Redwood
Redwood (Sequoia sempervirens). The heartwood works well for hearth boards. It is a relatively low density wood so little effort is required but I don't use it very often.
Cattail
Cattail (Typha latifolia) bloom spikes were used in prehistoric times in Eastern Oregon for hand spun spindles in conjunction with clematis hearth boards. Jean Auel, author of “Clan of the Cave Bear,” etc. learned her stone age survival skills from Jim Riggs in Eastern Oregon. Hence Ayla, the heroine of Auel's books, used cat tail bloom spikes plus clematis to start her fires. I haven't had any success with cat tail spindles but I know a lot of people who have.
Typha leaves are also usable for cordage for making a bow drill. Cut the leaves at dirt level, ideally while they are still green and scrape off the slimy stuff that accumulates at the base of the leaves. Split them into long strips and then let them dry. Moisten and then twine them into a two-ply cord about as thick as a pencil. The finer you split the leaves the stronger cordage but will suffice for making a few bow drill fires before it breaks.
Mare's Tail
Conyza canadensis, a common weed makes excellent spindles for hand spun fires. It is a member of the sunflower family (compositae) frequently found near freeway on ramps. It forms straight, tapered shoots with relatively soft woody stems which are easy to straighten with heat. The combination of a mare's tail spindle and an incense cedar hearth board for me takes the least effort for a hand drill fire.
Box Elder
Acer negundo is a streamside tree in the maple family. The wood is white, medium hard and very reliable for bow drill spindles and hearth boards and spindles.
Cottonwood
Populus sp. are found near water. They are excellent for spindles and hearth boards.
Willow
Salix sp. are almost always found near a source of moisture, whether it is a stream or natural seepage. My experience with willow wood has been a complete failure. It seems to disintegrate before it reaches ignition temperature but not so fast! Norm Kidder learned from Peg Matthewson who read it in a book that local Indians used cattail stems for spindles and willow root for hearth boards. Norm tells me that this combination works well. Tree roots are another source of materials which should not be overlooked.
Tinder Materials
So, you have twirled up a glowing ember. Now what? Gather some tinder. Materials which I have successfully used are:
The husk from soaproot (Chlorogalum pomeridiadum) is excellent.
Dry pounded grass. It's ubiquitous.
Dry shredded cattail leaves (Typha sp.)
Rotten inner bark from cottonwood (Populus sp.)
Nettle fiber (Urtica sp.)
Milkweed fiber (Asclepias sp.)
Dogbane fiber (Apocynum connabinum)
Redwood bark (Sequoia sempervirons)
Powdered gall from oak trees (Quercus sp.) is useful if you don't have good tinder. It can be sprinkled on a glowing ember and gently fanned to obtain a very large ember. The shavings or dry pine needles and fanned into a fire. Powdered dry rotten wood can be used the same way as powdered oak gall.
Socket Materials
The socket for a bow drill can be made either from a pitch saturated knot from a downed rotten douglas fir (Pseudotsuga taxifolia) or very hard wood such as grease-wood (Adenostoma fasciculatum).
FIRE
By Norm Kidder
* * *
Anthropologists debate the proper place in the fossil record to make the jump from apeman (Australopithecus) to man (Homo). The current trend is to base this arbitrary quantum leap on the first appearance of manufactured stone tools. The earliest case for this so far has been named Homo habilis (Handy man), a being otherwise physically identical to nearby apemen. This approach continues the bias toward stone tools inherent in the term stone-age to describe the human condition until the advent of metallurgy. This bias is the natural result of stone tools being all that's left of ancient technologies, and thus serving the needs of archaeologists. Recently chimpanzee groups in the wild have been found using stone tools, shouldn't they also then be considered human? I suggest a different theoretical approach -the use of fire as a tool.
The ancient tool kit probably consisted of a crude digging stick, a sharp or pointed stone, a stone hammer, and pieces of bark or leaf used as a cup for water. These are little different from the tools known to be used by chimps. This kit did not change for vast stretches of time. I propose that the stimulus for change that jump started the behavioral evolution for our kind was the discovery of fire as a tool.
Pre-human hominids were omnivorous gatherers and scavengers, killing relatively helpless animals if discovered. They lived at a time of drought, when the great forests of the world were shrinking and being replaced by grasslands. They were forced to make dangerous excursions away from the relative safety of the trees out into the more food-rich plains. Foraging required that group size remain small, and lookouts be always alert for the many large predators. Another element of life a few million years ago was occasional fires, started by lightning or volcanoes, which would sweep across large areas unchecked. A burned area would provide a major windfall to hominid groups. The ground would be cleared of dead vegetation exposing seeds and tubers, as well as providing the occasional cooked dead animal (one advantage to cooked meat is its shelf life). Burning also tended to run off most predators, and make it much easier to detect any that returned. For millennia perhaps, our ancestors learned to seek out burning grasslands which might provide food, briefly, for large congregations of hominids (the first conventions).
The great leap forward that I feel justifies a new classification for humans came when the first of these ancestors took a burning branch and set a new fire, taking control of the process. This discovery that fire could be used to make food more readily available, to preserve some of it for the future, and help defend against predators, created the technological base for modern society.
