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Tag: survival

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Phillosoph

Simple Survival Fire Kit

My recent article on the simplicity of the Soviet soldier’s kit made me think about some of the items that are not included in the equipment list.
Specifically, I thought about fire kits.
An idle moment on the internet turned up commercial fire kits with nearly a dozen different types of tinder. They also came with a big price tag!
We all know fire is important for survival, but what do you actually need in your fire kit?
One of the most useful items you can carry are disposable lighters.
Zippo lighters are touted as “the professional’s choice” but in my experience they seem to need frequent refilling.
Interestingly, “Detachment B-52 (Project Delta) Reconnaissance Tips of the Trade” has the advice: “Do not take cigarette lighters as they make too much noise when opening and closing.” This is clearly in reference to zippo-type lighters.
For the same price as a Zippo, you can have dozens of disposable lighters that keep their fuel until it is used.
Take a look around your local pound store and you’ll see them being sold in multiple packs. Invest in a few of these.
Bright colours reduce the chance of losing them in the woods.
Place at least one lighter in each emergency kit that you have.
Put one in each outdoor coat that you own.
Throw a couple in the glove compartment of your car.
A disposable lighter will give your many more ignitions than the equivalent weight of matches. Some disposable-type lighters may be refilled.
Optional: wrap the outside of your lighter with a few inches of duct-tape. Duct-tape is flammable and a small piece may be lit with the lighter and used to get a fire going. It may be used like a candle, as described later. The duct tape is also handy for repairs and other duties.

The only real objection to disposable lighters is that there can be a fairly broad quality margin. Some disposable lighters seem to last for ages, others do not.
Allow for this by having a pair in your main fire kit.
A butane lighter that has run out of fuel can still provide a useful spark, and can be operated one-handed, unlike a traditional flint and steel. For this reason, the disposable lighters that have a striking wheel are preferable to other ignition systems.
Even when the lighter “flint” is exhaused, the wheel may still be used to strike sparks from a ferro-rod. This saves your knife blade, and is handy if your knife blade is of a steel that does not readily throw sparks..
Twice I have managed to run a butane lighter through the washing machine.
The first lighter changed colour from green to turquoise, but continues to work fine.
The second, a flint and wheel type, I found on the floor while unloading the laundry. I picked it up and tried it, and it lit immediately!
Disposable lighters seem to be more tolerant of water than you might think!
I have come across claims that butane gas lighters will leak in low pressure environments. This may or may not be an actual problem if you are a mountaineer. For the rest of us, lighters are a very practical source of fire.
Butane lighters may be difficult to light when the temperature drops to zero or below. In such situations, carry at least one in your trouser hip pocket or an inner pocket where your body heat will keep it warm.

The second thing your fire kit should contain is tinder and something to carry tinder in. Ideally your tinder container should be waterproof.
A 35mm film container is close to ideal. Ideally the lid should be attached to the container body so it cannot be lost. A strip of cord or plastic and some superglue solves this.
While film containers are not as common (or cheap) as they once were, they can still be found from on-line sources. They are sometimes marketed as “geocache” containers.
While researching this I was stunned by a site asking £123 for 15 35mm containers!

Alternate Containers: One reader of this blog informs me he can scrounge pill bottles from local pharmacies. Another suggests that the little tins that the glucose test strips for diabetics come in can be used.
I have access to 50 ml screw-capped centrifuge tubes but to my mind these are a little too big.
At least one brand of storm matches comes with a container that might be suitable. Buying the container alone is nearly twice the cost of buying it filled with storm matches! Not sure if the cheaper examples have a screw-thread cap, however.

Pack your container with cotton wool.
Melt some Vaseline in an old spoon over a gentle heat. You will probably find Vaseline in the same store you brought the cotton wool from.
Pour the Vaseline on the cotton wool.
Pack that down, put fresh cotton wool on top and melt more Vaseline.
Keep repeating until your container is full of Vaseline-impregnated cotton wool.
Cotton wool is an excellent tinder. The Vaseline helps repel water and extends the burning time. You will only need a little, which can be teased out before ignition.
Wrap a little piece of Vaselined cotton wool around a stick before igniting, and then use this like a match/candle. You may also split the end of a stick to hold the cotton wool, or handle it with twig “chopsticks”.
As you use up the Vaselined cotton wool, you replace it in the container with “found tinder”.
“Found tinder” is anything that you find in the field that can be used as tinder.
It includes thistle or dandelion down, clothing fibres, scrap paper, woodworm dust, sawdust, shredded spent matchsticks, bird down, belly button fluff and many other materials.
Some outdoorsmen prefer to have a second container for found tinder.
You want to keep your found tinder dry. Dry it near a campfire or in the sunlight when opportunity presents itself.

Candles are a useful addition to a fire kit.
A small bundle of birthday cake candles is nicely compact.
Whenever you strike a match, use it to light a candle. If your fire won’t light with the first attempt with a lighter, use the lighter to light a candle, and use the candle for a sustained source of ignition.
If your tinder will not light after five seconds of exposure to a lighter flame, try something else.
Candles therefore conserve your supplies of matches or lighter fuel.

