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

For me, the easiest and most abundant to find tinder that works VERY EASILY with a firesteel is plain ol' punk wood. When it is wet out, you can usually still get at dry stuff in the middle of a rotted out log wity just your bare hands.

If I'm badly in need of a fire, the last thing I want to do is go digging through rotten trees looking for punk. I want something to light NOW. Playing mountain man isn't nearly as much fun when you're desperately in need of a fire. Besides, if you're out hunting coyotes in 5 million acres of sagebrush, finding a dead tree can take weeks.

Yeah, I'm in the NE so my reply was prolly too generalized.

I was also more replying to the OP's original thing about "learning to use a fire steel better". One prolly would not be looking for fatwood in an emergency by you either though that has been discussed in this thread, eh?

Except for what we carry, we can't count on finding any of the specific fire aids mentioned out in the bush. That's why it is good to know about many such materials (if we travel outside our local area) and how to find and use them in the areas where they occur.

The punk wood for example is one I will remember and try next time I'm in dry timber away from the coast, but it is all damp most of the time in coastal areas, even in the center of a log. (When its wet out = September through June .) I wouldn't bother looking for fatwood on the NW coast either, but would east of the first mountain range. In the interior it is common and many times I have found it handy in the bush and used what I could break off with my hands to start campfires. Ditto with birch bark- handy in some areas and not worth looking for in others.

Rockchuck, have cooked meals on sage wood fires. It is far from the best but was all we had.

Ice fog in endless sage country has to be one of the bad scenarios for survival if things went bad. I lean with those who think that we need to carry/wear items to survive for at least an overnight with no fire.

That right there is why I now keep my GPS on me in Eastern Montana. Toolie fog on the coast ain't got [bleep].

At least we don't see ice fog in NW Montana until winter.

Now November Whiteouts at 7000' are fun as hell too.

Fritos corn chips are a great fire starter,the dippers even better.I have started my pellet stove with fritos and pellets are hard to ignite.

Jayco

Burning too much fatwood in wood stove can clog the stove pipe badly. Dark smoke from fatwood actually forms furry stuff inside stove pipe and pipe must be cleaned running spruce boughs through the sections. Sparkscreens are also easily clogged when using a lot of fatwood. Best to use it only as firestarter in woodstoves.
Has anybody else noticed that?

I also find WetFire good, but better check them before heading out. Also they dry out and hardly burn after that...

By the time I decide I need a fire, the Fritos are long gone. I'm addicted to those things.

Here in the east, something I've found that works well is Poplar bark. The woods are full of poplar limbs. After they lay awhile, the bark starts to seperate. It is stringy and fibrous. Actually, it is the fibrous cambium layer underneath.



If you take your knife blade and scrape these old limbs, the outer bark chips away and that stringy inner layer fuzzes up into some fine firestarter. As long as it's dry, one or two strikes from a firesteel is all it takes. I carry a baggie of this in my firekit all the time. It weighs practically nothing. Finding any dry in the rain is a challenge however.



By the way, someone on another thread (or maybe it was this one) posted this link to a GobSpark Armegeddon Firesteel. I ordered a couple and they work great. They throw a shower of HOT sparks. Be advised if you order one the scraper that it clips into is a seperate order item.
http://firesteel.com/gobspark-armageddon-firesteel/

Good info and excellent photos! I learned something.

Will add that the inside of dead dry red cedar bark in the far west will scrape up into fine fibrous fuzz as well. I have a nephew who is excellent at primitive skills and he scrapes the cedar bark with the edge of a broken stone. The he uses that ball of fuzz to catch and ignite from the small hot "coal" produced by friction from a hand drill.

His demo to me was impressive, but done on a dry day in August. Our problem is to find dry cedar bark most of the rest of the year! But good info to know and worth checking just in case it is dry under a big deadfall, etc.

I am surprised I didn't see pocket lint listed as a fire starting method. Most of the time you can find some lint somewhere. In your pockets, pack, bellybutton, etc.

My typical method, however, is the Vaseline and cotton ball method mixed as others have suggested, putting cotton balls and Vaseline in a plastic bag to coat the cotton balls before transferring them to a prescription bottle.

That being said, I usually have multiple methods on me at all times when away from home. Why complicate things when a lighter is a fine tool. Then I can go from that to the firesteel and cotton ball and in the worst cases I can start scrounging for pocket lint and birch bark. I also find that if I can find enough dry wood I can typically make shavings to get a fire started as well.

I like a combination of vaseline and mineral oil

Seriously, are you REALLY surprised that pocket lint and bellybutton lint are not listed as a fire starting method? Just curious.

I was being sarcastic with the belly button comment, but not with the pocket lint. I have use lint as a fire starter in the past when in a pinch.

Another item I find starts a great fire is dryer lint. I will sometimes shove a handful of dryer lint in my pack to start a fire. It is excellent tender.

Dryer lint is a horse of a different color. I've seen it used before. works as well as the cotton balls supposedly.

in my packs, I carry a zip lock bag with dryer lint, fat wood sticks, matches, fire steel and lighter.
I have never been in a position where I could not start a fire.

I use a combination of some of the posts on this thread. I take a toilet paper cardboard roll and stuff it with dryer lint and then wrap the roll in duct tape. Place the kindeling on top of the roll and light the end.

I know this sounds silly, but I just nicked an UNUSED med from the medicine cabinet and placed it in my kit which is housed within an old 1911 galvanised cleaning kit tin.
The med is compressed and easily teased apart with the piece of saw blade I keep with the fire lighting rod, the saw also provides dust and chips to add bulk for starting a fire.

Since they are a one size fits all...I am pretty sure one will last a lifetime of lighting fires.

Well, if anyone like me has been thinking "why the hell do I need a V2.0 Firesteel when I got like 5 of the V1.0's??"

I'm here to tell ya, that's now the Firesteel in my fireworks. I don't fully comprehend the physics of better ergonomics making a [bleep] more spark, but you just lean on them harder. I've also added about a half ounce stick of fatwood that I also picked up at REI in Bozeman.

A buddy of mine joked "Only 50 bucks at REI, isn't that the cover charge at the door???"

Yup The V2.0 is the best I have used.