i like a pill bottle with Vaseline embedded cotton balls, backed up by a tin of paraffin saturated cotton balls.
i lay a scattered bed of small twigs and then strike fire to the Vaseline cotton ball on top of them. feed some matchwood twigs on top of that, and if they are damp i add a paraffin cotton ball to dry them out.
once i have a good hot matchwood fire going, which can take a lot of small stuff, i begin to selectively add pencil diameter kindling, and slowly work up to finger wood...
do your prep thoroughly and gather 10-20 times the matchwood that you think you'll need. you'll need it, particularly if all your deadfall is damp or the least bit punky.
if it's truly wet out, some small strips of innertube can give you the heat to dry some stuff out.
if you're making paraffin/cotton balls, wrap them individually in waxed paper and store them in a tin or pouch... they are a bear to get apart if they get mushed together and then get cold.
use caution when working around a stove with paraffin... it'll burn you clean out... i use a double boil setup to melt the stuff...
Good info. Since we are normally working with damp twigs etc. I do one step differently. I lay my base out with a "stairstep" about an inch to 1 1/2 inch high, lean my bundle of fine twigs or splinters etc. on that and
put the initial fire ball of cotton, Trioxane etc. in the gap under the fine twigs. The flame goes up through the kindling, drying and igniting it. Pitch wood sticks will feed under one at a time and keep the flame going until the stuff above gets going. A normal fire start takes me one cotton ball and one slat of pitchwood or fatwood. Recent fires built in rain after weeks of rain have required me to feed in three slats of pitchwood one at a time as the prior one burned out, before the bundle of fine twigs got going.
Ditto on double boiler for melting paraffin. Very dangerous stuff.
