Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Backpack Hunting tinkering with fire starting materials & techniques

I�ve been experimenting with making my own fire starting aids lately while learning to use a fire steel better.

My latest concoction: 2 parts Vaseline to one part paraffin used as flammable minimal binding material for a blend of pitch wood sawdust and fine shavings plus drier lint with two wicks and a waterproofed cotton ball stuck on top. The whole batch goes into a half sized paper cupcake liner, filled about � full. A lighter or match will light it anywhere on its surface and the flint & steel will light the lubed cotton ball if some of the fibers are teased and combed out into fine separate threads rather than clumped tight in the waxy coating.

Yesterday in gusty slushy rain on my deck it lit on the third try with firesteel and burned for almost five minutes. My son has tried it after submersing it in water for five minutes and it lit immediately with a lighter.

Natural cotton balls light instantly with sparks from a fire steel, but they need some kind of waterproofing to be worth carrying in our wet country. With a light coating of Vaseline rubbed into them, they are still fluffy enough to light fairly easily and are remarkably water resistant. When fully saturated, they are hard to light with the fire steel without considerable picking and combing out fine fibers for the spark to ignite. With cold hands in gusty rain, it could be tough to do the fine motor skill work to get flammable fibers separated out enough for the spark to ignite.

Another excellent start medium for the fire steel is fuzz from pitchwood. With a knife blade or the sharp edge of a freshly broken rock, scrape and rub back and forth for a half inch or more on a flat surface of a small slab of pitch wood. Fuzz will build up on both sides of the scrape area. It only takes a pinch of such fuzz to ignite with a fire steel spark, and if the pitchwood slab is thin and small, it will continue a strong flame.

Fatwood

You can light it with a UCO match or a lighter, or scrape some off with a knife and light that with a ferro rod, then light the remainder of the fatwood stick.

Vaseline cotton balls work okay, but for using a magnesium block/sparker, I've had much more succes using cotton balls soaked in an alcohol based hand sanitizer.

I like a combination of vaseline and mineral oil. The MO is not as sticky, and soaks the cotton better, IMO. Either is a good fuel to burn the cotton ball.

do any of you melt the vaseline and then soak your cotton balls?

I've done it both ways. It is quick and total with melted Vaseline.

With unmelted, I found it easiest and least messy to dab a gob of vaseline onto a few cotton balls, put them in a ziploc bag and then knead them till all of the vaseline is absorbed and evenly distributed through the cotton. A bit of trial and error will get the right amount.

I do it the same way with the ziplock bag. Scoop out a gob of vaseline with my knife and wipe it in the ziplock. I use a prescription pill container to store a lot of cotton balls (pack it in). I pluck them out with the knife and put them in the ziplock bag with the vaseline and knead them together.
Real easy! No mess.

Ya vaseline and cotten balls works

I use the vaseline lip balm in a small squeeze tube and the cotton ball with a fire steel system. I also have chapstick in the kit. Both materials are self contained and are still usable for their intended use.

i do this but i just save lint from the dryer and put in ziploc sandwich bags.

Yakataga - are you combining the cotton balls and vaseline/chapstick before you head outside? Or just taking both separate and combining right before lighting a fire?

I like the idea of not having a goopy ziplock in my pocket, but wondering if the cotton balls get wet BEFORE adding the vaseline, will it still work as well?

Me too on the goopy ziploc in pocket or pack. Wear and tear in a pocket etc. tends to poke holes in ziplocs and I HATE grease in a pack. I will try to photograph the small sealed tubs I found last week, a little bigger than the old standby of 35mm film canisters. Also, I wrapped a few of these items in stick-to-self Saran type wrap and that works pretty well, though I like the double protection of the plastic container whether it is prescription bottle or whatever: keeps the fire starter dry plus avoids mess in pack or pocket.

I keep my vaseline/cotton balls in a chewing tobacco can.

I just keep a 1 Oz bottle of Fire Paste in my kit. An ounce, if I stretch it, can last me almost 2 weeks.

Or, if you fall into a creek, you can use the whole ounce on the closest standing dead tree and have a Tiki Torch.

I keep everything separate. The cotton balls are in their own water resistant pill bottle. The vaseline lip balm is pretty handy for squirting out just the right amount of grease and then mixing it in. You don't need very much to get a good blaze.

We had to try three different fire starting systems in Learn to Return Aviation Safety class last winter. About a 1/4 inch of capstick mixed into the cotton ball and then teased the ball apart to gets lots of surface area created a really good kinder only fire. The vaseline was in a little jar and made a mess. However, still only need a small amount of the grease to get a good fire.

If I was going to attempt a fire in super wet conditions, I would build a shelter to keep the base fire materials and area as dry as possible for the initial lighting. Then keep the tender materials secure until I was finally ready to strike a spark.

Very good idea. We sure try to get it protected from wind and rain, and keep the next size up of kindling under a plastic bag or in a pack or something.

The second stage of fire building past initial starting flame is MUCH HARDER for us on the coast than getting initial flame. It is really hard to get a self sustaining fire going. In the past month I've built fires three times in wet brushy timber where it had been raining and snowing and melting for weeks. Each was near a vehicle and an axe made a huge difference in accessing enough quantity of wood in small enough diameter to dry out and burn.

The finest hairlike ends of dead twigs on spruce and fir trees covered by a canopy of branches above them are the most likely to be avaiable source of secondary kindling to find in our woods. They will likely be damp, maybe even soaked, but they are fine enough to dry and burn if you can keep a flame under them for a couple of minutes. It takes a LOT of them, and they don't work well unless every side twig is pulled off and they lie straight together like coarse hair. Any side twigs and it pushes the bundle apart too much to ever get burning. Gathering a softball diameter bundle sometimes takes quite awhile. It is worth it. Most novice fire builders in this area light the tinder too soon and don't have enough fine material to feed it.

Dead limbs broken from a tree trunk are our main source of backpack firewood in wet country, never picked up from the ground. Anything touching the ground is wet enough to squeeze liquid water from it (if you are as strong as Chuck Norris ). I don't backpack an axe or large saw, but cutting short, knot free sections of such limbs gives a source of inner wood that can be split into small diameter kindling with a knife. Standing dead sapling poles are another good source. A knife will peel off shavings from the inner wood of the split face. It will likely be damp, but again, if sliced into thin shavings, it will dry if kept over a flame for awhile. It takes a LOT of such stuff to ever get a sustaining fire going, and it requires constant attention, propping the next pieces of firewood to dry as close to the flame as possible, etc.

The most difficult fire starting conditions I've tried happened on a four day November backpack hunt near alpine. It took me hours to get a sustaining fire started. I was keeping camp, not hunting. I used a small folding saw to cut five inch long pieces of straight grained grey dead root horn off of a fallen fir tree, then used my knife to split and cut shavings from those. Prep of the secondary material after intitial flame material took me nearly two hours. It had been wet for a month or more.

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.

The best manmade tinder/starter I have seen are heavy paper towels dipped in parriffin and beeswax. One can even precoat the towels with petrol jelly before hand if desired, but it's not neccessary. The dried parriffin and wax make for easier and neater carry vs. cotton balls and vaseline, and you can unfold them like an little book and use as needed.

wow I guess I am fortunate not to have to deal with those kinds of circumstances when it comes to building a fire. Usually I can grab a fistful of birchbark and be good to go. But good and practical info.