Two-Stick Keyhole Hearth: Another Friction Fire Option

Like most friction fire methods, the two-stick hearth is a very old idea. The traditional benefit of the design is that is allows you to use sticks for your hearth that may not be wide enough to accommodate an appropriate sized spindle.

In the classic design, the two sticks are lashed together and the notch is created by the point where the two curved sides of the stick meet. I have had a lot of trouble with this technique and have failed with it more often than I've been successful. It may be a great method in drier climates, but I have found that tweaking the design slightly works better in my wet environment.

The biggest change that I have found helpful is to flatten one side of each stick so that they sit flush with each other. This negates the benefit of the "free notch" you get with the classic design, but is much more stable and the sticks are less prone to sliding back and forth as the drill changes direction.

Unfortunately, I was out of frame when I flattened the sides of the two sticks so that footage is missing, but you can see the basic shape and how they fit together by looking at the hearth when I'm wrapping it.

Rather than hoping for an ember in the crack, I have been approaching this with the keyhole or two-hole method popularized by Lonnie of Far North Bushcraft and Survival and his friend @AK Trapper on Bushcraft USA.

With this approach, the divots are made right next to each other, so that the dust collects in the adjacent hole. This can be accomplished by intersecting the divots, or carving a trench between them.

AK Trapper made an excellent observation that this two-hole method seems to work best when the collection divot is ventilated and the fact that the ember formed once there were were a total of three divots is probably at least partially due to this airflow.

So why bother with two sticks in an environment full of suitable sized trees? I think this has a specific application for a particular set of circumstances. While large pieces of wood remain dry longer during wet weather, they also take longer to dry out during periods with less precipitation. Small sticks get wet quickly in the rain, but in an environment where everything is wet, they can dry out to a suitable condition with a few days of sun and a nice breeze.

This approach lets you use a dry and easy to harvest resource in wet places, when the conditions are favorable, but larger pieces of wood may still be damp.

The sticks used for the set and tinder bundle were big leaf maple (Acer macrophyllum). The withies used to bind the sticks and tinder bundle were split branches from a western red cedar (Thuja plicata). The lichen use was Methusela's Beard (Dolichousnea longissima), which is relatively flammable, but in this case it was used to keep the curls and shavings packed together in a bundle with some cedar sticks for a handle.

The knife is an Ontario RAT 1.

The music is the theme from the Last of the Mohicans, performed on guitar by Luca Strangoli.