carry it around all the time (around your neck, in a pocket or in an Altoids container) and not really know it's there. It looks "cute" but I wanted to show that it can actually do some real work in a survival situation.
Here is my 1/8" Tin Knife being batoned into a scrap of pine or fir. The thickness helped split the wood and if you choose a decent baton and strike the spine you can indeed break down larger pieces of wood into kindling or in this case, a hearth board for the bow drill. I used a cutoff of oak and smacked my finger pretty good so be careful.
I started making a notch in the board and it worked ok. I think I need to sharpen up the tip a bit, but all in all it worked fine.
I split another piece of wood to make the spindle and handpiece.
I spent some time shaping the ends and knocking off the corners of the spindle and yes, I got some hot spots on my first finger. I switched hand positions from a regular whittlin' hold to a paring cut to give my finger a break and it worked fine in both positions. I plan to slap on some 1/8" cocobolo scales someday soon, but if you don't want to get that route you could round the edges of the handle to make it more confortable. Here's the pieces I made in just a few minutes.
I tried it out but only burnished the ends and got no charring at all. I used some nose grease on the non-burning end and tried again. I guess that pine or fir isn't a good candidate for a bow drill so I made another hearth board out of some cedar I had left over from smoking some salmon. I knew that cedar worked for me in the past so I thought I'd give it a try.
Here we are in the beginning stages.
Here we are after several minutes of bowing like a mad fiddler.
I got a good deal of smoke and decided to stop there as I was in the basement and my wife wouldn't like it if I set off the smoke detectors.
I know that in a real survival situation you might not have the choices of wood at my disposal. They might not be dry and you might not be in a windless space so the conditions may not reflect reality in the wilds, but I think it does show that a knife, no matter that its blade is as small as a guitar pick, can get your arse out of a jam.
Thanks John for offering such a cool tool at a great price. I can't wait to get my hands on one of your full-sized models.
