Hey Guys, So every weekend I like to take my oldest two Kids for a good walk. The trips vary from a couple of hours to a full day. We eat, play tag, throw rocks, make fire, play in streams, build huts and ID plants and wild edibles. The last couple of weekends we decided to find the natural materials and build a bow drill set. @Jcl-MD your threads over the years have really helped my bow drill skills. Kids helping each other drink. Dead Willow hanging. Low speed high drag gear nowadays. Let the rock throwong begin. All my wood harvested earlier ready to be split into fire boards and wood for a brew fire. Fire Boards. Kid bribes. Got to have a brew.
Walking home, I love this time of year, the flowers are awesome. Once home I carved my set and gave it a quick spin as wasnt even sure if this wood combo would work. Ok at this stage Im confident that this wood combo should work. Fast forward to the next weekend and I decided to go look for caves with my three year old off trail and test the bow drill. It was like a frikin jungle, lucky I packed the LM, we gathered material for the tinder bundle along the way. It was at this stage the day turned to crap. It had taken way longer to walk in than I thought. My kiddo was tired and getting irrate. My bearing block would burn out to fast creating too much friction and the bow string would slip. And then the clouds rolled in and the sandflies hit with a vengence. I just lit the fire with a firesteel, Fed the monster and called it a day.
Fast forward again and its round 2. I made a new bearing block with a bottle cap to reduce friction. I tried 3 different notches and the third time was the charm producing a large coal.
