Interesting read. Thanks for sharing the link.

wax paper is one of the best firestarters I know of. Another is a fine slice of an old rubber tire. Cotton or pocket lint is a food tinder, with the above as a good fire lighter!

They seem to have gone away from including cotton wool in aspirin bottles, but if you're carrying aspirin in your FAK, it may not be a bad idea to rectify the oversight <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I got into survival training a few years back when I suggested to a group of fellow pilots that a talk on wilderness survival would be an interesting lecture for our monthly meeting, and promptly found myself "volunteered" to give it <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I bought my first copy of the SAS Survival Guide and used it as one of my props, listing all the wonderful things about it. Someone in the audience pointed out that you could even tear it up and use the pages to start a fire; one of the other pilots (ex-military, I'm sure) immediately stood up and said "NO! You burn your log book before you burn your survival manual." I'll never forget that moment.

Minime: Have you had any luck with the "tinder fungus" that grows on standing birch? I haven't been able to get that stuff to burn at all even after drying.

Also, I can get the curliest of black birch bark to ignite from a spark if I twist it a few times to fray the fibers. It still takes a 8 to 10 strikes with the Strike Force though.


Chris

never any luck with lighting fires with fungus. Quite a bit of luck lighting my spirit with fungus but that's a different story <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

I'll have to try the curly black birch with the spark-lite.

Also I have great luck with the finest twigs from standing evergreens - not sure which evergree. Simply get a bunch of them by strippiing you hand along the larger branch and they all come off then bunch them up and put a little bit of spark-catcher tinder (cotton ball, milk-week, lint, dry punk, etc.) in the middle and throw a spark in. The dry twigs are small enough to catch from the smallest flame. I do this while holding them together. When they catch they become somewhat of a torch which can be jammed into the teepee of kindling to good effect.

Here's an idea I just got recently - I just tried it and it seems to work great, if you have access to one of those devices for laminating business cards.

I took a business card and a cotton ball. I pulled out the cotton ball until it was very thin, approximately the size and shape of the business card, and placed the two of them back to back in a laminating pouch (GBC 7.0 Mil Business Card Size, 2-3/16 x 3-11/16, although in principle any size will do). Making sure that none of the cotton wool extended past the sides of the business card, and that the business card was centred in the pouch, I put the whole assembly into the cardboard carrier and ran it through my laminating machine (GBC 40).

The result was a laminated business card with a barely noticeable - umm - "topographic effect" on the reverse. The theory was that the cotton wool was now effectively waterproofed, and I could carry it in my wallet and always be assured of having at least one piece of waterproof tinder at all times.

Would it work? Well, as luck would have it, this being Sunday night, I was doing a laundry, so I stuck the laminated card in one of my shirt pockets and tossed the shirt in with the load.

It looked fine and dry when it came out, but the proof of the pudding is in the burning, as they say. <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I took it into the kitchen and cut it in two with scissors. I thought I'd be able to pull it apart, but I had to cut along the sides to get the two halves apart. Then I put the piece with the cotton wool in the bottom of a disposable aluminium dish on top of the stove (making doubly sure there was nothing flammable within reach) and applied a shower of sparks from my Blast Match.

Initial result was a little disappointing; the cotton wool caught fire, all right, but after a few seconds it died away, leaving half the cotton wool unburnt. (I still had the other half of the card, though.) It occurred to me that I should have used the paper from the business card to augment my fire-making efforts. Since I still had some unburnt cotton wool, I struck another shower of sparks from the Blast Match and the rest of the cotton wool ignited; this time, though, I held the edge of the half business card in the flame and it ignited. Within a few seconds, flames were soaring up about 4 to 6 inches as the fire ignited the plastic laminate. I didn't time it but I'm pretty sure it burned for over a minute. (Caution: I just tried to repeat the process with the other half of the assembly and the cotton wool didn't burn long enough to ignite the business card, so either it's not as effective as I had hoped or it takes a little bit more practice. I didn't "fluff" the cotton wool up after separating the card, and I had it lying flat instead of standing vertical, both of which I'm sure robbed me of precious seconds. Also, I probably should have tried "priming" it with wood chips or dead twigs.

So I'd put this in the category of "last resort". (Otoh, it does provide you with one whole dry cotton ball, which should be enough to get a fire going.) If, however, you have something in your wallet that you want laminated, and you have access to one of these devices, it adds virtually nothing to the weight of your wallet.

(I don't intend to try this with a vaseline- or alcohol-impregnated cotton ball. For one thing, I'm afraid it would void the warranty; and for another, I'm not sure how I'd explain it to the insurance company....) <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Kinkos has lamination sheets at 11 1/2" X 8" along with lamination machines. You buy the lamination sheet and then you are allowed to use the lamination machine yourself.

I suppose if you glued the cotton wool to the back of the business card/certificate/wallet card etc. (with, e.g. GlueStick) it wouldn't be too hard to laminate a bunch of them and then cut them apart with a scalpel.

As a follow-up, just before going to bed I decided to try again with the remaining half of my business card. I looked at the remnants of the "cotton wool" side and realised there was a fair bit of unburnt tinder. I pulled it off ("picked away at it" is a more apt description) and got a couple of "pinches" of cw. I tossed on a couple of wood shavings and struck another shower of sparks from the BM. This time (3rd time lucky?) I was able to ignite the paper on the business card; it burned for well over a minute, with the peak flame about 4 inches high for at least 10 to 20 seconds. So even after 2 botched attempts, there was enough cotton wool to get a decent fire going. <img src="images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

The bark of some kind of (Birch?) tree was used by native american indians to start fires. It was multicolored bark that flakes away along the length of the trunk. The friend that told me this tore off a "leaf" of it, swished it around in a puddle, shook of the excess water, and it lit up from 3 seconds of a bic lighter flame. It then flared up enough to force him to drop it. It fell onto wet concrete and he had to stamp it out. Sure wish I could remember the species of that tree. Anybody?
Thanks,
Run

It's the Paper Birch found in northern and boreal woods. The bark contains natural resins that will ignite if it gets wet as the resin itself is water proof.

Don't remove bark from a live tree unless it's a true emergency. I carry a few pieces in my fanny pack that I removed from a downed log on the ground. Stripping bark off a live tree is unsightly and may eventually kill the tree as the stripped bark girrdles the tree. Especially trees near well worn paths. BTW, I went of the trail about 100 yards to collect from my tree, which had been blown down during a hard storm.