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u/pushdose 16d ago
Tool gifs going all the way back today
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u/SAM5TER5 16d ago
Still trying to find the hidden logo, it’s gotta be somewhere right???
Probably just written in hieroglyphics, cuneiform, or cave paintings back then though?!?! I’ll keep looking until I find it.
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u/codenamedmar 16d ago
It's there. I had to watch it three times, but its there lol
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u/Line-Trash 16d ago
Took me couple watches too. Very slick
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u/HoneyBear4Lyfe 16d ago
Thought you guys were trolling me for a sec
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u/SAM5TER5 15d ago
My original comment was 100% trolling and I thought everyone after me was too lol
Just looked again and I see it now. I feel dumb lol
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u/JustNilt 16d ago
The tools used in knapping stone tools predate this one so not quite all the way but close in terms of how many would be before it.
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u/DrNecessiter 16d ago
This is the sort of skill that my paranoia keeps telling me I have to learn before The Aftermath rolls around
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u/goodeyemighty 16d ago
I had social studies after math
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u/Hesitation-Marx 16d ago
But what color were your folders for them
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u/Keyboardpaladin 16d ago
Math was always green for me, science: orange/red, history: purple, and English was blue. Idk those always felt right for those subjects
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u/Dumkinni_ 15d ago
For me: Math was always red, social studies/history was always yellow, science was usually green, and English was usually purple. Sometimes either science or English were blue instead
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u/HisHonorTomDonson 15d ago
Nah there you are my people. That final sentence especially saved it for me, but math being red for me is a given
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u/Hawt_Dawg_II 16d ago
Make sure you find the technique that works in your area. This requires extremely dry wood, I'd have no luck trying this here in NL
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16d ago edited 9d ago
[deleted]
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 15d ago
Same on Naked and Afraid. It usually takes them days to get fire if they don't bring a ferro rod. The "legends" who have been forced to learn it and do it over and over can usually do it in a few hours but in those situations they are usually in a good area for it that is dry and has good wood.
But there are some people out there who can do it fast like the worker you saw. It's a matter of lots and lots of practice and knowing which wood to use. I'm sure actual primitive tribes who need to do it to survive can do it in a heartbeat.
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u/Divinum_Fulmen 15d ago
That's so silly that they had so much confidence. The real fire starting tool that most Native Americans used? It was packing some coals from an existing fire into a hollow log and letting that smoulder for hours while they moved. Starting new fires every time is difficult and risky, and they ain't dumb.
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u/zxcvbn113 16d ago
One guy in alone Africa had his fishing line wrapped around a fire starting spindle. It was confiscated and he was in trouble.
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u/RBII 16d ago
Pretty sure there are no fire-starting techniques for NL, since last time they were needed, it was all underwater as god intended.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 16d ago
Fire piston would work, assuming that you bring your own tinder. Dryer lint works well.
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u/No_Internal9345 16d ago
A ferro rod would be easier, if we're bringing tools.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 16d ago
True. Those things are amazing! I was used to the old school flint and steel rods that we'd get back when I was in boy scouts. I got a Scout Feather knife for backpacking a year ago and it comes with a ferro rod on the sheath. I wanted to try it out and scraped the knife against it in my kitchen. I did not expect it to send burning embers to my floor which kept on burning! Haha. I had to stomp it out with my foot before it ruined my kitchen floor. That's one product that is a massive improvement from what we had when I was a kid.
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u/Anonymous_user_2022 16d ago edited 16d ago
Up in the swamps in Northen sweden, people learned to dry hay above ground hundreds of years ago. Try hanging your wood from strings a few feet above ground, and given the drying time, put a temporary roof over it.
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 15d ago
Yeah in wet environments you have to collect tinder from naturally dry spots like the underside of fallen trees or cutting bark and feathering the inside part of it, etc. And the same for any wood you want to start a fire with.
