Uber Tinder

T

Temper

Joined
Oct 30, 2002
Messages
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Cliffs thread on extreme firelighting seems to have got a lot of traffic without it turning into a chest beating match.

I want to suggest a competition of sorts to see who can easily and cheaply manufacture Uber Tinder for wet and windy conditions.

It should follow a spec something like this

Easy to make with minimal tools
About the size of an OXO cube (large sugar lump)
Resistant to water
Have the ability to light from a spark
Burn for at least 2 mins
Somewhat resistant to extinguising from wind

What do you guys think?

If no one has the ability to post the picture I can do it for them.
 
Make a small tinder bundle which has two stages, one which lights easy (cotton+vaseline,birch mark) and another which burns a long time (wax,fat,rubber,heavy pitch), and surround it with wax paper, tying it with some cotton and put the whole thing in a plastic bag. You can roll up a ordinary grocery bag into a very tight bundle. Now squash the whole thing down with high tensile strength fishing line (just because it is good to have it).

You make a wind/rain break with the bag very quickly, just make a tripod and slip the bag down over it start the fire inside the tripod and take the bag off before it catches fire and once the fire has built up to the point it can take the elements, or you have built a more heavy duty wind/rain break and just move the coals, or be gathering materials to add to the break while the coal is forming. Be careful with the plastic because liquid plastic burns are fairly annoying.

Besides actually being a tinder this has a massive amount of other uses, clothing, shelter, weapons, tools, in general you want to be as multi-purpose as possible. You can also include a cut down strike anywere match or two for little added bulk so they are basically self-igniting.

-Cliff
 
What I have found that works very well is:
1.Using a double boiler method, melt some bee's wax or parafin.
2.Using a pure cotton cottonball saturate the cotton ball in the wax and set it aside in a cookie tray.
3. While the wax is still mallable but not fully hardened then place a second cottonball on top of the saturated one. You can even put a little vasoline on the second cotton ball.
4. After the wax has hardened in the first cotton ball then place it inside a square piece of wax paper and give the wax paper a twist so it looks like a large Hersheys Kiss.
5. I have found it works best by unwrapping the twisted wax paper and sparking into the top cotton ball (I usually place the whole "kiss" inside a stainless steel pipe cap to keep it off the ground).
6. I have timed these "kiss of fire" balls and they will burn between 5 to 15 or 20 minutes.
If it is windy or raining you can just shelter the pipe cap with your body or in a dry spot and then place the fire, pipe cap and all, into your tinder and small branches of chips. Pretty soon you will have a nice fire going assuming you have set it up in a protected spot.

When done, retrieve the pipe cap to be used again. To start a fire IN WATER with the pipe cap drop some miners carbide into the pipe cap and cover with a small funnel (stainless if possible)with a spark you can get some fire out of the small end of the funnel because you now have acetalyne gas coming out of it.

FWIW, Ciao
Ron
:jerkit:
 
Temper said:
... remember the size limitations.
Click to expand...

To be useful wet/windy I think you may want to adjust that, consider the flame output. In wind all the heat from the flame is constantly being dissipated by new cold air coming in, and for wet woods you have to boil the water out of it before it can heat up to over 450F before it will ignite, so you need a decent flame volume.

Probably the easiest uber tinder to make comes from an egg carton, fill it with something which burns readily like hemp cuttings, shredded paper, birch bark, etc., then cap it off with a decent amount of wax and then wrap the whole thing in several plastic bags. Each one of these individual starters will produce enough flame to burn a 2x4 sized piece of wood.

In general though what is more important than the exact process is the fundamentals, it doesn't matter as much as what is done as why it is done because odds are you may not always have the exact specific materials, but if you understand the general goals you can achieve them with just about anything.

There are also general performance aspects such as the more wax you add the longer a fire will burn but the lower the heat output at any given time. The looser you pack tinder then the hotter it will burn but the faster it will go out. This is in general a point of odds in fire building, vertical firewood lays for example burn much hotter and faster than horizontal.

I think Thomas made a fairly critical point in the other thread about weight vs volume on firestarters plus use of natural materials. The other factor is multi-use, Davenport mentions this in his books, don't just pack an item to do one thing, think about all the other things you need to do. There are lots of situations where having firestarters is of no use.

