Learning how to start a fire using friction is a skill everyone going into the wilderness should have, along with other basic survival skills like shelter making, water gathering, trap making, and rescue signalling.
I just have some tips to add. Starting a bowdrill fire is like anything else, it can be easy or it can be hard. IMO, you have never really made a fire until you've made a friction fire. It's a great experience to feel, and free's you of "man made" crutches. The "feeling" is somewhat "primal".
Spend the time to get the best (dry) materials because it pays in the long run, and makes it easier. Attention to detail is paramount to success, like carving/starting your hole in the fireboard a "pinky" finger width away from the edge, to making the fireboard notch with "sharp edges" into the hole. Cedar makes a good starter board and spindle. Nose oil (squeeze along the sides of your nose)
, waxy leaf plants, or soap make good lubricants for you hand hold.
Also, just go slow and steady until your notch fills up will brown powder then go fast and hard until you get a coal. Use the full stroke of the bow and support your "hand hold" wrist on against your shin. If your string slips use your fingers to tighten the string.
Make sure you have the appropriate DRY tinder bundle with lots of fluffy fiberous material intertwined. ie. cattail down, fireweed, thistle, down. Mixed with shredded inner cedar and fine dry shredded birch bark etc. Bundle should sit underneath you fireboard but on a dry surface. For practice you can use short length's of sisal twine taken down to fibers as a tinder bundle.
Once you get your coal, treat it as a newborn baby keeping it together in your tinder bundle. Gently bringing the tinder bundle up cradling the coal to eye level pointing downwind, slowly blow a steady stream of air.......coaxing the coal to grow and fire up the surrounding bundle. There is quite the technique to it and it's easier to learn by just doing it.
Have your fire materials ready and in place so once the bundle flames up you can put it into the kindling. Add lots of shredded birch bark intertwined into your kindling. Lower dry dead branches from hemlock, spruce, cedar, fir and pine make good kindling. Make sure they "snap". Dead standing trees of the same are good sources for firewood as are other, like larch, birch, etc.
You can also use the hand drill to get a coal. The secret is using a good, dead, dry, staight, and long
Great Mullein stalk and a cedar board. Great Mullein is a great medicine plant as well.
I've also used the flints, magnesium/strikers, etc. But I've found over the years the best one is the US Strike Force. Get one, learn to use it, and keep it on your person, this should go with your knife.
