Lets talk about fire building tips

[kev]

Lets post some fire building tips

1) Road Flares - In an emergency cold weather situation - nothing beats a road flare. When your fingers are numb and its difficult to grab a match, the road flare is large enough to get a good grip on. They take up a lot of room in your pack, and the fumes can make you gag, but they give you something like 10 minutes of fire to get your main fire started. And their great for wet weather.

2) Alcohol prep pads – These are the things that the nurse uses to clean your skin right before you get a shot. Their good for cleaning wounds and starting fires. The alcohol content allows the vapors to burn before the cloth of the pad to burn, so you might get a couple of minutes of burn time out of 1 pad. Their lightweight, easy to use, easy to light, and multi-purpose items.

3) Pencil and pencil sharpener – Not as easy to light as the alcohol prep pad, but will help you get a fir built. Use the pencil to write with, just as leaving notes at the truck before you head out on a hiking trip, and use the sharpener to get wood shavings to help build a fire.

4) Dip your matches – Even though a lot of people recommend dipping your matches in wax, I do not like doing that. The wax coating makes the match difficult to strike, and in some cases the match head might just snap off instead of lighting. Waterproof finger nail polish will give you a thin water proof coating that is easier to remove then wax.

5) Bow and Drill – Might take you a long time to build a fire, but if it was good enough for primitive man, its good enough for you.

6) Magnifying glass – May only work when the sun is out, but its good for looking at splinters. Being able to look at small splinters and start fires makes the magnifying glass a dual purpose item.

7) Magnesium Fire Starter - takes a lot of work, but gets the job done with some practice.

8) Swiss Army Fire Starter - Gives you a good spark, takes a little practice, takes up little room in the pack, cord can be removed for use elsewhere.

Example of building a fire with an Alcohol prep pad

YouTube- Wilderness skills - making fire with an...

[zoltan]

In a pinch, liquid fuel from your camp stove can be used to jump start the fire making process.

[aka"militiamike"]

dont forget the to pack some dryer lint....it makes great fire starting tinder....double or even triple bag it....

[EagleRiverDee]

I second the road flare. Perfect for when trying to light wet wood.

Also try:
-Cotton balls permeated with vaseline for tinder. They'll burn a good 5 minutes.
-A tampon dipped in a fuel tank (Good for when riding ATV's/Snowmachines)
-Using a candle instead of matches to light your fire- use one match that way.
-Hand sanitizer is quite flammable.

Oh, and a good way to make tinder is to take a small branch and start chopping into it to "feather" it. It allows air to get into each crevice and works much the way using wood shavings does, except you don't actually remove them from the branch.

[sticks65]

Flint and steel.

YouTube- Lighting my camp fire with flint and...

Good char cloth,the best thing I have used to make it is cotton wool,here's a link to a thread I made on making char cloth.
http://www.survivalistboards.com/sho...d.php?t=118998

Good dry tinder,In the wet I cheat and use jute twine as it works brilliantly but I do like to use natural tinder's to.

Processing jute twine for tinder.

YouTube- Making a tinder nest from Jute twine.

If you live in an area where Bamboo is plentiful its great as all the components to make fire are there in one stick of bamboo,here's a little tutorial I did on this method.

YouTube- Making fire using the bamboo saw method.

Bowdrill is not that hard but using woods that work well together is key and then practice,sometimes you will get smoke but it may look as if you haven't got an ember but if you have smoke most likely you have an ember,try it anyway as you may be surprised,two excellent woods that work well together is willow and sycamore.

Here im using a willow fire board and rattan spindle which I keep in my pack.

YouTube- Making fire using the bowdrill method

A couple of other tips are use pine resin on top of you kinderling as it melts down and really get the fire going and fat wood is also your friend.

Also in wet weather split your wood as split wood burns better and make feather sticks.

[sticks65]

Oh and I forgot to mention Jute works really well with a ferro rod[swedish firestarter]

Birch bark makes great tinder in all weather as its full of oil.

[sticks65]

Waist not want not,here I use the ember from my pipe then transfer that to a jute tinder nest,then I use some birch bark as a fire extender.

Notice I have all my wood sorted to size as preparation is the key to good fire management.

YouTube- Summer Solstice woodland campout

The fire burnt through the night and i was able to cook breakfast in the embers.



I also had some big logs that where about 5 foot long which I used the fire to burn through them and make them smaller,saves energy and you don't need a saw to cut them to size.

[pj_01]

WARNING: Do not put any type of product that has a liquid base of any kind into your Sealed Emergency Kit. Keep Medical Supplies seperate, as much as possible. I had experience with one of my Micro suvival kits that i put into an altoids can. i sealed the can with duck tape and electrical tape so no air in or out. sad to say anything that was not stainless steel inside rusted because i had an alcohol prep pad in the kit and one of my hooks managed to puncture the package. The kit was only sealed for about 2 months and when i took it out in the middle of the woods and opened it to use the fishing gear out of it i was sadly mistaken.

dont put items that have any damp nature to them inside your sealed survival kit or at least keep them seperated.

