Fire Starting & Wood Prep

Rokslide Grace

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Interesting article from our friends at Seek Outside, here is the text or see the article with images at https://seekoutside.com/blog/fire-starting-wood-prep/

Fire Starting & Wood Prep

22nd Dec 2017

“Tipi’s pitched on a sandbar of an Alaskan river, it’s been raining for four days, EVERYTHING is soaked, how do I light a fire in my stove?”

We get asked this and similar questions frequently, so we decided to tackle the issue.

How to start a fire in bad conditions:

Use a knife to prep dry tinder.
Find fatwood or use a commercial extender.
Use a saw / axe or saw / knife / baton to split rounds and get to the dry center to process plenty of kindling.
Build a strong flame base and good coal bed before attempting to burn damp or wet wood.

Ignition:

I carry a Bic lighter (not off-brand) and a good fire steel. This combo works well wet or dry, and is redundant.

Tools

There are three main tools that are handy for wood prep with our stoves - a good knife, a sharp saw, and a small hatchet or axe. You can take one, two, or all three depending on your usage and tolerance for gear weight.

Knife

This knife should be stout, sharp, and have a 3.75 to 5 inch blade. Most styles and shapes will work. Scandi grinds are often favored for wood prep. Full tangs are preferred for strength, but not required.

Mora knives are inexpensive and offer a ton of value. Stouter custom knives do the same chores with better durability and a bit of style.

The tasks we will ask of the knife are scraping, curling, feather sticking, and light batoning.

Scraping

If the spine of your knife has a 90° edge on it, then it is useful for scraping fluff from dry wood, and for striking a fire steel.

Curling

Carving small curls of wood from a dry stick requires a sharp blade and some technique. These curls make excellent tinder.

Feather Sticking

A feather stick is a more advanced form of curling where the curls are left on the stick. A large group of these curls begins to look like a hank of feathers, thus the name. Feather sticks are great for extending a fire and getting larger pieces dried out and lit.

Batoning

The roughest task we ask of a knife, batoning is simply splitting a round into smaller pieces by beating the knife through it end ways using a baton (another chunk of wood). Even in very wet conditions the inside of rounds will be dry, so this technique is important.

Saw

A small saw allows you to cut longer limbs into lengths sized for your stove box, and the 90° end cuts allow for splitting or batoning the rounds into smaller pieces.

The saw should be light enough to carry, reasonably durable, and cut well. Silky saws have an extremely good reputation among our staff and our customers.

I often use a Sawvivor - a folding aluminum 14” bow saw that has been out of production for nearly a decade now.


Axe

There are many different types of axes and hatchets, the main difference between the two being axes are intended for two handed use, while hatchets are one handed.

The key functions of an axe are felling and splitting. Of the two, splitting is more beneficial in the conditions our hot tents find themselves in. Many wilderness areas don’t allow standing live trees to be cut, and deadfall is often plentiful enough that felling isn’t needed.

An axe or hatchet can make short work of splitting rounds into kindling, but this works best if you have a saw along to square off the cut ends. Turning kindling into fluff, curls, and feathers still requires a knife, so the axe or hatchet is an accessory or “nice to have”, but not an essential.

A good knife and a good saw will keep you in dry wood for quite a while.

Tinder

Tinder turns spark into flame. It is the finest fluffiest and driest material you can find, or it’s a man made substitute.

Natural tinder can be bark scrapings, fatwood fluff or curls, tinder fungus, or the like.

Natural sources vary by region. In the East to Southeast the inner bark of red cedar works well. In the North birch bark is a go to. Anywhere that conifers are found, fatwood is king.

Fatwood (pitch pine, lighter pine, many other names) is dead conifer where the pitch - or sap - has soaked into the wood and preserved it. Fatwood can be found nearly anywhere conifer trees exist.

Limb butts, the center of dead trees, and stumps all often contain fatwood. It can be identified by its’ rich waxy color and strong resinous smell when scraped or shaved.

Due to its’ high resin content, fatwood doesn't rot. So if you find a solid section inside a rotten conifer log, it's probably fatwood.

Fatwood ignites easily and burns vigorously, acting as both tinder and extender.

Commercial tinder combines tinder and extender, and is discussed below.

Extenders

An extender is anything that once lit, propagates flame for an extended time. An extender allows you to take the flame from your tinder and keep it burning for several minutes until your kindling is lit.

