Little hobby of mine. Been teaching my granddaughter some. She is getting pretty good. Just found a minnow trap she made.
Went out to "teach" a young man how to start a fire with rudimentary tools, realized it's been a while since I haven't "cheated".They are "perishable" skills. I'm going to brush up over the next few days as I have another "student"
Cheating is a perishable skill too. That's the one I keep up on. Flint and steel? Yeah, on top of a small butane tank. Beyond that, I know how to make wood really small, and I'm a good hand at finding burn able liquids and solids in odd places. I don't smoke, but I buy a pile of lighters every spring, they go in bags, glove boxes, tool boxes, the kitchen drawers.
Back in the last Century, my friends and I would cut an old bicycle inner tube into small pieces and place three to four of these bands around a Bic lighter to use as 'kindling' to start our cooking fires while out camping. Worked very well, even with damp wood - less so with wet wood. For wet wood sticks, one uses their sharp pocket knife to split the wet wood sticks to get to the usually dry inner wood. eldar