Fire Stick Farmers
A study of aboriginal groups around the world gives clues to the advances in the use of fire as technology. One of the oldest uninterrupted cultural traditions known to science was found in the Australian Aborigines before they were ‘introduced to modern civilization’. One anthropologist described their food gathering practices as fire stick farming. Using fire to determine the species of plants available to them for food. Specifically, they used fire to reduce less desirable plants, and encourage the most useful ones. The result was that most of the continents plant communities were, until recently, maintained by fire.
The evidence for California Indians indicates a similar use of burning to promote seed production in grasses and wildflowers; thatch removal to favor tuberous growth and other wildflowers; and thinning of brush to improve hunting by both increasing animal browse and decreasing cover.
Fire was also a critical element in the hunting process. Many ancient groups used fire to drive animals into traps (blind canyons, pits, tar pits, marshes, cliffs, etc.). In recent times, fire was being used by California Indians to drive ground squirrels from their burrows, bees and hornets from their hives and grasshoppers into a pit oven. Smoke and fire permeate most aspects of daily life. It is used to straighten arrows and spears, harden digging sticks, bend basket rims, waterproof tanned hides, purify and deodorize and of course to cook.
The importance of fire to all ancient people made it nearly inevitable that eventually someone would discover how to make fire. It is unlikely that anything in the fossil record will enable us to know just when this change took place. Hearthfires started from wildfire are identical to those started by fire sticks. Even if by chance a set of fire sticks were to be found, it would only tell us when conditions for preservation existed, not the earliest use. As to how the secret of fire making was discovered, I have my guess:
The primitive "match"or coal extender. See page 58.
The same process that produces fire will also eventually produce a hole. I believe that s
omeone trying to drill a hole in a board discovered fire making accidentally.
The wide range of the fire-drill throughout many continents (Australian aborigines use the same method as American Indians, etc.) implies that it may have been known before the great dispersal of humans carried out by Homo erectus around 1.5 million years ago, or at least by the migrations at the end of the ice ages starting around 40 thousand years ago (although it is possible that it arose separately and identically in many different places).
The basic technique for making fire by friction involves spinning a drill against the bottom of a hole in a hearth board. Friction from rubbing the sticks together produces heat and (if the correct woods are used) fine powdery sawdust, or char. The char is collected in a notch cut into the center of the hole. This concentrates the heat, the wood acting as an insulator. If the char is heated to 800° F. it will begin to smolder. (Data courtesy of Richard Baugh) Placing the smoldering char (ember) into a bed of tinder (fine, dry plant fibers) and blowing gently will cause the tinder to burst into flames. This is much easier to describe than to accomplish. Reaching 800° F. requires considerable pressure be applied to the drill.
The hand spun fire drill, the oldest method, accomplishes this through hand pressure against the drill while bearing down with the weight of the body while continuing to spin the drill as fast as possible. With practice, a strong, fairly heavy, well conditioned person can get an ember in a few seconds of hard work, under ideal conditions. Smaller or less experienced people can make fire through cooperative efforts and persistence. Mechanical advantages can be achieved through the use of a cap piece which is used to push down on the drill. To keep the drill spinning with one hand, a bowstring is wrapped around the drill and moved back and forth, spinning the drill. Another variant involves using toggles (and normally a second person) to spin the drill. These methods probably evolved where conditions made fire making difficult.
Three other techniques for friction fire use lateral friction rather than rotational - fire plow (movement up and down a groove), fire saw (the edge of one piece cuts through the middle of another), and the fire cord (a vine is pulled through a notch). Two techniques are known using heating by compression - the fire piston (works like a diesel engine), and flint and steel (iron particles are crushed, and torn away, causing enough heat to ignite them). The last of these is the best known, but was probably not common until iron became available. Modern matches use materials which ignite easily with little friction heat. Lighters use miniature flint and steel sets to light their gas fumes. Three new ways to make fire have been developed in recent years - electric spark, electric resistance, and chemical resistance.
UNDERSTANDING WOOD FIRE
By Mors Kochanski
* * *
The diffusion flame combustion process that is commonly known as fire is made easier to understand with the use of a graphic model known as the tetrahedron of fire. This approach to explaining fire usually applies universally to any form of combustible material and is one of the more popular concepts used in fire suppression theory. It is based on the work of W.M. Haessler, The Extinuishment of Fire, Dayton 1962.
In the four-sided tetrahedron the four entities are adjoined and each is connected with the other three. The four entities represent the four factors in the fire process: fuel (wood); air (oxygen), uninhibited chain reactions, and heat. By the use of the four-sided model we mean to imply that each of the four factors are equally related and of exactly the same importance. If any one factor is removed the fire process is impossible.
The fire process goes something like this: When heat is applied to a fuel, which in this instance is wood, the rise in temperature starts a break-down process known as pyrolysis. Some components of the wood are changed into gases and vapors, amongst other things, and become increasingly agitated until they break up into very active particles known as free radicals which are very intent on finding something suitable to latch on to. The free radicals interact amongst each other and go into an uninhibited chain reaction which now involves its own heat source and becomes self-propagating and continues as long as there are properly sized and arranged pieces of fuel to maintain pyrolysis, radical formation, and feed-back heat.
