I`ve got almost all the above mentioned on hand and ordered the rocks.

Once I get a free day and all the test equipment setup I`ll report back with results for almost all of the above mentioned.

Pencil sharpener


I tried using a pencil sharpener over the weekend to see if it is useful for making a fire. The pencil sharpener makes wonderful paper thin shavings. It has been raining here in Phoenix. All I found in my back yard was a green twig. I made a quarter size pile on my Dutch Oven table. I tried my sparker on it. No good! I tried my lighter on it. No good. Even shaved paper thin, green wood will not burn. I found a dry twig in a parking lot. It made a nice pile of dry shavings. I have no idea what plant it came from. I made a quarter size pile of shavings from it. It would not light from my BS Hot Spark. I tried using a lighter. It lit but did not want to stay lit. My impression is that a pencil sharpener has no utility over a sharp knife. You can scrape wood with your knife to get fine tinder.

Noting beats cotton based tinder!

Wow. Completely different than my experience. Guess that is why redundency is a good thing.

Did I hear right? Are you a DO nut as well? That was quite an ingenious notion. Too bad it didn't yield good results.

I use my boy scout firestarters to light all my charcoal fires, and most of my camp fires as well. That is the old carboard egg carton with dryer lint and wax. Works like a champ every time.

Something else I used to make was sawdust cakes using old toilet paper rolls stuffed with sawdust and melted wax. I would stuff them real tight in my vise, let the wax set up then hacksaw the filled tube into half inch wafers. I wrapped each wafer in saran wrap, and ziploc bagged them into packable bunches. I found out you can do the same and make "fatwood" presto logs using confierous pitch and wax as the binder. You gotta use fresh pitch that is clear and soft instead of the yellow, crystallized type. Done right, them wafers will burn for quite a while, and put out a lot of flame and heat.