Rainy Day Hand Drill Failure & Split Cedar Stick Fire

I tried pairing up a western red cedar hand drill spindle with a grand fir hearth but was unsuccessful. I have gotten embers with a grand fir spindle on a cedar hearth, but when reversed, the spindle had a very hard time making headway into the fir and I was unable to get an ember.

I used a ferro rod to ignite the dust and moved that over to my tinder bundle.

A big focus of this video is on the fire prep itself, specifically how nicely small cedar branches can be split by hand to provide dry split wood without a knife. Also notice the difference in dryness of the ground cover throughout the video. It was raining to varying degrees all day, but you can see that the ground underneath the cedars is still very dry.

While I pulled branches from the trees for the split kindling, the flexible dead pieces from the ground under the cedars were dry enough to provide the frame and initial fuel stage for my moss tinder bundle.

Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome.