Hi all,

I just bought the Pocket Survival Pack from REI today. I was trying to use the spark-lite to light some small pieces of paper and I just couldn't get it to light. On a couple of occasions, the paper edge had a reddish glow and I tried blowing on it but it just went out.

I will try to light some wood while I'm hiking tomorrow. I know you have to cut the wood so it has curls and hopefully the wood will light.

I also dipped a Q-tip in rubbing alcohol and tried to light that. After a couple of sparks, the q-tip caught on fire. I was deliberately trying not to use the included tinder to see if I can start a fire when I run out of the prepared tinder.

Do you guys have any tips on how to use the spark-lite to start a fire with natural materials that you might find out in the woods?

Thanks a lot.

Shave whatever your tinder is down to the finest threads you can. Including paper. More surface area will allow it to ignite more easily since those sparks don't have much surface area of their own. Try to build said tinder into a bundle. Man, I really need to practice doing this myself... it's been a while! <img src="/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

You started off with one of the tougher materials to light by spark, at least from what I've seen during my experimentation with different tinders.

I've taken a MagFire, which produces an incredible shower of hot sparks, and couldn't get paper going. Granted, I knew it was going to be tough after reading a couple of posts here covering the very same subject, but I gave it a shot anyway.

I tried crumpling and uncrumpling the paper for about a half an hour before going at it, essentially breaking it down to what appeared to be a semi fuzzy limp mess before hitting it with sparks.
No Joy...

After that failed, I started shredding the mess into strips and wound them together lightly.
No luck...

So I shredded a napkin and mixed it into the tinder bundle.
Nope...

Then I pulled a bunch of fuzz off my cotton socks and put the resulting fuzzball in the middle of bundle.
After a few strikes that landed sparks in the cotton I was able to blow the mess to flame. (Thanks to Les Stroud for that tip in the Georgia Swamp ep. of Survivorman)

I was laying a lot of sparks down on the paper tinder bundles with no luck at all, minus a few red glows that would never amount to enough to catch, with so many strikes off of the MagFire that I could literally shake the bundle and a ton of black spark remnants would fall out, which may have been the wrong thing to do.

I've used the very same MagFire to light everything from prepared tabs such as Tinderquick and cotton and Vaseline balls to gathered natural materials, from drier lint to wood shavings and fire sticks, and from charcoal from a previous fire and char cloth to wood punk, always with eventual success (when dry), but paper... Ugh... I don't know what's wrong with my methodology there... Perhaps I didn?t try long enough, but after about an hour and a half or more I was so frustrated and annoyed with the whole thing I cheated an added the cotton lint from my socks to the bundle.

The one exception to my paper tests came later when I ran across a sheet of paper at an art supply store that was supposed to be used to make mattes for framing pictures and other projects. You could actually see the long fibers in that paper.

If anyone has some suggestions on how to use paper as tinder I would love to hear them.

It should be noted that I've never tried using a magnesium bar and striker setup to try to light paper. That might work fairly easily. That's a guess of course. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I wonder if grinding up some paper between two stones or something similar to a point where it's all fuzz might work?

I've found, the more fuzz the better. A spark-lite spark is tiny and in order for it to ignite any type of material, whether it's paper, cotton, whatever, it needs to land within microscopic strands. The issue, I believe, is the immediate need for oxygen. Of course adding fuel to the tinder composition (like wax, fat-wood etc.) will always help a great deal.

If you are going to try wood, don't cut curls to start (they can be on the side waiting for a flame to start) instead, scrape the wood into tiny curls or strands. Starting a fire is a lot of preparation of the materials first (all of this can be found in one nice old dry birds nest) and then using your sparking device. Practice practice practice.

With the sparklite and any kind of spark based fire starter, you need to remember five things about your tinder:

1. It must be dry.
2. Smaller is better, and fuzzy means it is really small.
3. No, drier than that.
4. Accelerants are a good thing, like the slightest bit of vaseline
5. No, no, drier still.

It needs to be as dry as you can get it, and the individual bits need to be as small and air surrounded as you can manage. Try this- take a BIG cotten ball, made from real cotton, and add about a pinhead-sized volume of petrolum jelly. Rub it in completely. Give that a whirl, I think you'll find you like how it works.

When you finally use a tinderquick, you need to open it up a lot. Practically pull it to shreads in the middle, so it is very, very fluffy.

I struggled with the spark lite initially. It's very much a confidence thing. Best way to practice is to use cotton wool rather than the tinder that comes with it. Don't spark straight down. Tilt your wrist to about a 20-30° angle from the vertical. Flick the sparking wheel quite hard. Get in close. That means under an inch.

Your question "sparked my interest" and I tried for about an hour with my magnesium fire-starter. I tried lint out of my pocket, dried grass, a cotton ball and "fuzzy" wood. Then I decided to cheat. I got some of my steel wool out of my wood finishing cabinet and pulled it apart so it was not so dense. This worked GREAT. In fact I just go through vacuum packing about 4 to put in my BOB and 1 in my PSK. It is light and the stuff caught after about 3-4 strokes on the striker. Blow pretty briskly to get it to burn hot and "POOF" I had a fire that I had to put out. Try it - you will be amazed. Ol' Dad taught me that about 100 years ago.

