Snowy day Pump-drillin'

Pump drills are cool. They are a little bit tricky to make but once a good set is tuned and working it takes very little energy to create an ember. I've never made one before so since it has been snowing hard here lately I thought it would be a nice little indoor project.

It works by twisting the rope around the spindle which raises the handle and as you push the handle down it turns the spindle, creating friction where the spindle contacts the fire board. The weight is attached to the spindle by drilling a hole through it (the handle also has a hole drilled through it) and tapering the spindle so that it is thinner at the top then gets thicker as it goes down so that the weight gets stuck part way down. This weight causes the spindle to keep spinning after you have pushed the handle all the way down causing the rope to twist back around and bring the handle back up. It was surprisingly easy to make once I found the parts and it is very fun to mess around with. I borrowed the dimensions for the parts out of the Bulletin of Primitive Technology and it worked well. The materials I used were an old broom stick for the spindle with a cedar plug on the tip and a cedar fireboard, an ash handle, a sawed off pine log for the weight and a purple nylon cord for flair.