Curls, shavings, and small splits of fatwood make an excellent source of natural extenders. Pine pitch can often be found at the site of an old wound on a conifer and also makes a great extender, burning like a candle for several minutes.

Commercial or man made extenders commonly used are paraffin wax mixed with cardboard or sawdust, petroleum jelly soaked cotton balls, trioxane, wetfire, instafire, and the like.

Instafire especially works well as it burns for a long time and with a very hot flame, allowing you to dry out damp kindling.

I like to make my own fire pills from sections of jumbo pixie stix straws, stuffing them with some petroleum jelly soaked cotton ball, then melting the ends shut with cross cut pliers and a lighter. The result is waterproof, mess free, and one pill burns for around four minutes.

Kindling

Kindling is pinkie to thumb sized sticks, twigs, or smaller splits from rounds. Kindling’s job is to take the fire started by the tinder and kept by the extender and use it to build a strong flame base and coal bed.

You may be burning kindling for a while, so prep a lot of it. Smaller stoves such as ours tend to do well with pinkie to three finger sized pieces, and burn hot and quick until a good coal bed is established.

Once the coal bed is built you have the option of loading damp or wet wood and letting it dry and burn, or feeding larger rounds in order to extend the burn time.

Wood

Larger wood can range from a couple fingers to rounds that barely fit through the door. You need a good coal bed established to burn these, but they throw a lot of heat and burn for a long time.

In cold weather you can prep several large rounds and provide heat all night by stoking the firebox 2-4 times during the night with a larger stove.

How to start a fire in bad conditions?

Find or bring good tinder and an extender such as fatwood, dry fluffy scrapings, PJ soaked cotton balls, Trioxane, WetFire, Instafire, feather sticks, or the like.

Use a saw to buck rounds to length, then use a knife to baton or an axe or hatchet to split the rounds into kindling.

Once lit, don't over feed it - leave plenty of air space.

Start small and work larger as the flame base grows.

Once you have a coal bed built you can dry damp or wet wood, or burn larger rounds to extend burn times.
 

gudspelr

Lil-Rokslider
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Good info. I made some fire starters a few years back out of cardboard egg crate, parafin wax, and wood chips. I used them this year to help light fires in my stove. I also had some commercial fire sticks that I tried side by side. Each trip I took out handed me wet wood-not “soaked”, but definitely a ways from dry. The home made starters definitely worked better for me. I had cut the egg “cups” into 4 pieces and they burned longer/seemed to do a better job at igniting the wet wood I had on hand. I plan to make more of them, but I also like the fire pill idea with the PJ coated cotton balls inside pieces of a straw.

Jeremy
 

KBC

WKR
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Mar 8, 2017
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BC
I did the cardboard egg crate thing too but used dryer lint and wax. They work awesome, you can light one and then once it's going dump water on it to put it out and then you can light it right up again.
 
Joined
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Road flare. If you cant start a fire with this, you are underwater. Carried these in my day pack when I was doing field work in SE AK. used them a couple of times when everything was wet. worked very well. Erie how the contorted alders look from the red glow.
 
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Nothing more challenging than being in a wet environment with wet wood while needing a fire.

Part of getting it done is knowing what might burn a little better in your specific area. For example, in central Alaska you can almost always find some dry, curled spruce tips hanging at the bottom of a black spruce. They contain a lot of resin, little cones and dry twigs. Black spruce is one of those trees which is basically all-flammable, all the time.

Birch bark is another good tinder. I'm talking about the very thin peelings which are almost a translucent cinnamon color. They crumble easily and will ignite even when pulled off a tree during a rain. I carry a plastic bag in my pack and stuff it with birch bark tinder when I find it.

Save and use every basic paper wrapper like oatmeal pouches. Sometimes throwing one in the stove on top of a smoldering or dying fire will ignite it and get things cranking.

I personally love trioxane and a trigger lighter like used at a bbq. I bring a box of Esbit tabs and use half of a tab to start up my stove.

Once I get camp established I go for firewood. My favorite is a standing vertical dead pole. It will usually be dry and hard. Even if the exterior is damp the center will be dry. I cut it and drag or pack it into camp. When splitting the rounds I take note of straight dry pieces and lay them aside. Later I carefully split them down into various sizes of kindling, splinters and so on. I always get more wood than I think I'll need and usually have a hefty rick of it split and stacked inside my tipi.