Your idea sparked an idea.(No pun intended.) Take a piece of paper and roll it up. Take the end of it and start rubbing it on a flat section of rock.(I have a couple of rocks sitting on my desk. I dont know what kind they are, but it's working for this.) I've been playing with this idea for a about an hour now. What I'm getting is "shavings". Fine little bits of paper that look quite fuzzy. Now if I were outside doing this probably the slightest breeze would blow it all away.

I haven't tried lighting it yet, just that I thought I'd share what I'm getting.

Well that was a no go. I see what you guys mean by getting a quick red burning spot then it's out. Not even time to breath on it. My finger is going to have a blister after messing with the green sparklite. Then the orange one. I'm throwing that green one out, it really doesn't work as well as the orange one.

I find paper will work indoors if you scrape it up with a knife. You should get a mixture of dust and thin scraggly bits. The action is not to cut the paper but to scratch it. I've never used a fire-drill, but I gather that too works by first creating dust then igniting it. Toilet or tissue paper can be easier to work with. I suspect it is possible with a $1 bill or a £5 note, but I've not seriously tried it.

Vasaline is good once you have a flame, but I find it inhibits getting the flame from a spark. There has been talk here recently about candle-wax working as well as vasaline without being as messy.

Just to be clear, there are typically several stages to starting a fire:
(1) Something to make a spark, eg ferro rod or Sparklite.
(2) Something to turn the spark into a flame, eg cotton wool, paper dust.
(3) Something to keep the flame going for a few minutes, eg cotton wool+vasaline, wood curlings, paper
(4) Something to make the flame bigger - eg twigs about as thick as a pencil.

and then you have to work up to burning big logs if that is what you are going to do. (I'm glossing over the later stages but it's important in the wild to have your main fuel stacked up ready.) When people talk about "tinder" they may mean stage (3), but they may also mean stage (2), and although some materials can do both jobs they are. in my view, different.

A cigarette lighter combines stages (1) and (2), eg using flint and gas, but in my experience if you want to, eg, light a Esbit-style hex fuel tab then it still helps to have a stage (3). A lot of fuel needs to be exposed to flame for 20+ seconds, if not minutes if it is windy, before it will properly catch. With cotton wool + vasaline, or commercial equivalents like TinderQuik, the cotton wool is providing stage (2) and the vasaline is providing stage (3) - in stage (3) the wool is acting like a candle wick and the vasaline is what is actually burning. A Trianga-style alcohol stove is unusual in that the fumes from the liquid can provide stage (2) and that's all you need to keep it burning, so you just need a spark and no other tinder.

With a fire-drill, stage (1) isn't a spark but the heat of friction. With a fire-piston, the initial heat comes from compression. I acquired a fire piston recently but haven't played with it much yet - it produces a red ember and you still have to turn the ember into an actual flame.

To get paper lighted - newspaper, toilet paper, paper napkin, photocopier paper, how the paper comes into contact with the sparks will make all the difference. I have tried this with a MFS and a sparky. No success with a sparklite yet.

Get a small piece of paper about an inch square and align the edge of the paper with the edge of the hacksaw blade. Hold blade and paper horizontal with paper side up between thumb and index finger. Use other hand to strike the MFS/ sparky / magfire down against the edge of the hacksaw blade to create sparks. Do it rapidly and with consistent force so that you create a mass of hot metal which lands on top & under the paper.

Best way to describe it would be how you strike a flint and steel with the char cloth on the flint, the paper being the charcloth, the blade being the flint and the firesteel being the, well, steel....

Newspaper and toilet paper should light pretty quickly, more effort is needed for normal photocopy paper. would be better if you shred it but I can now do it without any shredding of the paper....

You must have read my mind, Brangdon! The concept of more than one type of tinder was almost gelled in my mind when you described it so well in your post.

As a recent BAS (new acronym - "Born Again Survivalist") the second thing I added to my EDC after a knife was a BSA Hotspark on my keychain.

In the old days, I could build a fire in the worst of conditions with one match. So to me, "tinder" was always #3, with numbers 1 and 2 being provided by the match. While I did experiment with the military type magnesium block / ferro rod firestarter, the magnesium does a good job of #2.

With the hotspark only, I'm finding natural (#2) tinder materials harder to come by. Dry cattail fuzz works, as does very fine dry grass and finely shredded cedar bark. My goal is to get good with wood shavings, since the others can't always be found in a given area.

Now, for #3 I've never had trouble finding natural materials no matter where I am. My two favorites are birch bark and dry pine needles.

- Tom Scarince

Update:
Just found a #2 tinder to go with my #3 dry pine needles - pine pitch. It worked better when I mixed in a few pine needles as wick material.

- Tom Scarince