My first attempt at Friction Fire

[Punty]

  I made my first effort at friction fire a week ago, and failed. I had issues with the spindle popping out of the bow and flying several feet away, so I was having trouble with form and a few details like the bow being too tight, and probably too curved.

  At any rate, I wrote about it, with pictures, on my new blog site, along with a review of a cheap multitool I was given at work, that I used for my firebow project.

https://puntyventures.com/2018/08/05/friction-fire-fail-with-seven-multitool/

  A few pictures from the blog that you may enjoy...

TIIIIINDERRRRR!!


Screw this knife, I'm whipping out the axe.




  If I could figure out how to post the article in it;s entirety, I would...but that's beyond my low tech skills, I guess.

[lgm]

Don't give up, technique is everything, well almost.

[duxdawg]

Nice write up.

The colony wood (aka ant tower/hotel) is white rot punkwood. Which means it is good as a CE (coal extender). In other words, it will smolder like incense. Good addition to a TB (Tinder Bundle) as is or charred.

I'd say you are over confident with your TB. Unless you are very skilled with it, that will prove to be too small more often than not. No worries! You can always add more.

By your dust and smoke description, your hearthboard and spindle sound good. Just need to fine tune

Keep at it! And bring us along with ya. 

[Punty]

  Hey, thanks for the feedback and taking the time to read it, guys.

  I wasn't actually trying to start a fire, just to accomplish flame, so I wasn't too concerned about the tinder bundle. I've gotten flame with that green twine in the middle using charcloth and flint and steel, and the rest is birch bark...so I figured if I could get flame with charcloth ember, it should work with an ember from a firebow. I have no idea if it would have. Unfortunately, everything around was just saturated with water from nightly downpours and thunderstorms for several days..so I didn't really bother to try to put otgether a tinder bundle from the stuff around me. I just grabbed some birch bark off a dead tree and went with that.