Some of you may remember my daughter’s science fair project last year was “Can You Make Fire From Ice” based upon the idea of turning a chuck of ice into a convex lens. We had problems with bubble formation, despite boiling the water and with inadequate sun.

This year her science fair project was “Can You Make Fire From Air” based upon the fire piston. At first I was going to have her construct one and test it out, but time grew short, so we switched to comparing tinder sources using the fire piston to act as the ignition/spark source.

In the fire piston itself, we used Tinder Fungus, since I have always been able to generate a spark with a few “hits” of the piston.

We tested cotton balls w/ petroleum jelly, a commercial fire starter, shavings from fat wood, tow and homemade linen char cloth.

We set the upper number of tries to six. If we started a fire with less than six tries, we considered it a success and did not proceed any further. The creation of an actual fire was considered a success, if we only could generate smoke or a smoldering mass we considered it a failure.

We were unable to start even a potential smoldering mass with the following items indiviulally: cotton balls w/ petroleum jelly, a commercial fire starter, shavings from fat wood and tow.

We were successful the very first time using the char cloth and tow, which we then added to the fat wood shavings. We had a nice fire going within minutes. Pete