Soaking Wet Bow Drill Set: Drying Through Friction

I left this bow drill set submerged in the creek for about twenty minutes before pulling it out and going to work on it. The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the power of using friction to force moisture out of the wood. The basic idea is that the heat created through light pressure drilling vaporizes the water, drying things out enough to produce an ember.

The tricky part is finding the right balance of speed and pressure to create enough heat to dry the set, without removing too much material. Having two divots ready is very helpful for this as you can alternate between the two to dry out the set as a whole, without drilling too deep into either divot.

I have done this numerous times over the years and the first bit of dust created is the consistency of wet oatmeal and should be discarded so that the paste doesn’t end up transferring water into the pile of dry dust that you will eventually create.

This took about thirteen minutes from the time the set was pulled from the water until the ember first started showing the red color that indicates that it is able to survive on its own.

While this demonstration is great for highlighting the fact that you can dry out sub-par materials, it can be a bit misleading in the fact that in nature, damp wood can hold more moisture than dry wood left to soak for a while in the creek. While the principle is true and the lesson is valuable, this doesn’t mean that you can disregard dryness when searching out materials. A more practical way to view this is as a confidence booster in wet weather. Knowing that you can dry a soaked set makes a few rain drops hitting the hearth seem like much less of a hindrance to success. When it counts, find the driest wood you can and protect it from moisture to the best of your ability.

The first time I tried this…
https://bushcraftusa.com/forum/threads/friction-fire-tip-preheating-the-set-without-a-heat-source.173422/#post-2965255

Lonnie from Far North Bushcraft & Survival has a great demonstration of this exercise on his channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IR_CvF3-8U

David West has a playlist full of videos on this topic as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhXd7rYmLrY&list=PLkoXX8XsMW3lZEP_PF0eMdaiJOg2ABhoS&index=2

Daily practice videos and photos posted at https://www.instagram.com/nwprimate/

Materials Used

Hearth and Spindle: Grand fir (Abies grandis)
Bearing Block: Fatwood
Bow String: #36 Tarred Bankline
Knife (not shown): ESEE 6
Tinder Bundle: Black Cottonwood bark (Populus tripocharpa)
Music:
Luca Stricagnoli – The Last of the Mohicans (Guitar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kbv1OpIpaA

As always, questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome and appreciated.