Start a Fire With Sticks

If you're camping or hiking and discover you have forgotten the matches, knowing how to start a fire with sticks is critical. Using "the bow-drill method" described below can be slow and frustrating, but just might save your life in an emergency.

Setting Up

 * 1) Find tinder. Anything that is dry, fibrous, and will take a spark or "catch" and ignite should do. Pocket lint, feather down, dried mosses, and shredded plant fibers such as cedar bark are all good examples.
 * 2) Gather firewood.
 * 3) *Gather several handfuls of kindling, typically tiny pieces of wood in various sizes. You want some that are as thin or thinner than a toothpick but longer; several handfuls of wood about the thickness and length of a pencil; and lots of wood up to about the thickness of your arm.
 * 4) *Avoid having wood lay on the ground since it may be damp. Instead, look for snags (dead branches that have fallen off trees but get caught in lower branches or on bushes) and set the wood on top of this.
 * 5) *It is possible to snap dead branches from trees, but only take those that immediately snap free. If it bends without breaking, it's still alive or not dry enough. Avoid green wood since most won't burn well at all. See the Things You'll Need section below.
 * 6) Make a nest. Use small fiber, such as cattail, to ignite the coal and slightly thicker fiber on the outside, such as dry leaves, to shelter the nest. Make sure you leave a hole for the coal. A cotton ball size of tinder will do.
 * 7) Make a bow. Use slightly bendable wood for the bow. You'll be putting a lot of pressure on the bow and dead wood is more likely to break than similarly sized green wood.
 * 8) *Beginners should make a bow 1.5 to 2 feet long.
 * 9) *Use as thin a piece of wood as you can so the bow will be as light as possible. A lighter bow is easier to control and takes less strength to push back and forth. However, it has to be stiff enough to not bend when you're using it. The bow doesn't actually have to have much of a curve to it.
 * 10) *Use a shoelace, drawstring, small rope or whatever cordage you can find. Leave a little slack in the cord so that you can twist the drill into the bow. Once the drill is in the bow, the tension should be nice and firm.
 * 11) Make a fireboard. The fireboard and the drill both need to be made from light, dry, non-resinous wood. The best wood for this won't have any sap and will be light and soft enough to easily dent with your thumbnail without gouging. Shape whatever wood you choose into a piece about an inch thick, 2-3 inches across and at least 12 inches long. Set it aside for now.
 * 12) Make a drill. Your drill should be made of harder wood than your fireboard. Remember that you want the fireboard to hold the coal and not the spindle! Poplar and Maple are good woods for this. Try to find the straightest piece of wood possible.
 * 13) *Your drill should range between about 1 - 1.5 inches thick. If you're little and light, smaller drills are better. Start with a stick about as thick as your thumb or index finger. It should be at least eight inches long and as straight as possible.
 * 14) *If possible, use a knife to whittle your drill until it is straight and round. The top end of the drill should be shaped like the end of a pencil, while the bottom end should be more blunt. Take some time to get the drill just right. It will pay off. The top of the drill must be sharper so that there is less friction than the bottom.
 * 15) Find or make a socket. Your socket can be made of bone, wood or rock.
 * 16) *Look for a rock with a smooth dimple in it. Ideally, the rock should be about fist sized. It should fit easily in your hand but not be too small or it can heat up very quickly. The ideal rock has a deep dimple with smooth sides.
 * 17) *If you can't find a rock, the easiest socket to make is wood. It should be small enough for you to comfortably hold in your hand, but big enough that your fingers don't wrap all the way around it and touch the drill as it's turning. It is best to make the socket out of hardwood if possible, or use a knot in softwood as a naturally lubricated socket. Use the tip of a knife or sharp rock to drill a hole no more than halfway into the wood.
 * 18) *You can also improvise a socket from many other materials. Look for things that will keep the narrow end of the drill stable, but still allow it turn easily.Of course, other things can be used as sockets.
 * 19) *Lubricating the socket with lip balm or resin is a good practice.
 * 20)  Find a coal catcher. You need something to catch the coal that's created, keep it insulated from the cold ground and carry it from the ground to the tinder. This can be a dry leaf, sliver of wood, piece of paper or bark, among other options. Whatever it is, make sure you can pick it up without fumbling around and dropping it.

Starting The Fire

 * 1) Determine where your drill will spin on the fireboard. You need to know where your drill is going to spin on the fireboard before you cut the notch. Take the fireboard and mark a spot about 1.5 times the drill's diameter from one of the fireboard's long edges. Dig a crater there about 1/4 inch deep and about as wide as your drill.
 * 2) Burn a hole. Note that the following steps are written from the perspective of a right-hander; it would be the reverse for lefties.
 * 3) *Put the fireboard on the ground.
 * 4) *Put your left foot on the fireboard about one inch to the left of the crater. The arch of your foot (not the ball or the heel) should be over the fireboard. Make sure the ground is pretty flat or bed the fireboard into the ground. You don't want it to wiggle or rock much, if at all.
 * 5) *Kneel on your right knee. Make sure that your right knee is far enough behind your left foot that you make all 90 degree angles. (More about that later.)
 * 6) *Hold the bow in your right hand and the drill in your left.
 * 7) *Put the drill on top of the string with the pencil-sharp end pointing right, and twist it into the bow. You can loosen the string a bit if it's too hard to do, but the string must not slip once wrapped around the drill.
 * 8) *Put the blunt end of the drill on the crater. Put the socket on the drill.
 * 9) *Grab as close to the end of the bow as you can. Put some downward pressure on the socket and start to pull back and forth on the bow. It's a delicate balance between putting too much and not enough pressure on the drill, and having the bow string too tight and not tight enough.
 * 10) *Assuming everything goes right (troubleshooting is described later), you'll saw back and forth with the bow faster and faster, and put more and more pressure on the socket. Eventually, you'll get some black powder and smoke around the bottom of the drill. This is a good sign! Stop and pick up the fireboard.
 * 11) Cut a chimney. Use your cutting device to make a V-shaped notch that reaches from the edge of the fireboard almost to the center of the hole you just burned in the fireboard.
 * 12) *The most important thing is to make sure that it's not so wide that when you start spinning the drill in the hole again, it just slips out through the notch. About a "sixth of a pie" is good.
 * 13) *Make sure you don't cut right to, or past, the center of the hole, but you do want to get close to the center. Like Goldilocks, you want it just right.
 * 14) Make a teepee or "house" out of wood. If you want, make a floor to absorb moisture. Putting sticks at right angles works well. Remember the order: tinder, small sticks, larger sticks, larger, larger. Do not forget to leave a hole in your house to put the coal into and spaces between sticks so your coal can breathe.
 * 15)  Make a coal.  Now it's time to make fire! You do everything the same way you did when you burned a hole in the fireboard. Don't forget to put your coal catcher under the chimney.
 * 16) *Start pushing and pulling on the bow, and pushing down on the socket. As you get into a rhythm, saw faster and put more pressure on the socket.
 * 17) *Eventually you'll get black powder collecting in the chimney. Keep going and you'll get some smoke.
 * 18) *When you've got smoke coming out of the punk all over, you've most likely got a coal. If you're not sure, keep going until you can't go anymore. If it starts to squeak, you're starting to glaze the set and need to push down harder while keeping up the speed.
 * 19) *Sometimes you'll actually see the tip of the punk turn white (or if it's getting dark, red) and then you'll know for sure that you have a coal.
 * 20)  Blow the coal into flame.  Carefully remove the drill and lift away the fire board, using a twig to hold the new ember down if it gets stuck in the notch.
 * 21) *Use one hand to gently fan air over the coal, making it bigger and more solid, using up more of the punk. Don't blow on it unless you blow very gently, as you might knock it off the coal catcher. This isn't necessarily a disaster, as the coal usually won't fall apart. But if the ground's wet, it'll put the coal out, and if you're not careful picking it back up you might put it out.
 * 22) *Once you're sure the coal isn't going to go out, transfer it to your tinder.
 * 23) Begin blowing softly through the bundle while gently squeezing the tinder around the coal. As more tinder catches, you might have to turn and/or reshape it to keep the ember spreading into more and more of the tinder.
 * 24) Keep blowing and working with the tinder bundle until you get actual flames. Put it on the ground where you want your fire. Keep blowing if you need to to keep the flames going. Add the toothpick size sticks on top of the bundle, then the pencil sized sticks, followed by increasingly bigger items until you have your campfire.

Troubleshooting And Techniques

 * 1) Make sure your body is positioned correctly. The steps below are for right handers and would be the reverse for lefties:
 * 2) *Put your left foot on the fire-board, about one inch from the drill or closer. Arch over the fire-board.
 * 3) *The angle of your left knee is 90 degrees. The angle of your left leg to right leg is 90 degrees.
 * 4) *To balance, swing your right foot around to the left. (This opens up your body to the right).
 * 5) *Your left hand holds the socket and your left hand should be tight up against your left shin bone. This helps you to hold the top of the drill completely still.
 * 6) *This position will put you leaning over the whole set-up, and allows you to use the weight of your upper body to push down on the drill instead of just using your arm strength.
 * 7) Adjusting the string: It's important to keep the string tight so that it doesn't slip on the drill. However, if it's too tight, it will make the drill pop out of the socket or the fire-board. There are a number of ways to deal with the string adjustment.
 * 8) *Get the string almost tight enough, hold it at the very end of the bow and then squeeze the string up against the bow as you start to saw back and forth, if needed. Even if you get the string just right at first, it will often loosen up as you're sawing back and forth, so this is a good technique to master. If need be, work your hand up the bow to get the string tight enough. This is a good reason to have a longer (two feet long) bow.
 * 9) *To keep the cord firm, you might have to loop it around your finger(s) or adjust it by tying a tighter knot.
 * 10) *Another way to keep it tight is to put another stick (preferably thick, as this method can snap smaller sticks) in another loop, near the end. Twirl it around and around until you reach the desired tightness and then 'lock' it against the bow. If it keeps slipping, hold that end in your hand.

