The “no-tools, on-site” hand drill ember has been a goal of mine for a couple of years now, and I’ve gotten close before but have never been able to make this happen before today.
I have made this work with a bow drill but that required a grueling afternoon of persistence. Everything came together in my favor today, and mother nature definitely set me up for success with hot dry weather and perfect materials sitting right next to each other.
I grabbed a dry willow stick that had been harvested by the river and placed on the rocks for me and other than smoothing out the tip and peeling away a bit of bark, it was pretty much good to go.
I noticed a really nice piece of cottonwood root that happened to have a fork in it that looked like it would save me the trouble of carving a notch; which is one of the more difficult aspects of friction fire without a proper cutting tool.
I used a poorly chosen piece of very brittle slate to start the divot, but when it crumbled I just let the spindle do the work and ended up feeling like I might just be able to pull this off.
After a couple of minutes of spinning that willow stick between my palms in just the right place, and a drop of sweat that almost ruined the whole thing; I had the ember that a friend of mine once called “the holy grail of friction fire”.
If you asked me to go out and make this happen again tomorrow I would put my chances of success at less than 50%, so I would still lean on the bow drill before counting on a hand drill; but I had the deck stacked in my favor today and I’ll take it!