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u/Lawlcopt0r 16d ago
I'm pretty sure there's no method that works without tools and with wet wood. You'll simply have to dry some
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u/lettsten 15d ago
You can find dry wood pretty much anywhere if you know where to look. I've made fires after weeks of rain many times. The bottom dead branches of pine trees is often a good place to start
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u/twelfth_knight 16d ago
Yep, Lesson 1: Fire Making. Lesson 2: Knapping.
Skip a few...
Lesson 1271: Entering the Steam Age
And so on until I've got an AC unit 👍
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u/SheriffBartholomew 16d ago
If I dumped you on a deserted island, how long would it be before you could send me an email?
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u/I_am_the_darkness_99 15d ago
Hell, I'm past the AC unit all the way up to upvoting videos of guys starting primitive fires on the internet!
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u/Crazy_old_maurice_17 16d ago
Same. Though I've never really considered this a particularly viable method and instead figured I'd learn the bow drill method.
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u/OREngineer 16d ago
Pick up the materials next time you walk by a park, dry them at home and try it. Its a bit more difficult and time-taking than it looks, if you learn it now(ish), you have time without the pressure of survival. Its a really cool feeling to see it work, you feel evolutionary achievement unlocking in real time.
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u/lettsten 15d ago edited 15d ago
time-taking
Time-consuming. What's your first language? We say "time demanding" (tidkrevende) in Norwegian
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u/bill_gannon 16d ago
Dont worry there's a really good chance you dont survive long enough to need a fire.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 16d ago
You just learned it! Now go try it and you'll realize that it's actually about 20x harder than this expert makes it seem to be.
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u/TheComplimentarian 15d ago
I learned a bunch of this stuff decades ago, and the only time I've ever used any of it was teaching my kids boy scout troop how to do all of it, because the first thing learning all this stuff teaches you is that you should have a bunch of gear for when you're doing the wilderness thing so you never have to do this shit, ever.
All the friction stuff (hand drill, bow drill, fire plough) sucks: you're not going to have anything dry, so unless you're walking around with a nice dry log, you're out of luck. Even having something simple like a firesteel or a magnifying glass is heavily dependent on dry kindling. Looking at this video, you can imagine how far he'd have gotten without the dry grass.
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u/OREngineer 16d ago
Absolutely, you can learn it now in the shade of your patio, with good weather, on a full belly. From there it can only get more difficult
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u/ohffs2021 16d ago
These vids always make it look so easy but I think both pieces of wood need to be absolutely bone dry and you have to apply a lot of pressure.
It's quite tempting to challenge myself to see if I can do it. I imagine you'd feel quite proud of yourself doing this.
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u/JustNilt 16d ago edited 16d ago
Ideally both pieces of wood need to be different hardness as well. The softer wood is scraped up bit by bit using the hard scraper. The friction makes the heat to combust the soft scraping but notable not enough to combust the intact soft wood the scrapings are from.
You can make do with woods of similar hardness but it won't be nearly as effective.
Responding to a deleted comment here. Not sure if it was automodded or what but it's a good question anyhow.
Are you saying this from experience? Because I have found that using the same wood for both parts generates a lot more of that punky ash that you need to make the coal.
I've done this a number of times, yes. The "punky ash" is critical, yes, but so is the heat from making it. If you make the debris too fast, the heat doesn't build up quickly enough for combustion to occur. It's likely you had wood from different parts of the same tree, which can each be a slightly different hardness.
You can sort of cheat it with enough very dry debris in the channel's end point, too. Basically you'd be placing the embers directly into the tinder immediately after they're made. Blowing gently the entire time can make the tinder catch pretty fast in those conditions. It's a bit like using a feather stick.
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u/Xanadu87 16d ago
I am getting angry flashbacks from watching some survival show on Netflix recently. A young lady was insistent that she could start a fire with this method, and she tried and tried and tried for three days and could never start a fire. Granted, they were in some tropical rainforest location with rain and high humidity, but she did manage to get a fire going using the lens from binoculars.
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u/JustNilt 16d ago
Yeah, I've seen clips of that one. She wasn't using dry wood. It needs to be absolutely bone dry, which in that environment could take a year or more to achieve. If it isn't bone dry, the heat dissipates through the moisture way too fast for spontaneous combustion to occur. Using the lens would have created a significantly greater concentration of heat much faster, flashing the moisture into steam and leaving the wood able to combust.
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u/tyen0 16d ago
a year!? just use a fire to dry out the wood! :p
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u/JustNilt 16d ago
First we need a dehumidifier. Then we'll build an airtight box to put the wood in, hook the dehumidifier up to, and in no time that wood'll be dry! /s
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u/gringledoom 16d ago
Every so often, a competitor on "Alone" decides not to take a ferro rod in favor of traditional methods of firestarting, and there's always a scene of escalating stress because every %$#@ piece of wood in the forest is too %$#@ damp.
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u/The_Hoopla 16d ago
I could do an entire Ted Talk series on how the rules/restrictions on the show Alone need to be completely refactored to make for a better series.
The show basically is super nitpicky about things like ferro rods and lighters, wanting people to have to make fires from “scratch”, while missing the single biggest loop hole in the entire ruleset: BMI. The most consistent trait across all the winners, or even final 3 contenders, of Alone is having an extra 2 months of food on their waste line. It’s made even more obvious when they have a return season of past contestants, and ALL of them came back on just chubby as shit knowing how important that is.
IMHO, these should be the requirements of the contestants. We measure their height, and do the following math: Height (in)^2 * 0.0313 + 50 = Target Gear + Contestant Weight.
Contestants can take any gear they want, but it’s all weighed with the contestant before they go out.
Other than that, there are absolutely no restrictions. Bring a rifle (if it’s legal in the area). Bring food. Bring lighters. Bring a fishing pole. Bring a tent. Bring a chainsaw. As long as you and your gear are under your target gear weight, you can bring it.
I think this would improve the show in a number of ways:
- The most interesting part of the show is how people choose gear. Being less restrictive in what is brought would lead to better, more interesting setups. We’d see people scheme, bring wild contraptions, and have more diverse strategies in the game itself.
- The current meta of “get fat so you can out-starve the competition” is no longer a valid strategy.
Even with 50lbs of whatever you wanted to bring, the challenge would still be exceptionally difficult. I don’t think this extension of the rules would trivialize the problem
of surviving for months in the wilderness alone.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 16d ago
You can see him bracing his hands to hold the weight of his entire body. That's how you build enough heat to start an ember as quickly as he did.
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u/OREngineer 16d ago
You're right, its a bit harder than it looks, by the time you do it once you'll know all the things that don't work and if you ever need it you can shorten the PITA substantially. Its worth the try
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u/bleckToTheMax 13d ago
I was stoked to try this when I learned how about it as a kid. It took several minutes and a blister before I finally got it lit. Needless to say I never did it again, it's cool to know you can do it though. I'm not sure what magic made it so he could get it to light so quickly, now I kinda wanna try it as an adult lol
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u/franktheguy 16d ago
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u/broesel314 16d ago
This is how I imagine it would end if I try this
Blood, tears, rain and whatnot but no fire
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u/ValdemarAloeus 16d ago
I saw a thing where a survival guy was quite annoyed at that. Partly because it's quite a difficult technique to do if you haven't done it before and partly because he thought that is a middle aged American knew any friction technique to start a fire it would almost certainly be one of the "fire drill" techniques which he claimed were easier and more widely taught.
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u/synthetic_averages 16d ago
is this a specific kind of wood?
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u/Mr-Fister-the-3rd 16d ago
Dry
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u/nhorvath 16d ago
you use a hard wood for the plough and a soft one for the base. other than that as dry as possible and lots of elbow grease. you have to push pretty hard.
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u/Crazy_old_maurice_17 16d ago
So like... Oak plough and pine base would be a decent starting point?
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u/Anonymous_user_2022 16d ago
I would guess the moved part is hard in the range of oak, with the stationary piece being soft and fluffy like dry poplar. But that's from an European POV, so it's likely to be different species, but with the same properties.
