I spent a good part of the day attempting to start a fire with a magnesium block fire starter. No luck. The magnesium doesn't ignite very easily when you shower sparks at the magnesium shavings. It doesn't work too well at all, unless you drop those little shavings on top of a napkin. When you do that, the napkin is going to burn very nicely, but it's going stay lit for only a brief duration of time. It only takes about two or five strikes of the flint and steel to get those little shavings to ignite once they've been placed on top of a napkin. You run the blade of your knife along the carbon steel strker a few times, and voila ! that's all it takes to get the napkin to ignite.

The napkin fire, of course, is always going to "peter out" very quickly and long before it ever catches on to the piled-on wood.

Cotton mixed with petroleum jelly: now that's a completely different story. You get a very nice consistent flame whenever you mix cotton and petroleum jelly, and the flame is always long-lasting enough to ignite the piled-on wood.

I tried making a char cloth by placing the section of a cotton shirt inside an "altoids" can and then cooking it over the campfire. It came out very brittle, and then when I showered a whole bunch of sparks at the char cloth, the only thing that happened was that it caused the char cloth to catch on fire !

I really don't believe that that's the idea behind having a char cloth !

Isn't the char cloth supposed to hold a spark?

Isn't the char cloth supposed to be reusable ?

I really believe that we need to learn how to make fires by using the flint and steel method, and that it's a vital survival skill.

Let's converse about it, shall we ?

LW.