The final item I would include in the fire kit is a magnifying lens.
This can be used for fire-starting on sunny days. “The only fire-starter on Earth that isn’t!”
Your compass probably has a magnifying lens on its baseplate but it is worth including an additional one in the fire kit.
I recently picked up five Fresnel lenses for £1.99, less than the price some companies charge for one, so shop around.
I confess I have not started any fires with these yet since as soon as they arrived the sun disappeared!
The suggestions below is a fairly basic but capable fire kit:
•A pair of lighters.
• One or two tinder containers.
• Vaseline-soaked cotton wool.
• Bundle of birthday candles.
• Fresnel lens.
Store in a sealable waterproof plastic bag. Double-bagging is a good precaution.
Some of you will note that this kit does not contain some of the more traditional survival fire-starting items.
There are no matches or storm matches because I believe the lighters are more space efficient. A single disposable lighter is estimated to be equivalent to a hundred books of matches, so it is obvious which is preferable. If you have matches, however, by all means use them!
Conventional matches may be made more water-resistant by pouring molten candle wax over them. You may dip them individually but it is easier create a block of wax with the matches encased. The alternative idea of painting the matchheads in clear nail varnish may also be encountered, but will be more time consuming than the wax method. You will need to scrape the wax or varnish from the head before attempting to light them.
Matches may be packed into any wide-mouthed, suitably sized plastic bottle, so long as it is watertight. Do not forget to include the striking surface!
There is no ferro-rod and steel in this kit because the lighters can do the same job and are more effective.
Lighting fires with a ferro-rod is fun, and you should know how to do it. But when things get serious, have a couple of lighters handy.
If you already have a ferro-rod, carry it.
I have a waterproof match container that came with a ferro-rod glued to the side. Unfortunately the container is a little too narrow to make a good tinder carrier.
If you do not have a ferro-rod and striker, invest in some lighters and the other items first.
Shop around for a ferro-rod and steel if you want one. Prices vary considerably and some will cost you the same as a score of lighters!
Categories
Phillosoph

Four Tricks for Cleaning Water

Today’s blog will be a short one, but it will cover a couple of useful and interrelated ideas, all to do with water.
If you find a source of water, the chances are that it will not be too clean.
All sorts of mud, dirt and grit may be floating in it and the organic components will affect the efficiency of chemical purification methods you may employ.

Filter Tripod

One solution is to use a cloth bag to filter the water through.
I have even seen it suggested to use a spare pair of trousers. Tuck one leg into the other to form a double layer and then tie a knot in end of the leg(s).
Hang this up and pour water through so that it drips into a container.
In a long term camp, the filter can be packed with sand and straw etc.
Note that the water produced will be clearer, but cannot be considered to be safe until it has been boiled or chemically treated.
Wick Method of Filtration
A variation of the above is the wick method. Fill a container with your crude, suspect water and place an empty container lower down. Connect the two with a strip of cloth such as a bandanna and allow capillary action to do its thing. This may work with other materials such as paper or string. Experiment.
This method is a lot more economical on materials. When your wick becomes too dirty wash it or discard it.
Note that while the water produced will appear clearer it cannot be considered to be safe until it has been boiled or chemically treated.

Indian Well 

A third method I was taught to call an Indian Well. It is also called a seepage well.
We have all seen the movies when the protagonists get to a water hole and it is all muddy. “Oh no!” they cry.
What they should do is start digging a hole near the shore of the waterhole or river.
If the ground is too hard for your hands find an object you can use as a digging stick. A tent peg, tire iron, even a stick!
The hole should be about half a metre across and deep.
Since you have dug down into damp ground the hole will begin to fill with water.
Poke a few holes in the side of the hole and it will fill even quicker.
The water will probably look muddy and still something you do not want to drink.
Using your hands, a bark scoop, tin can or anything else you have handy, bail out the water and cast it onto the ground nearby.
Eventually the water coming through should become clearer. Leave it a while and more material will settle out.
The water will still need to be filtered further and boiled or treated.
This is not the fastest method of getting cleaner water but does have the advantage that you can use it when not near an obvious water source. Just dig down into damp ground.
The water first revealed by digging a hole just above the high-tide mark should be fit for drinking. Further digging only produces water which is too salty..
Obviously, digging at a low point will be more productive than a hilltop.Dig between dunes or the lowest point on the outside bend of a dry water course.
The Boy Scout Handbook (1911) tells us that an Indian Well should be several feet from the water source, twelve inches across and six inches below the water level.
Empty by bailing at least three times before considering using the water.

