Chapter 6
Chapter 6 – Fail-Proof Fire Fusion I think that someone should have named fire man's best friend, rather than the dog. Maybe they didn't because fire isn't alive, although it acts like it is at times. Nevertheless, fire remains the greatest invention or perhaps discovery of all times. Whenever you find yourself in a survival situation, you'll be glad you have fire to keep you warm and to cook your food. In olden times, people thought nothing of starting a fire. Travelers carried a tinder box, which held some tinder that they had encountered along the way, as well as a flint and steel for starting a fire. If they had matches, they were stored in the tinder box as well. Armed with their tinderboxes, our ancestors were ready to start a blazing fire for whatever their need might be. Today, most of us have trouble starting a fire. Since we don't need to start a fire as often, when we do need to start one, we struggle. But starting a fire really isn't all that hard, if you know how. Survival instructors and others who are serious about survival collect ways of starting a fire, as if they got points for them. While many of these aren't really the best to use when you need a fire, knowing many ways of starting one helps ensure that you can, when you need one. For most of us, all we need is our primary fire starting techniques, those of using matches or a butane lighter. All the other, more exotic techniques are considered secondary techniques, to be used when we don't have our primary means available. I'm not going to bother spending a lot of time talking about secondary techniques, just recommend that you have a lot of matches and butane lighters on hand. The absolute best matches on the market are ones called "stormproof matches." You can literally start these matches underwater, let alone in a rainstorm. Many preppers make their own version of this, taking four wood matches and bundling them together, wrapping a strip of toilet paper around them, just behind the match heads. They then dip this is melted paraffin, covering the entire match bundle and allowing it to dry. To use these homemade waterproof matches, simply scrape the wax off the match heads and strike them like normal. The combination of wax and toilet paper will provide you with a match which will keep burning for a couple of minutes, giving you a good chance for getting your fire started. If you are going to keep butane lighters on hand for fire starting, there's one thing you need to know. That is, they don't work well in the cold. Butane liquefies at around the temperature of water freezing. For the lighter to work, it needs to convert to a gaseous state. So, if you are planning on using a butane lighter in the winter time, keep it inside your clothes, where your body can keep it warm.
How to Lay a Proper Fire A lot of starting a fire depends upon proper preparation. Specifically, how you lay the fire. The same basic rules apply whether you are laying a fire in your fireplace at home, in a fire pit in your back yard or in a circle of rocks out in the woods.
To start with, you need someplace safe to light the fire, which will not catch fire itself. That means having an area made of rock, gravel, cement or dirt. In the woods, you would build a circle of rocks around a flat, cleared area or around a flat rock. At home, your fireplace or fire pit will provide that. There are three different categories of materials you are going to burn. If you start out trying to catch logs on fire, you're not going to get very far. Rather, you need to light smaller materials first, then work your way up to the logs. Basically, we use a three step process, using:
Tinder - This is small pieces of material which will easily catch fire. Dry grass, charcloth, dryer lint, an old bird's nest and other similar things are all great tinder. The tinder is the part we light, which then carries the flame to larger materials. Kindling - If we try to make a fire of all tinder, we'll spend all our time feeding it more material to burn. So, we step it up to kindling. These are pieces of wood about the diameter of your finger. They can range from as little as 2" up to big pieces which are 10" long. Just don't let them get too big in diameter. Fuel - Once the fire is started, it is passed on to larger pieces, which we call fuel. This is split branches and tree trunks, which will burn for a while. As much as possible, you want to use hardwoods for your fires and not softwoods, as the hardwoods will store more potential heat energy in them.
When laying a fire, the idea is to catch the tinder on fire first and allow it to get the kindling burning. The kindling can then pass the fire on to the fuel. Once the fuel is burning, you can say that your fire is ready. For cooking, you'll want it to burn a while, so as to produce coals. The coals burn hotter than the flame, so they are better for cooking with.
Fire - pyramid
Fire - teepee
There are several ways of stacking a fire, such as crisscrossing the pieces to make a tower or leaning them against each other to form a teepee. How you stack the fuel isn't as important as doing so in a way that allows the progression of the fire from tinder to kindling to fuel. This is usually accomplished by having the tinder at the bottom, with the kindling stacked over it, leaving air space and finally the fuel.
Air space is very important in any fire. If not enough air gets to the fire, it will go out. So, when you stack your materials, you want to make sure that at least half of your space is air space. That will allow air to flow through and keep the fire burning.
