Fire!

[jtluttrell]

Went out this weekend intent on building this fire from foraged materials and fire steel. Just to see if I could. It was harder than I would have thought.

 

 

Proper tinder seems to be the key. Dried grass burns well, too well. Burns up too quick imo. I lucked into some pine sap / fatwood and finally got her going!  Now, I usually carry a lighter or two in my bag, so the fire steel was more just to see if I could, but it was fun and interesting and I had a good time.

 

 

[Timestepper]

Congrats!

 

Thing with the fire steel - or bow drill, flint & steel, magnifying glass, fire piston, etc... - is that the more you "just see if you can" the easier it will become until you get to the point where it's second nature. THAT'S when it'll actually become a viable, valuable alternative for when your lighters get wet, run out of fuel, break or whatever.

 

 

:hat:

[monkeylizard]

I had the same experience trying my firesteel for the first time. If you're using grass, get plenty of it. Yeah it burns fast, but if you use enough of it it will burn long enough to get small twigs going. The sparks will light cotton balls pretty well.

 

I saw a cool survival fire thing when searching for something else.Take an old disposable lighter that's all used up and cut the bottom off. Shove in as many vaseline-soaked cotton balls as you can get in there then cap it off with wax. Now you have flamable materials and the lighter's flint to get it going. Small and light and a lot easier than the firesteel, which then becomes a backup to your backup.

[whitewolf001]

I learned this one from Timestepper and is something to be done BEFORE going camping or out into the woods in a controlled enviornment; get an altoids can, a small hardened punch of some type(needle, small nail, etc.), some old cloth from blue jeans or what have you. Punch three holes in the can on one side, doesn't matter which, in a linear pattern, put cloth into canister, then insert said can into a fire and let sit until no more smoke is coming from the can, you now have yourself a easy light weight source of kindling that is pure carbon. Timestepper can probably give you a more accurate ETA on letting it sit in the fire.

Edited September 16, 2013 by whitewolf001

[whitewolf001]

Also, Potassium Permangenate and Glycerin will start a fire and are BOTH useful in survival.

[LI0NSFAN]

We use our fire pit a lot and I have started trying to light it with just stuff I find in our tree line. I have started it everytime with firesteel, it gets esier as you do it. It was very hard the first time and then I started to get the hang of things.

[jtluttrell]

Thanks guys. I will be practicing. Had this been a survival situation, I would have been out of luck. I burned way too much energy to make it practical. I was watching a video and this guy made the point that if you're lost/hungry, tasks like this become much harder to pull off (unless you're well practiced?).

 

whitewolf, I think what you're describing is charcloth?

 

I've yet to try the cotton ball trick. Zippo sells a fire starter that utilizes a similar cotton wick thing. I think I have some somewhere... 

[monkeylizard]

Cotton kindling comes from two words: survival tampon   :D

 

 

Don't forget that a Zippo is stuffed full of cotton. If you ever find yourself in a real survival situation and you run out of lighter fluid, you can use that fluid-soaked cotton to get something started with the sparks from the flint. I've learned to use my firesteel, but I still take a freshly-fueled Zippo on every camping/hiking trip. I also take the firesteel of course.

 

Like was said above, simple tasks get harder when you're surviviing. If I can have fire with the flick of a thumb and the turn of a wheel, I'll take it.

Edited September 16, 2013 by monkeylizard

[Mark A]

some good little tidbits in this thread...

[UncleJak]

Also, Potassium Permangenate and Glycerin will start a fire and are BOTH useful in survival.

this only works in temperatures over 70ish degrees.
But it is good to know

sent barefoot from the hills of Tennessee

[whitewolf001]

this only works in temperatures over 70ish degrees.
But it is good to know

sent barefoot from the hills of Tennessee

 

Screw it, ROAD FLARE!!! How bout them apples? lmao ;)

[RED333]

Screw it, ROAD FLARE!!! How bout them apples? lmao ;)

I was thinking of a OA torch my self.

Getting a fire going is hard, Boy SCOUTS SHOWED ME A LOT.

[tennessee01tacoma]

I've found if grass is all you have you can make a bundle out of it, bundle it tight, then fluff one end and use that end to catch a spark.

[Timestepper]

Thanks guys. I will be practicing. Had this been a survival situation, I would have been out of luck. I burned way too much energy to make it practical. I was watching a video and this guy made the point that if you're lost/hungry, tasks like this become much harder to pull off (unless you're well practiced?).

 

whitewolf, I think what you're describing is charcloth?

 

I've yet to try the cotton ball trick. Zippo sells a fire starter that utilizes a similar cotton wick thing. I think I have some somewhere... 

Yep, that's what he's describing.

 

I've told this story many times elsewhere while demonstrating/teaching flint & steel firestarting so I guess I can share it here as well: When I was 19 (33 years ago, just to give an idea of how long I've been doing this), I was backpacking in the Colorado Rockies. Specifically, having just enlisted in the Army, I was <roughly> following the Rocky Mountain Trail from Durango to Denver for one last "freedom fling" before reporting to Fort Sill, Ok.

 

Anyway, one evening as I set up camp, I realized that I coudn't find my flint & steel. I'd reorganized my pack that morning and had made a cold camp for my nooning, so it'd been a good 10 hours since I'd seen it. I knew I had matches (although I wasn't sure where they were, either), but hadn't used anything but flint & steel to start a fire in so long that I wasn't sure I could make a fire any other way.

 

Well, if necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation is the bitchy, whiny wife of inspiration and so I did some looking around and found a piece of iron pyrite (fools gold) about six inches long by two inches wide and a piece of oh, so beautiful Colorado Rose quartz. Using those two items (and some char cloth) I had a fire going in about 3 minutes. (It was then that I found my flint & steel... in a small, lidded pot that I hadn't thought to look in because I didn't have a fire to put the pot on.)

 

I kept the pyrite & quartz until the end of my trip and then traded them to a Forest Ranger for a ride to the bus station (and been kicking myself ever since because I've never seen another piece of pyrite that big!)

 

At any rate, I guess my point is that there's a jillion different ways to start a fire. And no matter how hard they are, they're all still really easy if you just practice enough and remember to keep your wits about you.

 

 

:hat:

 

 

...TS...