Firestarter Showdown (First Heat)

[SJStuart]

So, I decided to invest a couple of hours of my life in trying out a whole range of household (and typical camp) supplies as fuel for starting fires.

Each fuel was applied to a piece of cotton wool (to catch a spark from a ferro rod) and timed. As well as being timed, I was also monitoring each burn to gauge temperature and what I believe to be a fairly accurate impression of its fire starting potential.

Anyway... some of the results were surprising even to me, so hopefully this info will be useful to some of you too.

[video=youtube;4VMInBxtcBM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VMInBxtcBM&feature=autoshare[/video]

 

[Will_]

Was just about to watch when I saw it's 54 minutes long
Time well spent I'm sure and no doubt I'll have a look but right now I'm at work and that would be pushing it even for me! :theyareon

 

[muracada]

Thanks for that controlled comparative demonstration, really enjoyed it because even a single flame is extraordinarily hypnotic. The vaporub and deet results were surprising, whereas the olive oil was much as I expected since I believe it was used in the past for lamp fuel as it wouldn't catch fire if accidentally spilt.
I wonder what other" fuels" are available around the home e.g. lip balm (petroleum jelly based), tippex (carries the flammable symbol).

 

[Mesquite]

Was just about to watch when I saw it's 54 minutes long
Time well spent I'm sure and no doubt I'll have a look but right now I'm at work and that would be pushing it even for me! :theyareon

I was the same and I'm not even at work.

It might have been better to have broken the video down into smaller chunks because I for one just won't sit and watch almost an hour of watching cotton wool be set light to.

 

[ozzy1977]

Watch the beginning, then skip to end for conclusion

 

[mountainm]

Lol.
"Will it burn?"
Great excuse to set fire to stuff.

 

[petrochemicals]

SJStuart, your next mission, should you choose to accept, it is to light fire with these seven methods. You have to source the materials and manufacture the apperatus without the use of general tools

www.instructables.com/id/7-Methods-of-Primitive-Fire-Starting/

good luck.

(this post will self destruct in 7 seconds)

pete

 

[SJStuart]

I'm lining up some more household chemicals/items for the Second Heat of this experiment. Even got a little bit of avgas (about 50ml) a friend has kindly provided to satisfy my curiosity of that fuel versus Diesel and Unleaded.

Cotton makes a great medium for firelighters because it of course catches sparks very easily, but also because it aerates the fuel (giving it the oxygen it needs to burn).

I had originally planned to also test each fuel with a piece of wadded up toilet paper (since that's something most people carry in their pack) but I'll do that separately methinks.

As Ozzy said, just watch the introduction bit, then skip to the last 5 minutes or so to see the conclusions... you don't have to watch every single burn start to finish. Only reason I didn't edit the burns down is so that people can (if they choose to) see the accurate timer and see for themselves that I wasn't cheating in any way.

 

[petrochemicals]

oh, household. try hydroge peroxide, or nitric sulphuric and glycerin all mixed with a stick. Fertiliser is quite good too !

 

[ozzy1977]

Track down the Jolly Rogers Cook Book, plenty of recipes in there

 

[SJStuart]

Track down the Jolly Rogers Cook Book, plenty of recipes in there

For legal reasons I have to deny having a copy of that.

Also, I'm not stupid enough to blow myself up (for example, I won't be trying out a certain mixture involving ammonium nitrate and sodium chlorate) even if I'm occasionally clumsy enough to fall into a fire pit, or melt the housing on my camera

So far the planned fuels to test in the next video are:

- Paraffin Wax + Cotton
- Paraffin Cotton (liquid paraffin soaked into cotton)
- Recycled candle wax (from cheap tea lights) wrapped in cotton
- Wax Cotton (melted cheap tea light wax soaked into cotton)
- WD40
- Used motor oil (I'll be testing this outside first to see if the fumes would be too much, if so I'll be scrapping that idea outright)
- Motorcycle chain lubricant (the aerosol kind)
- White Spirits (the cheap non-turpentine kind)
- USED vegetable oil (it actually stands to reason this might burn quite well, given that it is the key component of bio diesel and contains rendered meat fats from - in this case - sausage and bacon)

We know of course that the Paraffin will burn, the question is how will they compare to the Vaseline-soaked cotton (or "Petroleum Cotton" as I call it) as well as compare to each other. Likewise, we know that candle wax burns nicely... but again compared to Petroleum Cotton and unmelted versus melted.

I just find these experiments interesting, so I'll keep doing them until I get bored basically

 

[MarkinLondon]

I didn't realise that the two methods of vaseline / cotton wool impregnation varied the burn time so much. It's also nice to know that most methods will produce a couple of minutes.