Quote:
Originally Posted by Rockstar
I found theses little round 100% cotton facial pads make a for very good fire starter when used with one those strikers. They come in plastic ziplock bags so always stay dry, very convenient. All it takes one little spark and they catch fire.
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The textile flakes everybody has in the pockets of his trousers or pullovers. Some vaseline on the fingertip, take the flakes and rub the vasline in, add some crispy, dry, fibre-like other material. The flakes you can comb out of a carpet, too, especially if cotton, natural fibre, or a fur. Sheep fur that you occasionally comb to make the hairs nice again also produces good stuff, but always add some small quantity of vaseline. Create a reservoir of small fibre-vaseline balls that way. Very handy. And kind of water-proof, which might be useful if you really are outdoors, then there must be sufficient vaseline being used, of course.
Dont try to use toilet paper to light a fire, cleenex and such. Does not work, it only glows, but does not burn, does not feed a flame.
So much to be found in nature works, beginners in fire-making however often make the mistake that they want to light the "final" fire immediately, the wood they plan to use. But one has to make a small fire nest first, from light, lose dry stuff, and even dry straw or whatever should be rubbed until the fibres are loose and soft and good air circulation is possible, then it works easy.
If using a lens and sunlight: it works, but is more difficult. Burn the material first to blacken it, make sort of charcoal of it, move the focus of the sunölight and lenbse over the surface like a laser. And that "charcoal" area you then try to light with a lense and sunlight in the second working step. I found this to be the only way working on wood. To just focus sunlight via lense on a piece of wood never did the trick for me, never, it smoldered, but never started to form flames. I needed to turn bigger parts of it into charcoal first, the blakc parts then catches and feeds fire, and form that the fire then sporeads to the full piec eof wood.
Best solution: have a lighter with you. Just no gasoline Zippo, they are always empty when you need them, the vapors escape way to fast for these things being useful.