ouch 7 ounces of stiff wax+paper for $10.94 ... floppy waxpaper can be had ~6oz for $1

It's certainly not just wax + paper! If it was I wouldn't be very excited about it. This stuff is kind of laminated into layers. It's rigid but easy to work with. It seems to be pretty water resistant but I haven't tried soaking it overnight (that would be a good test though!). If burns for a long time if you let it burn down like a candle from the top but it burns bright and hot if you let it burn from the bottom. The price goes up and down on Amazon; when I got my last batch it was around $6.50 or so. Survival Metrics is a good place to buy it, too.

There are lots of great fire items out there and this isn't gonna be everyone's favorite. But I never go out camping or hiking without having some with me.

Some methods of carry like zip locks or aluminum foil won't protect tinder if you get fully immersed in water, not just rained on. I'm thinking of boaters and aviators, and the kits that would be on their person. See this video at 3:40.

Phaedrus, you may have posted it before but what bags & sealing equipment are you using? The setups you've described sound great, although their performance may be improved even more if you add a bunch of smilies...

I will vouch for the sealing job Phaedrus does with his tinder. I carried some sealed that way for more than a year, and did have some immersed in water, and they still worked. Several different types of tinders, and they all worked. I did abuse the packages, to. They are durable materials.

Phaedrus sent me a few of these and they are bombproof! After 3+/- years in various kits, there are no signs of wear or abrasion.
Thanks, Phaedrus!

























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Are you sure about that? How do you know zip locks and aluminum foil will leak when fully immersed in water?

The video I linked has the guy fully immersing a bare vaselined cottonball into a bowl of water ... it burns right after

I've personally dunked my ziplock in a bucket of water and it didn't leak ... there is more on ziplocks below



That is good thinking
In that video that guy uses cellophane to start a fire, thats practically waxpaper

Doug Ritter often includes zip-locks into his personal kits
Doug Ritter amk psp faq



Doug Ritter also uses match safes and also vacuum packs backups

See also Waterproof PSK where falcon5000 goes 8 feet deep with original PSP

Doug also includes a plastic boxed Spark Lite Aviation ... although the manufacturer doesn't list a waterproofness/submersion rating


lol

Hmm, could you elaborate on why you're excited about tinder cards? How is it more than just wax + paper?
So far the list of pros:
*kind of laminated into layers
*rigid but easy to work with
*seems to be pretty water resistant
*burns long and slow from top
*burns bright and hot from the bottom
*score it with a knife and light it with a spark
*can be bought for $6.50 or so

Your strategy of vacuum-seal-into-zip-lock-mylar seems fantastic as a tinder carry option , esp long term

"Are you sure about that? How do you know zip locks and aluminum foil will leak when fully immersed in water?"

Zip locks are pretty good, especially if you take care with sealing them and you make sure they suffer no snags or tears. I use them a lot, but they can fail. There are more foolproof methods.

I'm not sure how the Tinder Card is manufactured. It smells a bit like beeswax but probably isn't. I like the stuff for the following reasons:

1) It's rigid. It's not structural strong like wood but more live heavy cardboard. This makes it ideal for several applications. For example I can cut rounds out of it sized to fit the lid of my UCO Match case and once pressed up in there it's stiff enough to stay there. It makes a great backing board, and it will stand up if you lean it up on something.

2) It can be be "frizzed up" while retaining its shape. You can score the top side of it or one end to the point where it can easily be lit with a spark while staying in one shape. Some won't care but I like that for the way I build fires.

3) It burns at a nice, controlled rate. Unlike paper that flares up it's more like a cotton ball soaked with PJ. It's candle-like.

4) Being rigid you can cut it to fit specific spaces. For instance I will often cut it into little sticks that I can slip into a match case.

I like to use it in conjunction with other products. For instance, a cotton ball is great in a match case because it stuffs it up to prevent rattling and works as tinder. But it burns very fast; coating it in PJ is great but it's not much good to pack around matches then.

If you want I can mail you a little chunk to try out.



I use a light commercial chamber vacuum machine from Vacmaster. Mine is a VP215C (which I notice is now $250 cheaper than when I bought mine! ).

Chamber vac machines are great! Unlike a Foodsaver which sucks air out of the bad you place a bag in the chamber and all the air is evacuated from the chamber, not just the bag. It's pretty neat- if you seal something that's very wet you can watch the water boil as the pressure drops. At any rate this allows the use of many more kinds of bags than you can use with suction or snorkel machines. The heavy duty seal bar can easily deal with very heavy mylar and will do a passable job of sealing retort bags of the type used for MREs.

I use smallish bags (around 3" x 4" or so) for fire stuff. I've used somewhat larger bags to seal WetFire and Weber cubes as well. WetFire seems to go bad pretty quickly sometimes in the flimsy little baggies it's sold in. But sealed in a heavy mylar pouch they seam to last indefinitely.

Missed this the first time through but I wanted to chime in with my agreement. I do like to have a couple small squares of foil in my fire kits. Now only does a bit of foil keep wax from running, it can hold your tinder up off of the wet and protect it til it gets going. Always great to have along!