I make an effort to burn junk wood when I can...meaning those pieces that are punky, a bit damp, weird knots and such. Save the good stuff for when it really counts.

3q4TyKT.jpg
 

5MilesBack

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Road flare. If you cant start a fire with this, you are underwater. Carried these in my day pack when I was doing field work in SE AK. used them a couple of times when everything was wet. worked very well. Erie how the contorted alders look from the red glow.

I always carried a road flare in my pack when I hunted Colorado's rifle seasons years ago. Back then it was almost always cold with lots of snow and that was the easiest and quickest way to start a fire. Man, I don't miss those days much at all.
 

mtwarden

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Montana
night quite a road flare, but the Live Fire tins have proved to be a very good choice when conditions really suck- they light easily with a flame or spark (have to fluff the stuff slightly) and give you ~15 minutes of a very good flame to get your fire going- obviously you still want to do your do diligence with your wood prep

they're light and small too
 
Joined
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PA
Don't overlook the Vaseline and cotton ball combo. Its very cheap and very effective. I can get several minutes of burn time out of one and can start it with a flint and steel. I pack 5 or 6 into an old chew tin and keep in my bino pack so it's on me all the time. I hid several Bics around my pack so I always have one.

I think the biggest problem people seem to have when trying to start a fire in less than ideal conditions is moving too fast. Either by starting their tinder before they have proper fuel prepared or adding larger fuel before its ready. It's better to take a few more minutes to sort everything out before you burn your hard earned tinder.
 
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Paper-Medicine-Cups-1-oz-Model-55579-Box-of-250[1].jpg

Fast and easy firestarters: Buy some of the small paper medicine cups shown above. Place a Vaseline-impregnated cotton ball in a paper cup. Melt some paraffin and pour some into each cup over the cotton ball. Let it cool and harden. Put them in a plastic baggie. When it's time to use them just light the paper cup and add tinder plus kindling.
 

Hunter6

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Mar 23, 2014
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Eastern Oregon
For a DIY fire starter I get “borrowed from my wire” the flat cotton pads use for make up remover.
Use paraffin wax or leftover candles. Melt them in a pot and dip pads completely in the wax. Let harden.

When ready to use pull apart and expose some cotton . Light with lighter or ferro rod. These will burn for about ten mins.

Done cheap and easy.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 

IChaseCoues

Lil-Rokslider
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Feb 25, 2013
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225
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SW MT
RokslideGrace, thanks for the post. It goes farther into building a fire than I had ever thought!

Thanks everyone for the tips. They will be valuable when I finally get a stove for my shelter.
 

axeslovie

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Apr 28, 2018
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wincosin
An axe or hatchet can make short work of splitting rounds into kindling, but this works best if you have a saw along to square off the cut ends. Turning kindling into fluff, curls, and feathers still requires a knife, so the axe or hatchet is an accessory or “nice to have”, but not an essential.

A good knife and a good saw will keep you in dry wood for quite a while.

Tinder

Tinder turns spark into flame. It is the finest fluffiest and driest material you can find, or it’s a man made substitute.

Natural tinder can be bark scrapings, fatwood fluff or curls, tinder fungus, or the like.

Natural sources vary by region. In the East to Southeast the inner bark of red cedar works well. In the North birch bark is a go to. Anywhere that conifers are found, fatwood is king.
 
Joined
Jul 31, 2017
Messages
690
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Oakley, CA
Curious for backpacking. What are you guys packing in for wood prep. As I get older i have become an oz counter bad! hav an older WY saw and a smaller Outdoor edge saw short gerber hatchet as well. All three havent made it on a trip in awhile as its just my wife and I but thats only during archery elk adn want to start using my cimmaron for october mulies and back pack in. On these trips I may be solo
 

ODB

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N.F.D.
On the old Fred Bear video of him hunting sheep at cold fish lake, there is a short shot of a camp staff making a feather stick. I had never seen that as a kid.
 

dtrkyman

WKR
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Oct 2, 2014
Messages
2,932
I saw a guy carries a simple pencil sharpener for making shaving, thought that was a good idea.

If I were for sure in some crazy wet place the road flare sounds great!

I carry a bic. lighter, Actually 2, keep one in my pocket and one in my pack. Have some store bought fire starters(on closeout) they are wax and have a water proof match head so you can light them, pretty slick.

Bag of fritos in a pinch!
 
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