Things I set on fire with my fire piston, including a new natural tinder

[Le Loup]

Charcloth (duh...)
Horse hoof fungus or 'false tinder fungus' (Fomes fomentarius), the felty trama-layer, scraped into a woolly mass or sliced very thin
Cramp ball fungus (Daldinia concentrica)
Chaga or 'true tinder fungus' (Inonotus obliquus)
'lulut'; the fluffy layer that can be found on the base of the stalks of the fish tail palm (Caryota mitis), (growing in a garden centre near your house...)
The same from the palm Trachycarpus fortunei (it is inferior to C. mitis though)
The fluffy stuff that can be scraped from mullein (Verbascum thapsus) stalks
Artist conk fungus (Ganoderma applanatum); the felty trama layer, untreated

And a new one I found out about yesterday:
The fluff from coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara) seedheads, these consist of slightly thicker fibers than other plant down and don't burn as fast.

This is coltsfoot, I come across it almost everywhere
(clicking on the images will lead you to my photobucket-account with larger sized pictures):


The fluffy seedhead:


I collected some of the fluff and discarded the seeds, leaving only the white fibers:


Picked some of the fluff and rolled it into a felt-like ball:


Inserted into the tinder cup of my fire piston:


Ready to go:


A glowing coltsfoot coal!:


This coltsfoot fluff tinder greatly expands the probabilities of encountering natural tinder for fire pistons as the fungi mentioned above are not common at all in my area (and the palm tinders can only be scraped off illegally from the trees at my local garden centre ).

Coltsfoot fluff is a lot harder to light with flint and steel but it can be done.

Cheers,

Tom

Hi Tom, have you tried punkwood and dried cattail heads. These can be found in many countries.
Le loup.

 

[Galemys]

Hi Tom, have you tried punkwood and dried cattail heads. These can be found in many countries.
Le loup.

Hi Le loup,

Cattail/reed mace/bullrush seedheads work fine in my piston, I find the "open" older ones (from the previous year) work best.
Punkwood however has eluded me, all my efforts where in vain up till now, maybe Holland is just too damp

What kind of punkwood works best? Is it the whitish fibrous stuff (when lignin has been broken down) or the brownish little cubicles (when only cellulose has been broken down)?
Cheers,

Tom

 

[Le Loup]

Punk wood is the dry rot wood found mostly in the base of fallen trees, it is usually white and squidgy/soft.
Le Loup.

 

[Galemys]

Thank's for the picture Le Loup, it looks like the cubicle version (this is called "brown rot" in Dutch, as opposed to the more fibrous "white rot") to me, I will try this out again, maybe I just picked the wrong wood species in my earlier try-outs.

Cheers,

Tom

 

[Le Loup]

Tom, when looking for tinder it has more to do with feel and look than a particular plant. Once you find one tinder, say a fungus for instance, let us say for aruments sake that it is a soft bracket fungus that grows on trees such as the Piptoporus Cretaceus. You can see what it looks like and you can feel it is soft when relatively young and not weathered. The punk wood looks much the same, but what is more important is the texture, it feels the same. I can take a piece of inner bark from one of our local trees and beat it until it is soft, and it is then suitable for tinder. I found this, there is no record of it ever having been used that I have found so far.
So how did I know to do this, to try it, to experiment? Well it had the look but not the feel, so I beat it soft. There is a strong likelyhood that any type of punkwood you find will work as tinder regardless of tree, providing it is dry and soft. Do you see where I am coming from?
Experiment Tom, you may well find tinders that no one else has.

 

[Galemys]

Experiment Tom, you may well find tinders that no one else has.

Hi LeLoup, thank´s for your comments.

Experimenting is why I put this thread up, to show that the world of a primitive pyromaniac doesn´t have to revolve around charcloth. Why use something that needs a fire to be created when there´s plenty of natural alternatives waiting to be discovered that are fun to try out? This also learns me to look closer at different natural tinder materials and take advantage of their seasonal availability.

I can see what you mean by ´feeling´ possible tinder material but some equally fluffy tinders just seem to work better than others in a fire piston. Just as I find most unprocessed Fomes fomentarius easier to light with flint and pyrite than with flint and steel. I´m always on the look out to try new wood fungi or other material if I got a fire piston at hand so I´m confident punk wood will work for me at some time. I´m on holiday soon so I can roam in a proper wood instead of the tidily maintained and much too ´sterile´ park close to the laboratory I work in.