[scavind]

Didn't see anyone add this yet. Only works untill the battey is used up though but 9v with steel wood will start a fire quite quick.

[HammerHand]

This isn't a fire starting tip - more of a fire maintenance tip.

If you've got wet wood (surface moisture, not green wood) stack it close to your fire to dry it out. If you stack the wood in a ring around your fire it also acts as a wind break. And stacking it that close to the fire saves on the trips back and forth to the wood pile all night.

[AKpredator]

We don't have any hardwoods round here so I use birch bark, spruce sap or cotton as tinder. Cotton is one of the few things to light very reliably.

Good idea about the alcohol pads. WP pouch, too.

[EagleRiverDee]

Originally Posted by HammerHand

This isn't a fire starting tip - more of a fire maintenance tip.

If you've got wet wood (surface moisture, not green wood) stack it close to your fire to dry it out. If you stack the wood in a ring around your fire it also acts as a wind break. And stacking it that close to the fire saves on the trips back and forth to the wood pile all night.

Good points. Another thing you can do is stack the wood behind your fire as a reflector. It dries the wood out and reflects the heat back into your shelter.

[The Truth]

Though only having little experience with it, I appreciate using a Dakota hole for wilderness fires. Easy to control the fire, very easy to cook over it, and of course very concealable. One nice thing about them that you won't notice until you have one going, is that you can cook up a meal and still retain your night vision in the dark. Most fires require you to constantly look at them in some form, however the light from a dakota hole fire is concealed so your night vision stays relatively useful.

Makes a nice low-impact fire; I save the plugs of grass/moss/top soil when I make one, as well as heaping the removed soil, so I can fill it in and replace the grass plugs afterwards.

Favorite way to do it is in a small slope, dig sideways about 1.5ft from the crest-- 2-3ft inwards -- and then dig down to form a chimney. When done like this you get the benefit of a natural heat reflector, similar to the heat you feel when opening a hot oven. Chimney sucks all the smoke upwards away from you. Again it's easy to conceal and very low-impact, important things for me.

--

For lighting, in dry conditions it's hard to beat some kerosene-soaked cotton balls and a Bic lighter. I don't like dulling my knife making tinder so I just crush/grind some small twigs using two rocks sometimes. Not much experience lighting fires in bad conditions, though I know how to do it.

Love the pencil sharpener idea. Don't need a pencil though? Just peel the bark off some twigs and grind them up in the pencil sharpener?

[Smudge]

Practise, Practise, Practise.

[stigz]

Jute twine with wax melted into it pairs extremely well with a ferro-rod. Untwist only a small bit of one end and put your sparks there. It stays lit like a candle and wraps around your ferro-rod for storage.

[HaroldWayneHamlin]

Originally Posted by pj_01

WARNING: Do not put any type of product that has a liquid base of any kind into your Sealed Emergency Kit. Keep Medical Supplies seperate, as much as possible. I had experience with one of my Micro suvival kits that i put into an altoids can. i sealed the can with duck tape and electrical tape so no air in or out. sad to say anything that was not stainless steel inside rusted because i had an alcohol prep pad in the kit and one of my hooks managed to puncture the package. The kit was only sealed for about 2 months and when i took it out in the middle of the woods and opened it to use the fishing gear out of it i was sadly mistaken.

dont put items that have any damp nature to them inside your sealed survival kit or at least keep them seperated.

good advice

Question

would spraying with wd 40 inside the container (before sealing) help.

Now before anyone jumps on me, remember, the intent is for long term storage and clean and washing would be prefered other that a pile of rust inside after opening.


later
wayne

[stigz]

Originally Posted by HaroldWayneHamlin

would spraying with wd 40 inside the container (before sealing) help.

wayne

Not a bad idea. Although, if the intent of the alcohol was for fire...WD40 can also be used as a fire starter and will not cause rust.

[MikeK]

I've come to greatly appreciate a magnesium bar for fire starting. Good tinder and it lights well, even when wet. Combined with a good ferrocerium rod, blast match, or even flint and steel, it's one method I always keep in my pack.

[Gullars]

Supprised nobody mentioned Trioxane yet! Bough a airdrop full from Ebay! I live in fairly damp enviroment. When everything else fails, Trioxane will save your bum!

[MikeK]

Originally Posted by Gullars

Supprised nobody mentioned Trioxane yet! Bough a airdrop full from Ebay! I live in fairly damp enviroment. When everything else fails, Trioxane will save your bum!

I have a couple cases of that stuff. It's getting old and crumbly now. The crumbs make good firestarter alright.