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Quest for the Fire Bamboo Print E-mail
Written by David Maybury-Lewis   
Article Index
Quest for the Fire Bamboo
Page 2
Page 2 of 2

firebamboo7.jpg
The leaves of this plant can grow to 10 metres and are shaped like a V with wings in the way a child might draw a distant bird in flight. Some call it nature’s corrugated iron and it is indeed used as shelter material as this picture shows
firebamboo8.jpg
We collected some very dry old roof mats from the rice hut and brought it back to the longhouse. Salang washed it to remove dirt and impurities.

We then dried the lulut and leaves which is almost as exciting as watching grass grow.

When dry the leaves were burnt on a drum lid till they almost turned to ash at which time they were covered. I don’t know why this was done. Initially, when I heard the word ‘tin’, I thought they would make some kind of char fibre but this was almost entirely ash, char dust at best if there is such a thing (Any suggestions why they do this?)
firebamboo9.jpg
The lulut and the ash were then mixed taking care not to let any dirt etc on to it.
firebamboo10.jpg
A piece of fluffed up tinder is then placed on top of a piece of stone / crockery with the thumb on top in the conventional way and the temiang section is struck hard with a glancing blow. If lucky a small spark or two is produced. As Balfour said it is a method requiring great skill and in a very demanding environment at that.
firebamboo11.jpg
The tinder was not dry enough as it had barely 2 hours of direct sunlight to dry since being scraped off the inner stem. The crockery was also unsuitable being too modern though it threw off feeble sparks. We tried some robust ferrocium sparks to test the tinder. A very tiny part ignited but even hand fanning only produced more smoke.

Whenn I return to Borneo, we’ll do it again with drier tinder.


Some of the Dutch bushies were experimenting last weekend with the bamboo I sent them, with better result , I hear.

David Maybury-Lewis


Copyright ©2003-2007 Bushcraftuk.com
Comments (1)add
Reason for ash ...
written by Leaflitter , December 28, 2008
Some materials ignite better when coated in a fine ash. There's an old party trick of lighting a sugar cube by rolling it in cigarette ash first. It works for hexamine blocks and Esbit too, as a way of lighting them with a firesteel (allegedly).
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