How to Make Fire-Starting Drills from Scratch

The Primitive Technology YouTube channel is astounding. Using no spoken language, an unnamed fellow in Far North Queensland, Australia, demonstrates how to do all sorts of things in the woods—building huts, making tools, making roofs—and he does it all "from scratch," meaning using the materials lying around the forest. For videos that are often fairly long (around 10 minutes) with no speech whatsoever, they're entirely entrancing. Perhaps that's why his videos continue to rack up millions of views.

In this installment, our hero makes a "cord drill" that can start fires. If you've seen Survivor, this is the video those people should have watched before going on the show—it makes the process of fire-starting much easier than the ever-popular "shove a stick against another stick until you fall down" method. Then we move onto the "pump drill," which is a massively improved (but far more complex) version of the tool; it's also quite useful for actual drilling—complete with a handmade drill bit.

Who knew YouTube could teach you how to play with fire—and that it would be this fascinating?

File this under "YouTube Videos You'll Need When the Apocalypse Happens and You Can't Watch YouTube." See also: a Boing Boing comment thread about this guy.