Okay, did this early today with my son. He was very excited to be making fire!
1. Wood shavings
2. Cotton ball soaked in Vaseline
3. steel wool
4. paper
5. dryer lint
We took out the Bear Grylls fire rod and steel fro my EDC kit. The rod was not too bad, but man the steel made the tiniest little sparks. I could not let the boy use the knife, but I set the edge of the Mora knife too it and we got some action.
First up was shavings from some random sticks we found in the yard made with the pencil sharpener. The boy had a great time making these. we had plenty. It actually took a little effort to get these to smoulder, as stuff in the yard was still damp. After about 10 minutes we gave up trying to get a blaze off of them and added the cotton ball.
The cotton ball with Vaseline was the second easiest to light. With the shavings in the pan we had a nice little blaze going in about 2 minutes and we dumped it into our fire pit filled with small sticks and had a nice blaze in under 5 minutes that we could have added logs to for a sustained fire.
I remember steel wool burning better. Perhaps it as the super fine stuff I had. The only wool I had on hand was the 0000 super fine stuff. It made a nice light show but was out almost as fast as it lit. I could never get a fire started with it.
The paper was the toughest. I frayed up some pieces and the edges of the really soft paper that was packing material in a box. It must have been 15 minutes before we got it burning, and of course it burned really fast. This is not the optimum thing to use, methinks.
The dryer lint was the Holy Grail of fire making in our test. We did it twice with lint. One spark and there was flame. Adding it to tender and then tending as necessary with larger stuff we had a nice blaze in 3 minutes. Very cool (or hot).
As others have mentioned, the rod and steel strikers in the kits are not the best of quality. I got it to work but not sure I want to do this with my knife edge all the time.
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"You rarely rise to the occasion, you usually just sink to your lowest level of training."