Saturday 15 February 2020

Wood Pile Bowdrill Challenge

A while ago now I challenged myself to make and sucessfully use a Silver Birch bowdrill made from fire wood I had.

Recently I decided to tidy my wood pile up, it's located in my gardena nd is a mix of fire wood from my in-laws (the had a chimney fire and got shot of it), and various a.n.other wood that I've had the fortune to get hold of...A real mix and match.

With the Silver Birch challenge coming to mind plus the lack of recent bowdrill practice I decided to keep an eye out for any decent bits of wood that I could try again with.

Whilst I was involved in Scouting I used to collect every single large and small straight sticks with a view to adding them to my A frame shelter building kit, 
 

 Time had taken it's toll on a fair few of them so if they survived a forty five degree pressure bend they lived, if it snapped the bits went into my Frontier stove which was both handy for getting shot of the wood and a source of warmth on a clear but cold winter day. A great excuse to get it out and fired up! I have to say thanks to Canvas Tent Shop who put this up for a prize which I was happy to win.


With bow drill in mind I was obviously keeping an eye out for straight sticks to fashion a drill out of, I actually found some very early ones which in the main were fat, short and rather punky. A bit embaressing to say that I did copious reading before starting my self-taught bowdrill journey.

This discarded spoon blank was an interesting find as it wasn't a bad shape at all and was a puzzle why I'd ditched it half done.

 I'd previously found mice in the pile which made me jump a foot in the air so I was wary of more encounters, but I suspect a Grey Squrirrel had started a midden mound by de-shelling and troughing peanuts in there. Interestingly I don't put nuts in shells on my bird table so a furry-tailed rat must have come from another garden.


A couple of other interesting pauses were to look at a woven Wren's nest that did actually get built in. Apparently males build several nests to attract the ladies and luckily he didn't use this one as it was really near the wood and I needed the shelter stuff for Cubs around that time. The fungus is a Cramp ball which appeared on what is almost certainly Ash whilst it was in the pile. It's a useful  addition to a firelighting kit as it takes a spark well when dry. Upon further examination of the wood it showed a decent colony of them.


Towards the end of my tidy the rain started coming down so I did a bit of a bodge-it set up of my 3 x 3 tarp to finish off, it certainly gave it a bit of a camp feel.


So with the tidy up finished attention turns to the bow drill set. The bow is curved but a bit short and the wood of unknown origin and is powered by the paracord that was securing the wood bundles, the bearing blocks looks to be coniferous and whilst seasoned it is very damp, the drill is almost certainly Hazel and the base Lime which is actually a decent drill/ board combination. 


The set bedded in nicely and smoked well but the board was just the wrong side of punky and two efforts on it resulted in corners pinging off the depression. I wondered as well if the first length of paparcord I used might have been an old worn bowdrill length relegated to stick tying duties as the cordage slipped a few times whilst bowing. I changed it for the second attempt but I ended up with worn cordage which I've put down the the drill being really rough.


I decided to change the key componants completely, I'm fairly sure I found another piece of Lime for the base although not 100% because there wasn't any tell tale bark on this piece like the last, and the drill was again swopped for another Hazel length that had less abrasive bark. I was pleased to get to a sucessful ember but having not practiced in a while I felt my technique rather ring rusty, and videoing it was interesting for me to look at and critique (my eldest son has said that making Youtube videos is very narcissistic!).


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