Secondary Fire Starters There are many different ways of starting a fire, but I want to mention a couple of the best. If you make sure you always have good means of starting a fire with you, then you may not need some of the more exotic methods. Sparkers There are a number of different fire starters that provide hot sparks to get your fire going. The most common one is the Ferro (ferrocarbon) Rod. This is a man-made material which is struck on a piece of steel, much like using flint and steel. Typically they are sold with a short piece of a hack saw blade attached, to use as the steel. However, the back of a knife works better. Going up the scale from there is the Metal Match. This is a block of magnesium, with a Ferro Rod embedded into one side. Magnesium is highly flammable, so it makes a great fire starter. To use it, some shavings of magnesium are cut off with a knife and allowed to fall on the tinder. Then the knife is flipped over and the back side struck on the Ferro Rod, directing sparks into the magnesium to start it burning. There is one other type of sparker that is even better, that's the BlastMatch. This device takes the idea of a Metal Match and a Ferro Rod and puts them together in a spring-loaded package. When you push it down, it creates a shower of sparks, starting your tinder burning. Solar When I was a kid, my parents gave me a magnifying glass. It wasn't really glass, but plastic, but we still called it a glass. About the first thing I did with it was to take it outside and find a dry leaf to start on fire. While that little magnifying glass didn't do all that good a job, the idea is sound. Focusing the sun's rays, either by the use of a lens or by reflection is a great way to start a fire. There are countless ways of doing this, up to and including making a lens out of ice that you cut from a frozen over river. However, that's a rather desperate method, only for use when you don't have anything else to count on. Carrying a small Fresnel lens with you offers an easy way to start a fire. Just focus the sun's rays through it, aiming them at some dry grass of leaves to act as tinder. You can also focus the sun's rays with any parabolic reflector. You actually have several of these around you, without even realizing it. Your car's headlight housing is a parabolic reflector, as is the reflector inside a flashlight. If you have stainless steel mixing bowls, they will probably work as a parabolic reflector as well.
Friction Stating fires with friction is the hardest way that you can find to start them. However, methods like the bow drill work well, once you've practiced enough with them to become proficient in using them.
Fire Accelerants and how to Make Them There's a bit of confusion when it comes to fire starters. The confusion comes in that anything that is used to help get a fire going is called a fire starter. However, not all fire starters are the same. Some create fire and others work to get that fire into the tinder, kindling and fuel. These are better called fire accelerants. If you pour charcoal lighter fluid on charcoal and then throw in a match, the lighter fluid is an accelerant. It is accelerating the rate at which the fire gets into the fuel. Since charcoal lighter fluid isn't a great choice for use indoors or when you are bugging out, we need to look at other accelerants. There are a number of commercially distributed fire accelerants on the market, some of which have been developed specifically for the prepping and survival market. Of these, the cubes are about the best I have used. They can be broken into smaller pieces for use multiple times and burn hot enough to pretty much guarantee starting a fire, even if your fuel is a bit on the damp side. Instead of buying them though, I'm going to show you how to make three different types of fire accelerants. Dryer Lint & Wax This is one of the easiest fire accelerants to make and if you buy candles from garage sales, it costs almost nothing to make. Start by making loose balls of dryer lint and putting them in a cardboard egg carton. It has to be the cardboard type and not Styrofoam. Melt some paraffin from old candles and pour it over the dryer lint, wetting it. It is not necessary to fill the egg carton with the wax, just put enough in to wet the lint well. Allow it to cool, cut or tear it apart into individual cups and its ready to go; you don't even need to take them out of the carton. Cotton Balls & Petroleum Jelly This is my go-to fire accelerant, both because it is easy to make and because it works well. All you need are cotton balls and petroleum jelly. Start by stretching the cotton ball out, making a bowl out of it. Then put a glob of petroleum jelly in it, equivalent to about 2/3 teaspoon. Fold the cotton over it and knead it, mixing the petroleum jelly throughout the cotton. This fire accelerant starts extremely easy, even with a sparker. It will burn for over three minutes, at a temperature high enough to not only start a regular fire, but also one in which you're starting out with damp wood. Black Powder & Nail Polish Remover When all else fails, this method will start a fire, even with wet firewood. To make this, you'll need some black powder (the old type of gunpowder, still used for muzzle loaders) and some oily nail
polish remover, the type that has acetone in it. When you buy the black powder, buy the finest grade they have; it's graded by the size of the granules. You want the smallest granules possible. Put about two tablespoons of black powder into a bowl and cover it with the nail polish remover. Allow it to soak in for a couple of minutes and then pour off the excess nail polish remover. It will have softened the black powder, turning it into putty. Knead that putty thoroughly by flattening it out and folding it over. You are trying to make layers in it and you need about 50 of them. The layers are what controls the burn rate of this accelerant, so they are very important. Without them, the putty will burn too rapidly, almost exploding. With sufficient layers, this accelerant will burn for about 3 1/2 minutes at a temperature over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's enough to dry the wood out and get it burning. The one problem with this type of fire accelerant is that acetone is highly volatile. So, it will evaporate out of the putty very easily. Once that happens, these are useless and need to be replaced. I usually keep mine in 35mm film cans, in which they stay good for about six months. A baby food jar would keep them good longer, but is much more fragile. I'm not sure I'd want to keep a baby food jar in my bug out bag, just to have a good fire starter.
