using fire as a knife?

psy-ops

psy-ops

Joined
Sep 27, 1999
Messages
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I have not tried to do this......but from what I have seen in a few books you can use fire to cut wood and manipulate it to whatever your needs are.

has anyone tried this successfully?

if it works it makes fire more important than a knife!
 
You are right, fire is a more important tool than a knife is. A knife won't keep you warm, where a fire will. A knife won't harden the sharpened tip on a spear, where fire will. Plus, the tip can be sharpened by rubbing it on rocks and not sharpened by a knife. Even game can be cooked by simply throwing them onto a fire and cooking the whole carcass, hair and all. However, the loss is the pelt or hide of the critter as well as other parts that can be used. In order to utilize those things for bags, clothing and other needed tools and items, ancient man needed to have edged tools for scraping, cutting, choping and so on. These made life easier and gave them more time to follow spiritual, artistic and other avenues in their lives. In my opinion, if you only have the ability to make fire, you would be able to survive. But if you have a good stout blade with you in addition to the fire making ability, your chances go up by a considerable margin.
 
You can indeed use fire as a "knife". The issue is time and accuracy. I see lots of ideas floated here, most of them contain damn good pieces of information. Our job is to take those ideas into some context and apply them to see if they fit well into our overall framework of skills.

I worry about folks taking good information and incorporating what they heard or read into their bag of tricks without any real field experience with this data. In my book, some idea untried personally is a high-risk idea (with some obvious exclusion).

Please don't get me wrong, here. I think all posts are great, if only to get us thinking "out of the box" a bit more. My specific concern goes to a notion like "fire is more important than a knife". I can immediately recall hundreds of situations that put them damn close to equal.
-carl
 
When out-n-about I almost never chop fire wood. Instead I cut it by laying it across the fire. The main drawback I've found is that you then have logs extending out of your fire pit and into your camp space, creating a hazard that you can trip on. If I lay a 15' log over the fire it burns out two feet in the middle, leaving two logs of 6 1/2' each. Lay them across the fire and you get four logs of 2' each, which is then the perfect size for fire wood. Once I get them down to the desired size I lay them aside in the wood pile (after extinguishing the embers) and start 'cutting' another log. I keep the finished lengths for preparing cooking fires or for when more people are in camp, to avoid the hazard mentioned.

I have never used fire to shape wood, but ethnographic records show it being used in most primitive cultures to fell trees and to hollow out boats. I don't think you would get the detailed accuracy needed if you wanted to, say, notch logs for building a cabin.
 
Me too. Commonly I let the fire do the work and 'cut' the big stuff in successive halves until they are all burned up. When I don't have an axe or hatchet with me it sure makes life easier. Of course many Native American tribes used fire to help build dugout canoes from big logs. I think we'd be hard pressed to find a big enough log to use in this manner anymore...
 
carl, you are absolutely right.

you must experiment and take ideas into the field, see if they work for you dependably.

not just sit in front of the computer and dream.

but this idea does help me, sometimes I think "I can't survive with out a knife" even though I would survive without a knife, mentally having a knife really gives some extra mental help.

Now mentally I know if I have fire I will survive!
 
I sometimes wonder if we focus too much on things as aids to survival. I think things (knife, fire, etc.) are an aid. Things can be lost or taken away. I like to focus on skills and imagination- though I carry just as many things as the next guy if given the chance.

But I always try to delay simply grabbing the most appropriate thing to aid my survival and try to imagine what I'd do if I did not have this or that thing. I think we all carry what is potentially the best PSK in the world - our minds.

When I was 12, I hopped a train one night. Inside the empty boxcar it was very dark, and I failed to notice two men already there. They took everything I had including the clothes on my back, but not without a struggle that left me pretty beaten. They jumped from the rail-car. This was in winter, temperatures in the mid 20's. I survived the 16 hour ride to the train's first stop. Clearly, the only thing I had as a resource was my mind (and some residual calories). I had a goal and knew about cold (I was going to get those guys and get my stuff back). Combined these mitigated all issues.
-carl
 
I went backpacking two weekends ago in Nordhouse dunes in northern Michigan. We had a fire going from 10am Saturday until 2am Sunday morning. There was a ton of dead and down wood near our campsite. We drug several 15-20 foot logs, about 8-10 inches in diameter to our fire pit and just fed them in as they burned. The only bad part was that you have to have them heading in different directions, if they are all parallel then the fire starts creeping down the length of the logs out of the fire pit. I guess if you were in a desparate situation you could cut with fire, but you had better not be in a hurry when you are doing it because it will take a while. I have heard of this before though, with indians packing clay or mud around a tree above the point they want to cut it at. They then start a fire around the base of the tree, as the trunk burns up to the clay ring they chip off the coals to make the process go faster. I think a quicker alternative, at least for wood that isn't too thick or green, is to find two trees about a foot apart, then insert your piece between them and lever it until it breaks. This worked fairly well for us on smaller or rotten logs.
 
...so much for a "hatfull" of fire being enough :D
There have been times when I've had big fires using similar sized logs but I found I could break them over a rock far easier than with the leverage method. I guess it boils down to "whatever works".
-carl
PS- I hate to burn rotten logs unless I have a need for smoke. Out here where I live there is an abundant tree nicknamed by the loggers as piss fir. Burn it in any way but extremely dry and you quickly know why.
 
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