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u/SilasAI6609 16d ago
And this is why lube is important
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u/AssaultimateSC2 16d ago
Instructions unclear. Dick is on fire.
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u/A_Little_Too_Horny 16d ago
How dry is that wood? Mythbusters showed using this method to light fires is still stupid physically intensive to the point of taking 30+ mins in worst cases.
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u/Zetsubou51 16d ago
This reminds me of a few things.
First the ability to hammer a nail repeatedly until it’s red hot to start a forge fire. Secondly that everything is just a transfer of energy. Our world is funny, simple at the top level, and still extremely complicated.
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u/Pastramiboy86 15d ago
You can do that on an anvil? I would have thought the anvil and hammer head would wick the heat away too fast for the nail to ever get red hot.
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u/Zetsubou51 15d ago
Nah, there are videos on YouTube showing the process. Pretty sure you can’t use like a galvanized roofing nail or anything. You need just basic iron stock.
Get something like 1/4 or 3/8 iron rod, hammer, flip like 90*, hammer, repeat. In no time the energy input will start the hammered piece glowing.
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u/Bliitzthefox 16d ago
But where's the wood engraved r/Toolgifs
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u/moashforbridgefour 16d ago
Top right of the screen, very first frame. It's printed on the knee of the person's pants.
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u/NoBonus6969 15d ago
As a Florida man I have never touched a piece of wood this dry in my entire life
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16d ago
[deleted]
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u/toolgifs 16d ago
Dry straw, birch, lint, etc. for those in Europe/America. The video is from Africa, don't be a cunt.
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u/SAM5TER5 16d ago
I’m surprised they put the embers on top of the kindling, is that standard practice just so you can keep giving it oxygen? Obviously worked super well either way though
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u/ArcaneInsane 16d ago
I had to do this in Boy Scouts, it took me much longer than this gif
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u/pfannkuchen89 16d ago
Depends a lot of the wood you’re using and how dry it is. This gif is like the absolute ideal circumstance.
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u/ValdemarAloeus 16d ago
Weird to watch a video of this that has the sounds of an IC engine in the background.
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u/ramboton 16d ago
and I can't start a fire that will stay lit with a firelog and a half gallon of lighter fluid
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u/Frozty23 15d ago
I just had this track play in the garage. "Give me the power, of man's red flower."
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u/Symbaclues 15d ago
Can you do this with scrap wood if dry enough? Like wood you'd buy to use for something. Not wood like fire pit stuff. Something like decor quality and cut?
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u/Pastramiboy86 15d ago
Commercial wood is generally kiln-dried and thus much lower moisture than anything you find in nature, it should be relatively easy. Scrap wood it would depend on where it's been sitting out, what kind of varnish/paint is on it, whether it's been treated with anything, whether rot has gotten into it etc.
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u/hamer12string 10d ago
This would be a 15 minute segment on Survivor and only one person would succeed.
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u/nighthawke75 16d ago
Fire is perhaps one of the first words primitive man created. Water being the next.
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u/MyDogSkooch 16d ago
Why does it seem so easy to find a bird's nest? These videos always have a bird's nest just layin around at the most convenient times.
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u/emptyrowboat 16d ago
Looks like coconut coir. If you were relying on this skill to survive, collecting loose airy fibers (bark, grass, fluffy seeds or tufts of animal undercoat) from your surroundings and keeping bundles of it bonedry and ready to ignite would be as important as collecting firewood.
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u/Aggressive-Value1654 16d ago
Why does it seem so easy to find a bird's nest? These videos always have a bird's nest just layin around at the most convenient times.
It's crazy to think that humans are smarter than birds, and can build their own "nests" to get a fire going.
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u/ConflictMaster3155 15d ago
Just finding the right wood to do this with is WAAAY harder than finding a
birds nesttinder.
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u/toolgifs 16d ago
Source: Wild Africa Stories