The BladeForums.com 2024 Traditional Knife is ready to order! See this thread for details:
https://www.bladeforums.com/threads/bladeforums-2024-traditional-knife.2003187/
Price is $300 $250 ea (shipped within CONUS). If you live outside the US, I will contact you after your order for extra shipping charges.
Order here: https://www.bladeforums.com/help/2024-traditional/ - Order as many as you like, we have plenty.
Now that wasn't very nice. Personally I carry multiple bics and matches too and reserve the other stuff for play. To each his own.
:thumbup:
It's been raining for days here. It rained an inch and a half last night alone. I got up this morning, looked out the window and thought "what a crappy day to make a fire". So that's what I did, first in the wood stove, then outside in the rain.
Temp: 51 degrees
Dew point: 52 degrees
Humidity: 97%
Raining steady, occasionally hard.
Wind 12 gusting to 24 mph.
I picked a dead pine that was down, but not all the way on the ground. You could break it, but you had to bend it past 180 degrees to do so.
I used my usual puukko neck knife for eight minutes to shave as much as I could off the top of the tree, staying with a piece that went from about half wrist-thick to thumb thickness at the end.
Eight minutes of shavings:
I put what I thought were the best shavings from deeper in the tree at the bottom and stacked the wetter shavings on top of it. All of the shaving were coarse and wet, both from the condition of the tree and from the rain. The match was also wet from the time it took to photograph it to light it.
One REI storm match inserted at the bottom of the pile and it lit off. Total time from tree to ignition: nine minutes (not including the picture taking).
Twenty seconds after applying the one and only match:
From this point I kept shaving down pieces of the tree and feeding the shavings onto the fire. As the fire got larger and the pieces got smaller, I added them and grabbed the next piece. It didn't take long for the fire to shatter the piece of tile I built it on. Once the fire got to the point that I could add wood without shaving it, I quit.
What I learned:
Storm matches rock! But I already knew that.
As Mistwalker stated at the beginning, making this work requires some knife skills. I intentionally used the crudest movements to make my shavings: stick braced on the ground and my elbow and wrist locked, using my torso to move the knife against the stick. I wasn't going for pretty feather sticks, I was trying to reduce as much wet wood as I could in the shortest amount of time.
Regardless of what knife you carry, it needs to be shaving-sharp and able to quickly and efficiently make wood shavings. If it can't, what ever other attributes it has may be of little value.
Almost any wood will burn if you can shave it fine enough in great enough quantity. This pile of pine shavings caught fire well from the match, and with some tending it burned hot and built quickly. It was also sappier than some I've come across. Luck of the draw on that.
In the scenario where there is really no small wood available, having your own tinder will ensure a better start to a pile of shavings, but nothing short of a road flare would have a chance of igniting wet, thumb-thickness branches unless you have a knife or ax to reduce them, and even that is NO guarantee. I've seen people use an entire can of charcoal lighter and still be unable to keep a fire lit on a warm, dry summer afternoon, so relying on ignition sources rather than technique isn't a good strategy.
I can build a fire with about anyone in adverse conditions But if the weather may get to the point my life may depend on fire, I drop one of these in a side pocket along with a fire steel, bic, storm matches and some tinder jute tied around cotton and dip the whole thing in wax.Forget messing around with matches and those stick thingies, I carry a cut down road flare
Seriously though, a road flare cut down to 4-5" and sealed in a zip lock fits in a pocket and burns long enough to dry out and ignite kindling.