-Cliff
 
Temper,
A piece of fatwood meets all of your requirements. Pitch wood or Fat wood is found in pine forests and can be easily lit from a spark and is very water proof ,and burns a long time. I have several old pine stumps full of pitch wood in my back yard and can send you some if needed.

Ron
 
Temper,

No time to post a pic tonight, but I have a charcol disk in each of my 3 fire kits ( different locations). It's pure charchol, concave, and used to burn incense. They are about the same diameter as a silver dollar and maybe 3 cm thick.

They are about a buck for five at a incense store. They will light on a spark and ignite into a solid coal. They work after being wet (not while wet) and can be broken up for multiple uses.

I normally scrape some pine resin on scene and build a little mound of it into the concave depression, then place this into the center of my kindling. It has worked very well for me, starting with just one swipe of the sparker.

They are durable, wind resistant, very cheap, and simple. The one disadvantge is that they burn like all charchol, producing heat but not a lot of flame.

I am experementing with a "gunpowder/nail polisher remover ball " type tinder that a good friend recently raved about. I'll let you know. He states that they start on a spark and burn with a hot flame for a good 15 minutes. Obviously, the formula would be critical to good and safe peformance and I don't have it yet.

Stay Warm,
Jeff
 
Guys I'm not looking for Tinder per se, I thought it would be cool to see what we could come up with in pictures and a small description. This is why size isnt that much of a problem as we could always scale it up for actual use. I know a tire and a bag full of gas would probably work best, but I am trying to see a little creativity here :D

Myakka, I would love to try a little fatwood if you are willing to send it. :thumbup:
 
Does anyone bring newspaper when they go caming? It is easy to light, cheap, burns hot and takes up no space in a pack.
 
Temper said:
I know a tire and a bag full of gas would probably work best...
Click to expand...

That is mainly what gets used here by most people who go outdoors in the winter, the gas from the chainsaw doubles to both gather wood and start it burning, many people are also on trikes or quads so same thing.

If you took match heads, a lot of them and crumbled them into melted wax you may have something which would burn hot and fast with any natural wick, and be decently resistant to both wind and rain.

Mag shavings may do the same thing, this is starting to approach the point at which it is getting dangerous to work, don't use strike anywhere heads obviously as they could self ignite.

-Cliff
 
For my failsafe übertinder, I use a prefabbed Swedish Match product, cut into small squares and placed in a piece of cottonwool. Lights like magic and burns for over 2 minutes.:thumbup:
 
Cheater! :D Nothing should be pre-fab, naughty Viking, naughty!


I made some today that I was pretty happy with. My wife has the camera at the moment but I thought I would write the method here.

Cotton wool about 5cm x 4 cm x very thin, but not enough to see through it easily.

Smear some vaseline on one side only. Cut up some thin natural rubber bands and sprinkle them in the middle of the cotton wool sheet. then roll the sheet up to make a rough egg shape. The vaseline will hold the cut rubber bands in situ for the most part. Then take a single rubber band and wrap it around the egg from the pointy end side to make it into a rough ball shape. Then drip candle wax over the whole thing. Melting the wax in a container and dipping may work best for you, but I found that dripping one or two drops at a time more controllable and less messy. While the wax is still warm, rub your fingers over it to seal any little cracks and wait for it to cool.

These will obviously float, they are quite resilient as the wax isnt too thick that it will just fall off in big lumps.

To ignite, crush it between your finger and thumb and twist gently to free up the vaseline free side of the cotton wool but not so much that you break off too much wax. A Blastmatch lighted it first time. I quickly made a circle/windbreak with my hands and gave it about 10 seconds to get established, once it was established I let the wind at it. I did this at the side of my house where the wind barrels through and its quite blowy today, it didnt affect the fire at all. If there had been any wood around it for the fire it wouldnt have even stirred up the flames. Burn time was about 4-5 mins and the flame for about half of this time was 5 inches.

If I had a pre layed fire in a teepee syle I would have split a thin branch as a fork, trapped it between the split, let it establish itself and then moved it into the teepee.

When the missus gets back I will make another with some pics.
 
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