Solar Distillation with Bottles

Our fourth method is useful for sunnier locations such as the desert, but may work elsewhere.
Take two bottles, glass or plastic. Clear is good but if both are opaque use the darker coloured one for the “crude” water.
Partially fill one bottle with untreated water and tape the necks of the two bottles together.
Since we are in the desert we will assume you have a vehicle nearby (working or not) and it has some tape in the tool kit. (don’t go to places like the desert without a tool kit and other essentials in your vehicle!).
If you have a suitable tube, use this to connect the two bottles rather than taping them neck to neck.
Find a slope or pile of sand, Select the side that will get the most exposure to the sun (the south in the northern hemisphere).
If the bottles were taped directly together, lay the two bottles on their sides and bury the empty one in the side of the slope, leaving the one with water exposed to the sun.
Let nature take its course.
The water in the outside bottle will be heated and evaporate. Being in a closed system it will pass into the interior of the buried bottle and the drop in temperature will cause it to condense.
After a while, the buried bottle will contain drinkable water which can be collected if you take the apparatus to pieces carefully.
If you had a suitable tube, you could have run this into the collection bottle when you constructed the device.
If you paid attention in school, you will recognise this method as distillation without the need for Bunsens and heatproof glassware.
The source water you used could have been urine and the produced water would still be safe to drink.

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Phillosoph

Bows in North America and Pellucidar

Reading through my file collection the other day I came across an old (1930’s?) article on how the North American Indians made their bows. I have some knowledge of English and Asian bows but this was a field I was less familiar with. One of the reasons that this article so interested me was that I am currently reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar series. Many of the characters in these books use bows and there are frequent references to them constructing new weapons after escaping from capture. The Indians tended to favour flatbow designs and I have heard it suggested that such a bow is easier to construct under field conditions than the D-section English Longbow.
I will not bother to reproduce the entire article since there are some excellent websites on the topic available on the internet. Some interesting points from the original article were:
    • The best time to cut wood to make bows was February since the sap had not yet risen into the wood. This was defined in the article as “when the geese return”.
    • The wood of choice was Osage Orange. Where this was not available a number of other woods were used including ash, hickory and yew.
    • Like the English Longbow, the bowstave needed a considerable period of seasoning before any carving could be done. Bowstaves were hung high up in the tepee above the fire to gently season in the heat. Arrowshafts and other items were seasoned in the same way. The bark side of the stave was used for the "back" of the bow: the part that faces away from you.
    • Bow length varied with tribe, intended use and probably the individual. Bows of six foot or longer were known, as were bows of only a few feet. A suggested measure for a bow was the distance from the left hip to the right hand when the hand was held out horizontally to the side. This is about four feet. Some readers will recognize this as illustrated in Lofty Wiseman’s “The SAS Survival Guide” and doubtless this book and the article drew from a similar source. The bow illustrated in that publication is a flatbow.
    • Arrows were often marked with three lightning bolt carvings. Practical purpose of these may have been to reduce the tendency of the arrow to warp. It was also suggested in the article that the grooves might have encouraged blood loss.
    • Arrowheads were bound into the end of the arrowshaft. Some war arrowheads were constructed so that impact with the target would cut the bindings, leaving the head in the target even if the shaft was pulled out.
    • Hard sinew (from the neck of a buffalo) was sometimes used as an arrowhead. The stated advantage of this was that such heads had a tendency to deflect from the ribs of an animal and slip between them while flint or iron heads would stick, shatter or bend.
ERB does not give us any description of the type of bows his characters use, although David Innes in “Land of Terror” does tell us:
“A species of the genus Taxus is more or less widely distributed throughout Pellucidar; and I had discovered that its wood made the best bows. For arrows I used a straight, hollow reed that becomes very hard when dry. The tips which I inserted in the end of the reeds were of wood, fire-hardened.
A modern archer of the civilized outer world would doubtless laugh at the crude bow I made then at the edge of the Valley of the Jukans. If he uses a yew bow, the wood for it was allowed to season for three years before it was made into a bow, and then the bow was probably not used for two more years; but I could not wait five years before eating; and so I hacked the limb I had selected from the tree with my stone knife and took the bark from it and tapered it crudely from the center toward each end. I prefer a six foot, eighty pound bow for a three-foot arrow, because of the great size and formidability of some of the beasts one meets here; but of course my bow did not attain this strength immediately. Every time we had a fire, I would dry it out a little more, so that it gradually attained its full efficiency. The strings for my bows I can make from several long-fibered plants; but even the best of them do not last long, and I am constantly having to renew them.”

In “Return to Pellucidar” in the anthology book “Savage Pellucidar”:
“Fruit and nuts grew in abundance on the trees and shrubs of the little canyon; but fighting men require meat; and one must have weapons to have meat. These two had not even a stone knife between them, but the first men had no weapons originally. They had to make them.
Innes and Hodon went into the little stream and hunted around until they found a large mussel. They pried it open with a sharp stone, and each took a half shell. With these they cut two pieces of bamboo-like arborescent grass to form the hafts of two spears. Searching again they collected a number of stones: soft stones, hard stones, flat stones, stones with sharp edges; and with some of these they chipped and scraped at others until they had fashioned two spear heads and a couple of crude knives. While Hodon was finding the toughest fibers with which to bind the spear heads to the hafts, Innes made a bow and some arrows, for this was one of his favorite weapons.”
Since Pellucidar was constantly under an unmoving noon-day sun it presumably had no seasons and the trees would have always been filled with sap. Perhaps that was why the bow was so rare on Pellucidar!
The Boy Scout Handbook (1911) has a nice section on archery.