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.