How to Lay a Proper Fire A lot of starting a fire depends upon proper preparation. Specifically, how you lay the fire. The same basic rules apply whether you are laying a fire in your fireplace at home, in a fire pit in your back yard or in a circle of rocks out in the woods.
To start with, you need someplace safe to light the fire, which will not catch fire itself. That means having an area made of rock, gravel, cement or dirt. In the woods, you would build a circle of rocks around a flat, cleared area or around a flat rock. At home, your fireplace or fire pit will provide that. There are three different categories of materials you are going to burn. If you start out trying to catch logs on fire, you're not going to get very far. Rather, you need to light smaller materials first, then work your way up to the logs. Basically, we use a three step process, using:
Tinder - This is small pieces of material which will easily catch fire. Dry grass, charcloth, dryer lint, an old bird's nest and other similar things are all great tinder. The tinder is the part we light, which then carries the flame to larger materials. Kindling - If we try to make a fire of all tinder, we'll spend all our time feeding it more material to burn. So, we step it up to kindling. These are pieces of wood about the diameter of your finger. They can range from as little as 2" up to big pieces which are 10" long. Just don't let them get too big in diameter. Fuel - Once the fire is started, it is passed on to larger pieces, which we call fuel. This is split branches and tree trunks, which will burn for a while. As much as possible, you want to use hardwoods for your fires and not softwoods, as the hardwoods will store more potential heat energy in them.
When laying a fire, the idea is to catch the tinder on fire first and allow it to get the kindling burning. The kindling can then pass the fire on to the fuel. Once the fuel is burning, you can say that your fire is ready. For cooking, you'll want it to burn a while, so as to produce coals. The coals burn hotter than the flame, so they are better for cooking with.
Fire - pyramid
Fire - teepee
There are several ways of stacking a fire, such as crisscrossing the pieces to make a tower or leaning them against each other to form a teepee. How you stack the fuel isn't as important as doing so in a way that allows the progression of the fire from tinder to kindling to fuel. This is usually accomplished by having the tinder at the bottom, with the kindling stacked over it, leaving air space and finally the fuel.
Air space is very important in any fire. If not enough air gets to the fire, it will go out. So, when you stack your materials, you want to make sure that at least half of your space is air space. That will allow air to flow through and keep the fire burning.
Secondary Fire Starters There are many different ways of starting a fire, but I want to mention a couple of the best. If you make sure you always have good means of starting a fire with you, then you may not need some of the more exotic methods. Sparkers There are a number of different fire starters that provide hot sparks to get your fire going. The most common one is the Ferro (ferrocarbon) Rod. This is a man-made material which is struck on a piece of steel, much like using flint and steel. Typically they are sold with a short piece of a hack saw blade attached, to use as the steel. However, the back of a knife works better. Going up the scale from there is the Metal Match. This is a block of magnesium, with a Ferro Rod embedded into one side. Magnesium is highly flammable, so it makes a great fire starter. To use it, some shavings of magnesium are cut off with a knife and allowed to fall on the tinder. Then the knife is flipped over and the back side struck on the Ferro Rod, directing sparks into the magnesium to start it burning. There is one other type of sparker that is even better, that's the BlastMatch. This device takes the idea of a Metal Match and a Ferro Rod and puts them together in a spring-loaded package. When you push it down, it creates a shower of sparks, starting your tinder burning. Solar When I was a kid, my parents gave me a magnifying glass. It wasn't really glass, but plastic, but we still called it a glass. About the first thing I did with it was to take it outside and find a dry leaf to start on fire. While that little magnifying glass didn't do all that good a job, the idea is sound. Focusing the sun's rays, either by the use of a lens or by reflection is a great way to start a fire. There are countless ways of doing this, up to and including making a lens out of ice that you cut from a frozen over river. However, that's a rather desperate method, only for use when you don't have anything else to count on. Carrying a small Fresnel lens with you offers an easy way to start a fire. Just focus the sun's rays through it, aiming them at some dry grass of leaves to act as tinder. You can also focus the sun's rays with any parabolic reflector. You actually have several of these around you, without even realizing it. Your car's headlight housing is a parabolic reflector, as is the reflector inside a flashlight. If you have stainless steel mixing bowls, they will probably work as a parabolic reflector as well.
