Good point and one I will take with me further.

I also appreciate Art_in_FL's point about leaps in understanding through countless hours of practice. As I said, I focus on practicing the art of making a fire cheating with Bic's, fire steel and so on. I am sure there are much lessons to be learned there as well. But I don't rule out that I will shift my focus to more esoteric techniques at a later time.


Speaking of which, I read a blog about using a cordless drill for testing various bow drill materials. (Sorry, forgot the reference). The idea was to test a lot of local materials at high speed, gaining experience to which materials that provided the best fire board + drill combination. That's distilling countless frustrating hours of bow drill experimentation into a matter of minutes. He still has hours and hours of practice before he can make it work, but he knows he now is practicing with the best possible combination of local materials. For all I know, he lost some esoteric, mythical deeper meaning when he cheated with an electric drill... but he probably gained a lot in terms of his ability to think outside the box and find new solutions to old problems.