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Cooking Fires
FIREWOODS - There are many things which make some woods burn hotter
than others - rate of growth, resin content, age of tree, part of tree,
structure of the wood itself. As a general rule, fire making woods that
are good for making friction fires make bad firewoods, since they are
low density and resinless. The best woods include oak, hickory,
madrone, manzanita, mesquite, and other dense hardwoods. The worst
woods include pine sapwood and many other softwoods and willow,
although these make good kindling. Wet wood burns cooler than dry wood,
but burns relatively longer. Heart wood burns hotter than sapwood in
general. Rotten wood is good for producing smoke, but not heat or
light. Charcoal burns hotter than the wood it was made from as the
volatile gases which produce flames burn at a relatively low
temperature. So your coals are the hottest part of the fire, not the
flames. Light comes from the burning gases. The firewood you can
actually get always burns better than the firewood you wish you had,
but you'll need more of the poor stuff. Think of wood as calories.
Better wood has more calories per piece, so can do more work.
 The easiest, but slowest way to get a bed of coals is to build a huge
log fire and wait a few hours. This takes the least effort and the most
wood. To get quick efficient coals, burn small pieces of wood. In the
Scouts, the rule was to find wood (or split it into pieces) the
diameter of your thumb. These were neatly stacked next to the fire and
added as needed to maintain a constant temperature. When cooking
directly on the coals, the new wood is added at one end of the fire and
the coals are pushed down into the cooking area. If you are using wood
that doesn't make coals, you need to add pieces very often to maintain
any he
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Fire pit construction varies according to weather conditions, wind
direction, what and how much you are cooking and the type of fire wood
that is available. Once your fire is started the two important things
to manage are fuel, mentioned above, and air flow. If you are building
a fire in a windy place such as the grassy plains of the Dakotas, you
need to dig out a deep fire well.
The extreme version of this requires two holes dug about a foot deep
and a foot apart. They are connected at the bottom by a tunnel. A pot
or grill (or big piece of meat) can be placed over one hole, while the
other provides access for fuel and air. The Dakota fire is also very
efficient, requiring less fuel, as almost all the heat is put to work.
Moderately windy conditions can be handled with a wind screen of rocks
or logs.
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 My standard cooking fire is dug down about four to ten inches,
depending on soil type and wind. (Save the soil and sod if you can to
put back when you're done.) If the wind is not too strong, line up the
pit so the breeze flows parallel to it. Make sure the wind isn't
blowing the smoke to where you want to sit while you cook. The pit is
then lined with the flattest and driest stones I can find, including
the bottom. Stones that contain moisture tend to explode as the water
becomes steam. The stones come up another four to six inches above
ground level.
If I am going to do a pit roast, another, deeper pit is dug a foot or
so past one end of the main fire, and the hump of dirt between the two
is not rock covered. Pit ovens should be dug deep and wide enough to
accommodate a stone lining and a green vegetation lining as well as the
food. The area between can be used to generate coals to replenish the
cooking area, heat rocks for stone boiling or covering the baking pit.
The length of the fire varies according to the number of people
cooking, the width is from one and a half to two and a half feet. One
or two people can easily cook on an 18" round fire.
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BushMoot, the best event of the year - from 1st -5th August 2008 at Merthyr Mawr in South Wales. 
I used Hazel wood. Choose the
thin long shoots of wood which i would think are a couple of years old.
If you don't catch anything at first don't worry. It may just be a case of
changing a few things.
Most bushcrafters know that Birch bark is fantastic for fire lighting
because of all the oil concealed within it. This tutorial guides you
through the process of extracting that tar from the bark.
Now we could bung a label on (which should always say they type of wine and when it was bottled). I suggest you cross-reference to a book of recipes and notes so that when you get a cracking wine you can recreate it. We are going to add a little something to the presentation of the wine by putting a foil cap over the neck. First we drop a foil cap (available for a couple of pence from a wine shop) over the bottle neck.
Right, we now have clean, fined and filtered wine. We pour it into clean (yes and sterilised) bottles with a funnel. We need to cork it. Its possible to put corks in with a mallet. I use a corking gun and waxed corks that do not need to be soaked (plain corks do)
Well, the finings have worked – the wine is beautifully clear.
As soon as I'd finished my Paracord Bracelet, I'd decided to write a tutorial on making one. A good thing considering the majority of the responses since I posted it were asking me how to do it! Here goes.. You will need approximately 3 metres of paracord with the ends already sealed/melted, and something to make a temporary knot - a twist tie or piece of string should suffice.
I have been asked a number of times recently to provide some advice of guidance on the best way to sharpen an axe. Whilst I am always happy to provide input, I thought that it might be worthwhile to put together a tutorial on the basic techniques. The techniques used in here are intended to provide not only a sharp axe but also a safe and efficient axe.
There was a period in my life where I lived out of a pack for months at a time and this was one of my staples.
I like to coil it like a rope on a stick and bake it over hot coals...
There are many different ways you can make a berry picker but this is just a design i came up with which uses a packet of kebab skiewers and some discs of wood.
The whole kit took less than three hours to finally pull together — though that really overlooks by far the most time-consuming aspect, the preparation of materials. In fact, preparation has two components, actually. The first is the selection of materials. The second is the actual preparation.