Hello, I’m ROBwithaB and this is 101 ways to make fire;
the show that takes you to the cutting... ouch
to the cutting edge of ... ouch
That’s sharp. ...to the cutting edge of science...
... and survival skills ... and sibilance
and also some scatological, gratuitous sexual innuendo.
Mostly thanks to his seriously unsexy assistant. Now, if you are out in the bush,
you may have forgotten your lighter or run out of matches.
But hopefully you’ll have one of these: a knife.
Now, a lot of people seem to prefer the $400 stainless steel alloy mamba-slagter of a knife.
I prefer something a lot simpler: Small, simple, easy to carry, easy to sharpen,
even on a rock and it’s a folding knife,
so it stows in the handle. It’s called “Opinel”.
Borrowed it yesterday from this French chap I met here in the camp grounds.
(calls out) Hello Robert. (French) $#!%. Somebody stole my knife!
Good for pruning vineyards and slicing baguettes, and
cutting cheese... (queef) Oops, excuse me.
... and even starting fires. Opinel: the knife that might save your life.
Right, so here we have our little French fire lighter
or as I like to call it, le firelighter français.
But we are not going to use it like that for two reasons:
1. Its sharp and you can cut yourself. 2. It’s a knife and it’s useful
for cutting things, which doesn’t work if you’ve been beating
that with a rock. So, we are going to close it into the handle
and use that as our striking edge.
Now, we just need a sharp rock. I found this one down by the stream.
Sharpened using stone-age tools. I just took a big rock and dropped it and
the thing broke, leaving a nice sharp edge.
Yes, so this is quartz, you can use any hard rock that
you can get a sharp edge on: obsidian; chert; flint would work especially
well. We don’t have that here.
I’m using quartz, it’s abundant. And then the last thing we need; some smigtin,
Some smouldering ignition tinder, and for that I’m going to use
a little piece of charred rope. I always carry a bag of this stuff around
with me. Thin cotton rope that’s been charred.
Now, some people might say: “Dude that’s so fake,
you have 3 things and only 2 hands.” And to them I say;
“I’m going to use my middle finger.” What I’m looking for, is a little indentation
like that... I hope you can see that
... in one of the sharp edges of the rock... and that’s going to help me align the blade.
I’m going to position this just underneath that.
I’m going to hold all of this so that my fingers are out
of the way and can’t get slammed by the knife.
So, I’m going to grasp this firmly by the handle
and turn it slightly so that we are shaving the corner
over there. Okay, here goes.
There we go, one time baby.
Cool. You rock, brother. And you can see why we had to do all that
talking just now, because this would have been a very short
video otherwise. Right, then all that remains
is for us to drop our little ember into the birds nest.
Today I’m going to use an actual birds nest. (shouts) Sorry!
We are going to get that smoking and then do our fire dance;
(singing) Unga bunga, unga bunga, unga bunga, unga bunga.
And we have fire! Oonga Boonga baby,
just in time for braai-vleis. Bloody Caveman.
Savage.
