Review of Homemade Firestarters

Review
of
Firestarters
Homemade
Recently I was surfing around the Internet and came across a
link shared by Survival For Blondes that was about using stuff
around the house to make fire starters. It lead me to the
instructions on making what you see above and I turned to the
mister and said, “Hey, we actually have all the stuff to do
this. You want to try it?” He agreed and we were off to making
our first homemade firestarters!
All in all, it was extremely easy to make and took less time
than writing this article. Egg carton, dryer lint, wood
shavings, melted wax. Pretty easy! We used soy wax chips that
I bought from Amazon to make emergency candles with so I
already had a the pot to melt wax in. We didn’t follow the
instructions in the article exactly. How boring would that
be!? What we decided to do was test different combinations of
the materials to see what would work the best. We tried
layering the dryer lint and putting wood shavings on top, we
tried mixing them up really well, and then I wanted to try one
that was straight lint. We poured wax over all of them as you
can see in the title picture.
About a week later we were heading outside to test our Kelly
Kettle (watch a great review video here) in adverse weather
conditions with less than bone dry fuel. I grabbed one of each
type of fire starter we made, too. They were easily torn off
from the rest of the egg carton and put into a pocket. By the
way, the Kelly Kettle performed very well with wetter
materials though it did take some extra work to foster the
coals. Back to the fire starters, here are the results:
1.
Layered lint and wood
shavings – This combination fired up pretty well but
needed some extra protection from the breezes and had to
be closely tended. There was more wax in these ones than
the other two. Once the lint started catching though,
the flame was steady and easier to work with.
2. Mixed lint and wood shavings – This combination caught
fire right away and spread nicely across the top of the
‘cake.’ We ended up taking a stick and breaking it up a
bit to help it along (should have done that with the
first one too).
3. Lint and wax – No doubt about it, this was the best
combination of the three we tried. While all 3 lit and
burned, this one was superior. Not only did it burn, it
burned hot! So hot that it dried out the red cedar we
were feeding around it fast enough to catch within
minutes and soon we had a very nice little fire going.
The lint/wax starter turned the wood into a nice
set of coals relatively quickly which is a plus.
The downside? It stinks. Literally, stinks when
burning. Not so pleasant but it doesn’t last long
and if you look at what it takes to make these and
the ease of carrying, lighting, and using them for
cooking or getting warm – I think it is safe to
say the smell is worth it.
***UPDATE JANUARY 2016**
After using these several times, I’m hooked! These fire
starters work really, really well. They burn very hot and once
going, burn for a fair amount of time. This is important
because you do not have to worry about the fire going out
while you are preparing more tinder/kindling or gathering more
sticks and twigs to build the fire up. Plus, we live in a
coastal area which means that 90% of the time, there is at
least some kind of breeze which has resulted in a fragile
flame being snuffed out more times than I care to count.
The more we have used them, the less the initial smell
bothered me and now I don’t notice at all. Really great DIY
project that has real value! We have two of these in every
single BOB and EDC bag we carry as well as in the vehicle bag,
in various supply caches that are stashed here and there on
the island and I will continue to use homemade firestarters as
long as I am able to make them!
See the original article here.