I have that one, and it is very nice!

I have read that, in order to make good char cloth, you need cotton that has NOT been treated with any chemicals to make it flame-retardant. This means no T-shirts. Does this sound familiar?

A regular old T-shirt being flame-retardant is a new one on me. I have made a little bit of char cloth from a T, and it burned just fine...

Colour is important with a lens. If the char cloth was black, it will have adsorbed more of the light energy, which is part of why it will have been successful. White cloth reflects light. Similarly if you are using newspaper - the black print will work better than the white page.

Tinder Quick is light-coloured, and I think it can also be hard to focus on. However, in my experience it works fine with sparks.

I've been experimenting trying to create a home made dry replacement tinder for the cotton balls, coleman white gas and used shoe polish tin tinder. So far the specification I am looking for would go along the following lines,

1) The tinder once ignited should burn for more than 2 minutes with a substantial flame.
2) The tinder should be reasonably waterproof before being used.
3) The tinder should ignite from from the sparks produced by a Swedish firesteel or even a flint and steel.
4) The tinder should ignite using a frensel lens.
5) The tinder once exposed should have an indefinite life time unlike the wetfire tinder.
6) The tinder should be of a similar size to Tinder Quick.

The ingredients so far include Char Cloth, Cotton wool, candle wax and powdered hexamine. This is how I have proceeded.

Crush the Hexamine tablet to a fine powder. Spread the powder onto a warmed metal copper plate and poor melted candle wax on the plate and powdered hexamine to just cover the hexamine powder. Partially dip small strips of Char cloth in to the melted wax and hexamine leaving a portion of the char cloth dry. Some of the hexamine will adhere to the char cloth with the melted wax acting as a binder. Wrap a cotton wool ball around the dipped char cloth strip. The cotton wool will adhere partially to the waxy hexamine char cloth strip. Once the wax has hardened inside the cotton ball together with the char cotton hexamine impregnated strip inside it can then be used a tinder. Store in a small polybag.

Any other ideas for tinder?

I'm curious as to how effective my test batch of "char cloth" that I made will be. I made some with paper towel instead of cotton cloth recently. It's nearly pure cellulose, just like cotton, but it's thinner. I was thinking it might work better; it looks pretty similar to normal char cloth. Unfortunately, offhand, I don't have a good way to try it -- no flints at my house. Burns with a nice even, steady wavefront, but I'm not sure of a good way to test how readily it will catch a spark. I've been brushing up a bit on bow drill practice lately, but haven't gotten a coal yet (too much slipping; time to work some more on the bow and spindle), so I can't tell how well it would ignite from that.

Any ideas?

I guess you could take a cigaretter lighter and drain the fuel, then use the sparker to try to ignite your "char paper" stuff...

It's not absolutely necessary to drain the fuel out of a bic-lighter or such. But what you really need to do, to get it sparking right, is to remove the metal guard from the front side (just grab its sides from the wheel side and bend open, it'll fall apart). The fuel will ignite, right, but the flame will go up, and the sparks will fell down. Just watch your fingers

Thanks; I'll give it a shot.