Friction Stating fires with friction is the hardest way that you can find to start them. However, methods like the bow drill work well, once you've practiced enough with them to become proficient in using them.
Fire Accelerants and how to Make Them There's a bit of confusion when it comes to fire starters. The confusion comes in that anything that is used to help get a fire going is called a fire starter. However, not all fire starters are the same. Some create fire and others work to get that fire into the tinder, kindling and fuel. These are better called fire accelerants. If you pour charcoal lighter fluid on charcoal and then throw in a match, the lighter fluid is an accelerant. It is accelerating the rate at which the fire gets into the fuel. Since charcoal lighter fluid isn't a great choice for use indoors or when you are bugging out, we need to look at other accelerants. There are a number of commercially distributed fire accelerants on the market, some of which have been developed specifically for the prepping and survival market. Of these, the cubes are about the best I have used. They can be broken into smaller pieces for use multiple times and burn hot enough to pretty much guarantee starting a fire, even if your fuel is a bit on the damp side. Instead of buying them though, I'm going to show you how to make three different types of fire accelerants. Dryer Lint & Wax This is one of the easiest fire accelerants to make and if you buy candles from garage sales, it costs almost nothing to make. Start by making loose balls of dryer lint and putting them in a cardboard egg carton. It has to be the cardboard type and not Styrofoam. Melt some paraffin from old candles and pour it over the dryer lint, wetting it. It is not necessary to fill the egg carton with the wax, just put enough in to wet the lint well. Allow it to cool, cut or tear it apart into individual cups and its ready to go; you don't even need to take them out of the carton. Cotton Balls & Petroleum Jelly This is my go-to fire accelerant, both because it is easy to make and because it works well. All you need are cotton balls and petroleum jelly. Start by stretching the cotton ball out, making a bowl out of it. Then put a glob of petroleum jelly in it, equivalent to about 2/3 teaspoon. Fold the cotton over it and knead it, mixing the petroleum jelly throughout the cotton. This fire accelerant starts extremely easy, even with a sparker. It will burn for over three minutes, at a temperature high enough to not only start a regular fire, but also one in which you're starting out with damp wood. Black Powder & Nail Polish Remover When all else fails, this method will start a fire, even with wet firewood. To make this, you'll need some black powder (the old type of gunpowder, still used for muzzle loaders) and some oily nail
polish remover, the type that has acetone in it. When you buy the black powder, buy the finest grade they have; it's graded by the size of the granules. You want the smallest granules possible. Put about two tablespoons of black powder into a bowl and cover it with the nail polish remover. Allow it to soak in for a couple of minutes and then pour off the excess nail polish remover. It will have softened the black powder, turning it into putty. Knead that putty thoroughly by flattening it out and folding it over. You are trying to make layers in it and you need about 50 of them. The layers are what controls the burn rate of this accelerant, so they are very important. Without them, the putty will burn too rapidly, almost exploding. With sufficient layers, this accelerant will burn for about 3 1/2 minutes at a temperature over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's enough to dry the wood out and get it burning. The one problem with this type of fire accelerant is that acetone is highly volatile. So, it will evaporate out of the putty very easily. Once that happens, these are useless and need to be replaced. I usually keep mine in 35mm film cans, in which they stay good for about six months. A baby food jar would keep them good longer, but is much more fragile. I'm not sure I'd want to keep a baby food jar in my bug out bag, just to have a good fire starter.
