Search Engine Use Survival Skill

If you know enough about the internet to find my blog you can use the internet to help yourself prepare for emergencies.You can pick a subject that you need to know more about to become prepared for disasters and use a search engine to find out about it.


An example of this could be how to start a fire. A lot of people do not know how to start a fire without matches and other equipment. You may be one of them and have realized that this problem could get you killed in an emergency.


Pick your favorite search engine. I am going to use Google, although it is not my favorite, because it is so popular. I started with an obvious search term, how to start fires without matches". Google gave me about 114 million results in a few seconds. The top one is, "How To Start A Fire
Without Matches", on the site, 
This search engine result 
http://artofmanliness.com/2008/04/29/9-ways-to-
start-a-fire-without-matches/ 
came up number one on Google.


This site has nine different ways to start fires 
without matches. They range from difficult to do 
ones to some that most people could manage with
the right tools, like a swedish firesteel, army model, 
sold on Amazon for About $15 - $40 dollars.


If none of those 9 ways to start fires with matches 
suits you, you could continue down the page of 
Google results and see if anything else is right for 
you. If you don't think so, you can keep looking on 
the next page of 114million results, or try another 
search term. That could be something like, "fire 
without matches". The results are much the same as 
the previous search term results.


You could try, "survival fire" as a search term. That 
one produces about a billion results in .23 seconds.
The fourth search result down the page is interesting. 
It is http://www.m4040.com/Survival/Skills/Fire/
Fire.htm


This site starts off telling you that it is for those who already have some survival skills. He then tells you the basic requirements to have a fire and keep it going. I think the fire requirements are good basics as long as you are willing to practice making fires. When you are shivering in the middle of a disaster is not the time to learn fire-making skills. 


He also has some items to help out those with less skills. One of these is kind of difficult to use without practice and he says so on his site. He gives up on the use of a fire piston that he made himself. He is assuming that one would use available materials to build a fire with a fire piston. I have not used a fire piston myself, but have read enough to know they don't assume you start with materials at hand to build a fire with a fire piston. 


Some fire pistons even have small compartments inside them to hold extra supplies for fire making. Some of the suggestions I have read are cotton balls covered with vaseline and shredded twine to start from the vaseline cotton ball. Another is char cloth. You can buy it, but it is not hard to make. It is fabric that you have allowed to start burning and then blown out while there was still a lot of the fabric left to start a fire. Another that I particularly like is dryer lint. It is a serious fire hazard if you don't clean it out of your dryer, but it helps a lot to start a fire when you want one. The suggestion for use of the dryer lint was to put it in a ziploc bag to make sure it stays dry. If you want to use unravelled twine with the dryer lint, you could put the twine in the ziploc bag also.


Dryer does not require much preparation and it is free as well. I like the idea of dryer lint as a survival tool also.


The three things he says are necessary for a fire are,   tinder, kindling and logs. He suggests you use twice as much of each as you think you will actually need. The smallest is tinder and that is used at the beginning of a fire to get it started. That would be the dryer lint and you would also include the unravelled twine or wood shavings. 


The kindling is what you get started burning after the tinder. It is small pieces of wood like twigs and small sticks. A teepee shape is commonly used to get your fire going with the tinder in the center, the kindling around that and then logs around the outside. You will need to practice to get this to work. I hope that you will start this as soon as possible. It is hard to predict when the next disaster will happen in your area.