Post by wombat on Apr 3, 2015 22:01:48 GMT -5
By Steven JuanCervia
Why primitive fire is the WORST survival skill ever...
1. It's the most dangerous:
Requiring far more knife & tool work than any other fire, there's more potential for getting injured especially in a survival situation where conditions are less than ideal. It costs one far more energy and calories to produce and is the most inefficient way to make a fire in every sense of the word.
2. Unreliable:
Despite the expertise of the person trying to get an ember, if the materials are marginal, the chances of getting a coal will drop dramatically. While one could say the fault there would be of the marginality of the tinder, the fact is something like a ferro rod or a can of accelerant and a lighter do wonders for overcoming the inadequacies of marginal tinder.
3. Conditions Dependent:
Primitive fires are the most conditions dependent forms of fire craft around. Even in poor conditions (rain, snow, wind, cold, etc...), other means are far superior to primitive fires because primitive fires rely solely on the materials harvested from the region one is in.
4. Time:
On average, a primitive fire will take a person hours just to get a working bow drill set in the Northeastern Woodlands and that's if a the person is lucky enough to find natural cordage that they don't have to wet to make malleable and if they find stones that they can break to make their cutting tools with.
5. As a consequence...
For someone to have to rely on a primitive fire in a survival situation, that would mean that they had to have lost everything (yes...including their knife because knives have ferro rods and can spark if high carbon and struck with a hard enough rock).
They are at ultimate fail at that point meaning their stress level is high, they are looking at some form of hypothermic conditions heading their way and for lack of a better phrase, they are MUBAR. So by the time they are making a primitive fire, life must really be hard on them.
Either they are excellent survivalists who just happened to have gone through some wickedly perfect storm of stuff hitting the fan to have overridden all their preparedness or they are average survivalists who lost everything easily. More likely than not, they wouldn't be inexperienced survivalists because friction fire is at the upper echelon of survival training and knowledge and novices usually pack too much gear anyway so they'd have redundancies.
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Now, my theory on it is this...
Learn it, master it, practice it, but don't rely on it. If anything, it should scare the bejeebus out of you and force you to focus on how to secure and protect your fire kit so that you don't have to fall back on this remarkably difficult means of starting a fire. After all...we're not cavemen anymore. wink emoticon
And that's why primitive fire is the worst fire of all for a survival situation.
Carry an Altoids tin with a Bic lighter, a ferro rod, a Fresnel lens, some cloth material and a piece of broken file (which has multiple uses like filing knife edges, cleaning ferro rods, dental work [don't ask me how I know] and being used to scrape ferro rods besides being used as a flint striker).
Just do that please and for gosh sakes, don't lose it. Put it in your pants pocket or in a PSK attached directly to your belt or in a BDU pocket so that even if you fall or take a tumble, the chances of you losing it are much less.
In the end, it's all about mitigating difficulties. You can never obliterate them, but you can do the best possible to lessen the potential of your failure.