Making Fire with Ammo and a Knife: Hunter’s Emergency Fire

It is flat-out amazing how well this works and it has the potential to be a lifesaver for a lost hunter or stranded soldier.

It is without a doubt the easiest friction fire method I have ever tried; as it lets you completely skip over the ember and tinder bundle stages.

You don’t have to master the intricacies of the bow drill to be successful with this method, so it seems like it could be a very valuable thing for hunters to know if they ever found themselves in an emergency without the means to start a fire.

I have been carefully playing around with different ideas for starting an emergency fire with ammunition and as soon as I tried this one, I knew it had real potential.

The ignition point of smokeless powder is quite low, so just a few seconds of the spindle rotating is enough to set it off. So many of the factors that make friction fire difficult are related to the need to create a big pile of dry fluffy dust; and this approach completely removes those complications.

The first time I tried this, I poured the powder from a .22 LR cartridge directly into the burn in divot and it ignited almost immediately, but burned up around the rim in less than a second. Taking a second to make a small indentation next to the divot allows you to put more powder next to the spindle; which gives an extended burn time and more concentrated flame.

I have experimented with different amounts of powder, and the sweet spot seems to be three or four .22 LR cartridges worth of powder. You can get by with one or two if you’re low on ammo, but any more than three and you increase the risk of burning yourself with a taller flame.

I also tried this with powder from centerfire cartridges and shotgun shells, and it works equally well, but more caution is necessary to make sure you don’t use too much powder.

The gunpowder burns up quickly, so placing your tinder directly over the reservoir is the most reliable way to ensure that you catch the flames. I used feather sticks from a maple branch, but any flammable material should work well provided that it is fine and dry enough.

I have tried this with four different types of wood and have not had a failure yet. Soft cedar took more strokes to ignite the powder than fir, alder, or maple, so harder woods may be better in this application.

One of the most interesting this about this to me was how quickly the divot got up to the ignition temp. With a conventional bow drill, I generally recommend starting slowly to warm things up and make good dust, but in this case you would only be covering the gun powder in potentially damp wood dust, so starting out with plenty of speed and pressure is probably the best approach.

As stated in the warning at the beginning of the video, handling and disassembling live ammunition is potentially hazardous, so do not attempt this if you are not willing to accept those risks. If you choose to try this, you do so at your own risk and it is important to understand that even a momentary lapse in judgment could result in serious injury or death when handling firearms or ammunition. I neglected to put on my gloves when taking apart the cartridge, but I was wearing eye protection. I recommend wearing both leather gloves, and ballistic rated eye protection if you choose to experiment with this.

I used .22 LR for this demonstration because it is very common worldwide and easy to disassemble. The lanyard hole on my knife worked perfectly for pulling the bullets, but they can even be wiggled loose by hand if necessary. Other rounds may require other methods for pulling the bullet, but regardless of the approach, this is the most dangerous stage in the process, so extreme caution is required.

Materials used…

Ammo: 22 LR Remington Golden Bullet
Knife: ESEE 6

Pacific Silver Fir for the hearth, spindle, and twig bundle.

Music

Luca Stricagnoli – The Last of the Mohicans (Guitar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kbv1OpIpaA

Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated.