Everyone here is familiar with the cotton ball / vaseline fire starter, I assume. You know it will catch sparks when torn open, and give some good flame for around 5 minutes. Recently, an idea came to me while I applied some Carmex to my lips. this little canister of lip balm in my pocket suddenly set off a light bulb in my head. I headed for the fire place to experiment after first grabbing my pocket knive, firesteel and a cotton ball. first, I opened the carmex, then with the screw driver on my knife stuffed the cotton ball down to the bottom of the canister right into the lip balm. of course, this displaced some of the lip balm, which I just slathered on the side of the remains of the cotton ball, leaving some cotton exposed to fray and catch sparks. ignition was simple with firesteel (or match/lighter). what happened next was a slow startup, I almost thought it was going to burn out. maybe a different installation of the cotton wick would help, but I've only tried once so far. anyway, it started to pickup in intensity, until after a minute or so was 4" tall. THIS CONTINUED FOR 20+ MINUTES! Better performance than I've seen for any firestarter, bar none and yet much smaller. the entire container also melted down to nothing, as well as it's contents (although it held it's general form as it burned down). This was so cool, I thought. I carry this stuff anyway. I'd be interested in any tests others run with blistex and other brands, as well as approaches to the "wick". try it, you'll have some fun!

I had a similar idea a couple of weeks ago, with less than perfect results. I always have some ChapStick (Cherry of course), and gum (Double good Double Mint) in my pocket, so I got to wondering what would happen if I smeared some ChapStick on the white paper gum wrapper. To make a long story short, didn't work. I even learned that the white paper, even if lit with a match, just doesn't burn all that well. Your way is morebetter...

I've tried this with several different lip balms (Dermatone and a few others) with no success.
I am glad that you had success with carmex; this means your / my/ our idea had some merit.
This will cause me to keep testing; it would be good to have lip protection that had additional survival applicatons.

Wow, great info Kevin. I carry Carmex every day. This is a nice piece of info to know.

I placed several drops of Purell on a cotton ball to test its firestarting capabilities. It lit easily with a nice blue flame. I then checked the ingredients list and noticed that its over 60% alcohol.

The base of Carmex is petroleum, lanolin, cocoa butter and a mixture of waxes (plus the less useful ingredients -- for our purposes), so it should burn quite well.

Suggestion: just smear some of it on a cotton ball and ignite it. If you do need it for survival purposes, you may need it more than once. And raising it on a couple of sticks helps ignite it if you're using a match, and allows air under it if you're using sparks.

Sue

Here's another one. GI insect repellant (and probably some civy types as well, altho I have never tried them) makes a nice fire starting aid. Just squirt some on your tinder pile, it will usually take off with a Whoof!!! Yet you can make a puddle of the stuff and stick a lit match in, it will snuff the match out...

Here are some flamables out of your med kit that will help in a pinch; alcohol preps light with a spark, so do tincture of benzoin swabs, and regular cotton top applicators don't have a "fuel" but will also ingnite with a spark.

I tried this method this weekend and it worked great.

I tried purell over the weekend, and I couldn't get it to even smolder. Or is the fact that I accidently got the kind with aloe to blame? Anyone know if that uses less alcohal?

I literally reached the point where I soaked a half dozen cotton balls in the stuff, put it on a piece of birch bark, and in a few minutes, it was just these scorched cotton balls sitting on a rock. Very soggy, depressed looking, scorched cotton balls. <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />

Neopsporin, on the other hand, that burns nicely. PJ base, or something awfully similiar.