Tips

 * This is the method preferred by the Boy Scouts of America and Girl Scouts. The Wilderness Survival merit badge requires you to make a fire in this way.
 * If you can, find someone that has done this and have them teach you. It'll save you hours of grief!
 * Practice makes perfect. Do this at home in your spare time so your body will learn how to do it!  Do it several times and you will always know how to do it.
 * If you have a good coal in your nest, the nest will literally burst into flames. Be ready with the rest of your fire before actually lighting it.
 * Chimney shape is important, but not essential as long as it is slightly wider at the bottom than at the top. A narrow shape is preferable, about 60 degrees (1/6 of a pie) and U-shaped, but V-shaped notches work too. The chimney is where the hot powdered wood is going to collect and meet up with air, allowing it to turn into a coal. A wider chimney usually means you'll just have to create more punk (the hot powdered wood), but also allows more air in.
 * Keep the bow in the middle of the drill. If the string moves up the drill, it will create more horizontal force up near the socket and will be more likely to pop out. To fix this, keep sawing away, but rotate the bow up in the Y-axis (so the bow would touch the top of the drill if you rotated it all the way up). The same is true if the string works its way down the drill. Rotate the bow so that it would touch the drill near the ground if rotated all the way. The bow string should always be horizontal to the ground (if the ground is perfectly flat) and perpendicular to the drill. Don't dig the tip of the bow into the ground or up into the sky. Learn to keep the bow flat and level as you saw back and forth.
 * The notch and the drill end that goes into it should both be rough, not shiny and smooth. The roughness promotes friction. If they get shiny, put a little sand in the notch. This is an old Native American trick that many settlers missed.
 * Don't be afraid to take a break if you're tired. This takes a lot of energy when you're first learning. Taking a break to regain some strength can make the difference between a warm, comfortable night in the friendly woods and a cold, dark night in the inhospitable wilderness. Try getting the notch nearly full of dark wood dust before taking a break. Once you are rested, you can "pour it on" right away to bang out a coal since the notch is filled and ready to go. Or, as soon as you tire out, let someone else jump in and knock out the coal before the dust cools down.
 * If there are two of you trying to "bust a coal," you can "go tandem." One person sets everything up normally, but before starting to saw away, the second person kneels down opposite to the first, puts their left hand on top of the other guy's left hand (which is on top of the socket), and takes hold of the bow with their right hand. The first person is the lead and starts sawing away, while the second person adds their strength and speed by pushing down on the socket and pulling back and forth on the bow. This can take a bit of coordination, but makes busting a coal a lot easier, particularly if this is your first time.
 * It's been found that this is easier if your hands are somewhat sticky (i.e. with pitch).
 * Place the notch on top of your tinder nest and you won't have to transfer the coal. The coal simply falls directly into the nest. This method dramatically shortens the effort required.
 * If you know you're going to have to make fire this way and you don't have a flashlight with you, make sure you plan plenty of time for it before dusk. Experienced campers have been doing this for years and still have difficulties doing this in the dark. Even if you do have a flashlight, do this during daylight hours. You'll be glad you did.
 * Be sure not to let the board rock as you are drilling. If it does, the change will cause the air trapped in your sawdust to collapse on your ember, effectively smothering it.

Warnings

 * The drill, board and socket will be hot.
 * This method of making a fire does not always work and takes a lot of time and energy.
 * When you're done with the fire, cover the ashes and make sure it's out!
 * Be very careful about what kind of wood/leaves/twigs you burn. For instance, rhododendron is very poisonous, so make sure not to get wood/leaves/twigs from (under) it. Do your research beforehand so you know what and what not to burn.

Things You'll Need

 * Knife or sharp stone
 * Tinder
 * Fire board made from a soft wood (such as cedar or basswood)
 * Drill made from the same or a softer wood (such as cottonwood root)
 * Bow made from a piece of "springy" wood (such as ash, wattle, hickory, osage or any "green" wood) for an emergency bow
 * Leather or rawhide lace (such as a work boot lace) or a strong string (such as 550 parachute cord)
 * Socket made from either a smooth, dimpled rock or piece of hard wood

Related Tips and Steps

 * How to Survive in the Woods for 3 Days


 * How to Make Waterproof Matches
 * How to Choose a Tent
 * How to Survive 3 Years in a Living Hell
 * How to Plan a Backpacking Trip
 * How to Make the Perfect Fire
 * How to Have a Bonfire

Sources and Citations

 * http://www.bizarrelabs.com/firebow.htm