Fuel - Wood
Surface area or surface-to-mass ration: The ease of ignition and the promotion of combustion are strongly affected by the size of the wood used. The finer the wood, the more readily it will burn, and of course the faster it will burn. If a block of wood with a surface area of a square meter was split so that the resulting pieces would have a total surface area of ten square meters, these would burn up ten times as fast. The split pieces would burn with greater intensity to a higher temperature, but the amount of heat liberated would be the same for both, as this depends on the calorific value of the material. The way to be assured a good start for a fire is to use adequate fine material to get the intensities of heat and higher temperatures to make the larger sticks burn. Twigs and wood feathers should be about the thickness of a match stick to start with.
Fuel Spacing and Arrangement
It is not sufficient that the fuel be of the correct thinness but it has to be properly spaced in relation to the other pieces of fuel so that the desired heat concentration from the igniting source can be that the desired heat concentration from the igniting source can be achieved, oxygen has access to the combustible gases that evolve, and when the fuel is burning the adjacent fuel is involved to extend the fire process. Experience will eventually determine that you can not squeeze your fuel too close together or have it spread too far apart.
In lighting a fire, if the kindling is too close together the mass of the material in the kindling absorbs too much of the match's heat before it can be effective, and it physically obstructs oxygen access so that the oxygen combustible vapor mixture is too lean to catch fire, producing only smoke.
It is also helpful to light your kindling well off the ground. The coolest air is near the ground and there is more obstruction to the flow of needed air.
The best fuels are ones that are high in carbon and hydrogen content. The most common elements found in all living things are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. Oxygen is not a fuel but it supports combustion. Nitrogen is not a fuel and neither does it support combustion; in fact it tends to interfere with oxygen. Combustion will cease when the atmospheric oxygen level drops below 15%.
The Composition Of Wood
Wood is composed of three major constituents: remicellulose, cellulose and lignin. Their molecular structure puts them in a class of chemicals known as polymers. A polymer is a relatively large molecule that is made up of a number of repeating (poly) smaller units called mers.
When wood burns the cellulose participates mostly in producing the visible flame and the lignin supports the major part of the glowing.
The cellulose is the main structural part of the cell wall of trees and plants. Wood has such an intricate structure, creating such an enormous surface area, that a cubic centimeter of wood spread out would cover an area of ten million square centimeters.
Wood heated up to 200 degrees Centigrade dries out, undergoes slow pyrolysis (break-down through being heated) evolving some carbon dioxide, formic acid and vinegar. Some heat is given off. At temperatures between 200 and 280 degrees Centigrade wood slowly undergoes pyrolysis with much the same evolution of gases as mentioned earlier and the wood is reduced to charcoal without flame. From 280 degrees up to 500 degrees Centigrade the mixture of gases are combustible and are readily ignited.
Wood will readily ignite from a flame at 380 degrees Centigrade. Spontaneous ignition occurs at about 545 degrees Centigrade towards the end of pyrolysis, as the emission of gas decreases and air can reach the hot charcoal. Above 500 degrees Centigrade carbon monoxide and hydrogen burn as a non-luminous flame and the charcoal burns until white ash is left.
Studies have shown that the average composition of the evolved volatiles remain constant throughout the py-rolysis. The calorific
value was constant at about 4 Kcal per gram.
The yield of charcoal from wood is about 16 to 20 percent and the calorific value for charcoal is about 8 Kcal per gram.
Cellulose, which composes about 50% of wood, volatizes rapidly around 340 degrees Centigrade and exhibits typical polymer characteristics by degrading into nearly two hundred different chemical compounds. The situation is rather complex as numerous simple molecules form and diffuse to the surface where mixing with oxygen occurs and subsequent ignitions take place if the temperature is at or above the ignition point. All woods have similar ignition temperatures despite appreciable variations in their ignitabilities. Cellulose products burn without melting to form a char.
Rapid heating produces little charcoal, much tar and highly inflammable gases. Some of the compounds evolved through pyrolysis are very toxic, probably accounting for the headaches one often gets by breathing smoke, especially from black spruce and pine. Some of the compounds you are likely to find are:
carbon monoxide
acetaldehyde
hydrogen cyanide
butraldehyde
carbon dioxide
nitrogen dioxide
formaldehyde
acreolin
Smoke
Smoke is mostly composed of unburned carbon particles that are less than one milimicron in diameter and can be suspended in a gas. Anything larger would be considered a dust particle. Smoke is composed of clouds of particles, which when taken individually would be invisible, but taken as a cloud scatter light and are opaque to visible light. Smoke results when carbonaceous materials (and hydrocarbons) are incompletely burned due to a lack of heat or a restriction in the oxygen supply, and unreacted carbon molecules form. Soot is formed when these molecules lump together. When other intermediate gaseous products form simultaneously with the carbon, they may condense on the particles to produce uniquely acrid, toxic or irritating smoke. In a confined space wood smoke alone can produce lung damage and be lethal long before the heat of the fire would have any effect.
Primitive Technology Page 7