How to Make a Fire Fork – Tutorial

A fire fork is used to hold things onto a stick; you can buy them but like most bushcrafters I prefer to make my own.
They are not as pretty as the ones you can buy, but they do exactly the same job and are about 99% cheaper

What you need:

• 18″ of relatively stiff steel wire (you can snarf this from a broken fence.) Avoid galvanized wire as the flakes from it and heating it can be bad for you.
• Wire Cutters
• Strong Pliers (Square or round nose, it doesn’t matter)
• Something Cylindrical

Ok, get the wire and snip it to about 18″, this is plenty long enough for this project.
Find out where the middle is and wrap it around a cylinder, this can be a stick, a board marker or in my case, a lipstick tube.

Only wrap once, like shown above and then grab your pliers, I personally work better with round nose ones but whatever you have is good.

Try to make the bend as close to the loop as possible:

Do this on both sides:

Now about 2″ down you will need to make another bend in the wire.
This is towards the middle like this:

Do it on both sides.

Now grab the wire about half way again and bend it into a ‘U’ shape:

Pull the two apart a bit and bend the ends in to make the prongs:

Finished!

To attach your fork to a stick all you need to do is thread the stick through the standing loop and then squeeze the two U-shaped bits so they overlap and pop the end through.

N.B.: You need to use pretty stiff wire to get the tension to hold the fork to the stick.

 
Happy Bending!