Cheers,

Tom

PS I´ve got a French book on primitive firestarting through the ages, ´La grande aventure du feu´ by Roussel and Boutie (http://www.amazon.fr/Grande-Aventure-Feu-Histoire-lallumage/dp/2744906301) that may be of interest to you. Besides flint and pyrite, fire by friction techniques, flint and bamboo, fire pistons, 19th century chemical methods, optical methods, early matches and lighters it has chapters dedicated to flint and steel as well as horse hoof fungus. Send me a PM if you like some scanned pages mailed to you, although -after seeing your fascinating website- I can not imagine there will be anything in the book that you don´t already know

 

[Galemys]

Here's another natural tinder that works in a fire piston, fluff from the seed "balls" of Platanus, the London plain tree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus

The seedballs consists of a round core, surrounded by the seeds with some hairy stuff attached.
http://waarneming.nl/soort/info/9090
In a ripe seed ball, the seeds and connected hairy fluff are easily separated from the harder core, they look like this:
http://images.google.nl/imgres?imgu...=GGLG,GGLG:2006-06,GGLG:nl&sa=N&start=20&um=1

By rubbing these hairy seeds between your hands, the seeds and hairs become separated and a woolly mass can be gathered. Rolled into a tight ball this stuff can also be lighted by a fire piston.

Haven't tried it with flint & steel yet

Cheers,

Tom

 

[coln18]

im impressed with your trials to find new tinder.

I have a suggestion, as the best bushcraft kit is multi purpose, why dont you try a politician in your fire piston -

1. you do the country a favour and get rid of the white man speaks with forked tongue brigade.
2. you could start a nice fire with your piston ( oh sorry, i forgot sh**e dont burn)

sorry for hijacking your thread, but i couldnt resist

Anyway keep up the good work, i think we are all agreed that you can never have enough good tinder sources up your sleeve..

Col...

 

[Le Loup]

Here's another natural tinder that works in a fire piston, fluff from the seed "balls" of Platanus, the London plain tree:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platanus

The seedballs consists of a round core, surrounded by the seeds with some hairy stuff attached.
http://waarneming.nl/soort/info/9090
In a ripe seed ball, the seeds and connected hairy fluff are easily separated from the harder core, they look like this:
http://images.google.nl/imgres?imgu...=GGLG,GGLG:2006-06,GGLG:nl&sa=N&start=20&um=1

By rubbing these hairy seeds between your hands, the seeds and hairs become separated and a woolly mass can be gathered. Rolled into a tight ball this stuff can also be lighted by a fire piston.

Haven't tried it with flint & steel yet

Cheers,

Tom

Good post, well done.
Le Loup.

 

[Galemys]

The weather was very fine last week and my two daughters (7 & 8 years old) had the afternoon off from school so I took them for a picknick to the 'heemtuin' (botanical garden) at my local park. Lunch was quickly gone and we set of to explore the botanical garden. While the girls where looking for frogs, newts & tadpoles in a few small pools I noticed some lumps of sphagnum moss that had dried in the sun. I took some of this dried stuff and rolled it into a little ball, it worked very well in my fire piston, a glowing ember at first try

Cheers,

Tom

PS
by turning a corner on one of the paths in the park we stumbled upon a female sparrowhawk on the footpath just a few metres away! It sat on the path with spread wings as if it had got lucky but when it finally flew away after a full minute of amazement from the three of us there was nothing left on the path and nothing in its claws. The girls were deeply impressed!

 

[Le Loup]

Good post Galemys. It appears that far more plant materials can be used with a fire-piston than by other methods, but it encourages me in my search for new tinders. One wonders if the moss were charred, would it catch a spark from flint and steel. Worth trying.
Thanks.

 

[lamper]

Well done on finding something new to set fire too.

If only my parents said these sort of things when I was young!

 

[Le Loup]

That coltsfoot looks a lot like dandilion, has anybody tried the white fluffy bit from dandilions in a fire piston? my only warning is when I have lit dandilions with a firesteel the head burn very fast, less than a second, it might just burn up rather than produce an ember.

Is that a real firesteel or a feris rod?