Homemade fire starters and lighting them on fire at home

A friend of mine bought the firestarter necklace that I recommended as a holiday gift idea, but told me that he’s having trouble starting a fire with it.  So I made the video below, wherein I mash vaseline into cotton balls to make homemade fire starters, then light one with the necklace.

Whichever firesteel and scraper you are using, the key is the tinder (or vaseline cotton ball).  The sparks that come off a firesteel are hot, but pretty small, with little thermal mass.  Those sparks need some thin little filaments of super dry flammable material to ignite, the wispier the better.  Those thin filaments can be achieved in a carefully (very carefully) constructed tinder bundle from bone-dry plant materials, or the cotton in a cotton ball, as in the video below.  Whatever you use, the tinder needs to be top-notch.

The vaseline cotton balls are easy and fantastic.  They are waterproof, owing to the vaseline (provided you jam enough in there), and they’ll burn for maybe 1-3 minutes (also depending on the vaseline).  The only disadvantage is the slight messiness.  I use old film canisters to store 4-5 each, and put a couple in my car, the camping bin, etc (I included an Amazon link to the film canisters, even though the idea of paying for the empty canisters makes me cringe, having grown up where there were ubiquitous extras available).  For storing the vaseline cotton ball in the Altoid survival kit, I cut a small square of plastic-wrap, and wrap up individual cotton balls that way (see video).

Now, the necklace may be with you at all times, but what about the tinder, since it’s the most important factor?  Well, you can keep the little survival kit handy with two of the vaseline cotton balls inside (as shown in the video).  Or, you could carry around some paracord with tinder inside, either in a bracelet or as shoelaces, or even as the fire starter necklace cord (though I prefer the leather cord).  I haven’t tried to light the paracord tinder; I’ll let you know how it works when I do.

Here are the materials (real complicated here, brace yourselves):

Fire starting Necklace (as described in our gift recommendations)

 Vaseline

Cotton balls

 

After this video I decided that it was cheating to do it inside where it’s all calm and warm, and we happened to have a snowstorm going on outside with two feet of snow on the ground and more falling, so I went out into the backyard and dug out the two feet of snow over our fire pit and dug out the two feet of snow over the woodpile and used some of our firewood and my knife to cut kindling and then lit a fire with the firesteel necklace and the vaseline cotton ball out in the storm.  Yeah, I did.  I really did.

And then when I went to upload the video, somehow I managed to either delete or never even record the part where I actually START the fire.  Which really bums me out, because it was a good hour worth of work with all the digging in the snow, and to have lost the video seems overly convenient—as if I would claim to have started the fire without ever having succeeded.  Honest, it happened.

Granted, I was using split firewood as my stock material, which is already dried (on the inside, after digging it out from under two feet of snow and batoning it into kindling with my knife).  But it’s similar enough to twigs and sticks collected from the woods to be legit.  And I did it in a FREAKING SNOWSTORM.  And then lost the damn video.  I tried everything to recover the video off the camera, spending an extra hour messing around with data recovery software, without success.  MAJOR bummer.  Learned my lesson though: I need a more reliable video camera.