Survival Basics: Starting a Fire

It has been awhile since I have written about living a strategic life.  For those of you new to Backdoor Survival, living a strategic life is something that I encourage everyone to embrace, prepper or not.  As a matter of fact, it is so important to me personally that I co-authored a book about it, 11 Steps to Living a Strategic Life: A Guide to Survival During Uncertain Times.

In a nutshell, living a strategic life means that you are able to take care of yourself and your family no matter what Mother Nature and the Universe decides to drop in your lap.  And while talk about a global collapse is dramatic sounding and the cause for major, life-altering concern, a  realistic assessment of the odds suggests that more commonplace emergencies and disasters are singularly the reason we prepare.

This is not to diminish preparing for the likelihood of a collapse, of course, but rather to focus on risks of life that can happen any day, any time, to anyone.

With that being said, throughout most of human history, man has learned that a few necessities can and do make the difference between life and death.  While emergency food stores, stored water, and the need for a good first aid kit serious medical training on how to use it are all important, today I would like to talk about something increasingly overlooked in our “modern” society:  STARTING A FIRE.

The Triangle of Fire

Fire is a big deal and a necessary component not only to our senses, but to survival itself.  That said, most people have terrible fire skills.  It is not that fire skills are difficult to learn, mind you.  It is just that in today’s world of electronic cooking gadgets, pre-packaged meals, and grab and go dining, using a fire to do something basic like cook seems like a lot of work and a plain nuisance compared to get getting the job done with electricity, natural gas or, those plastic cards we carry around in our wallet.

Today I want to get down to the basics, namely the basics of simply starting a fire and getting it going with a minimum of fuss. Let us start with rule #1 of fire making.

There are three parts to fire:  Oxygen, Fuel, and Heat.  This is referred to as the Triangle of Fire.  For the visually oriented, it looks like this:

Starting a Fire with Charcloth

Building a fire is something to be taken quite seriously and since we are talking about the basics, remember, never build your fire indoors, except in a real fireplace.  Every winter, dozens of people die of carbon monoxide poisoning due to indoor heating with charcoal briquettes.  When that happens, the victims simply go to sleep and never wake up. The point being that outdoors confined to a fireproof area or in a real fire place is where fire belongs, period.

That said, the first step and some would say the most important step to having a good fire is getting it started.  You can purchase  a variety of fire-starting tools ranging from waterproof matches to Bics to all sorts of pre-package tinder, but for Prepper types, nothing beats the reliability of a simple magnesium flint and steel (I like the Swedish Firesteel).

One of the oldest and more reliable methods to start a fire is to make some charcloth and have it ready to go in your survival kit.  Charcloth you say?  What the heck is that?  Well to be honest, most city-dwellers have no clue what it is, how to make it, and even less how to use it. I know that until three years ago, I did not have a clue.

But no worries. Here is everything you need to know about making your own charcloth.

1.  You begin by finding a pair of old jeans that you’ve ripped and patched for the last time. You’ll cut patches of the fabric just the right size to lay flat inside an empty Altoid can.

2.  Once you’ve about filled the can up, you make a small nail hole on both the top and the bottom of the tin.

3.  The next time you have your BBQ fired up, toss in the denim filled Altoid can and let it cook for 20 minutes or so.

Of course you can also toss the tin containing the denim into a real fire on the ground or into your fire pit.  By the time the fire has burned down and cooled off to nothing the next day, the can will be cold and there will also be no grill to clean. Easy peasy.

4.  Remove the tin filled with denim from the grill and let cool overnight (place can on a safe surface).  If you used your BBQ, you will want to to wash the grill off thoroughly when you are done, since remnants of the burning paint from the Altoids can will make an unsavory seasoning to the next piece of food thrown on the grill to cook.

5.  To start a fire using charcloth, you simply take ½ a piece of the cloth and tear at it a little bit.  Strike your flint so that the sparks land on the tufts of thread which are charred and catch fire extremely easy under a wide range of conditions.  All it takes is for the charcloth to begin smoking a bit.

6.  The next step is to take some very fine shavings of wood (picture shaving a match-stick to get some small shavings) and toss them on to the charcloth and blow the charcloth so as to push the burning part into the wood.  After a few tries, you should be able to get a fire going easily this way.

7.  Once you get a visible flame going, you need to start moving up in the size of material burned.  What you want to do is roughly double the thickness of the wood each time you step up a size.  A typical progression can be charcloth setting off a bit of tissue, which sets off a few matchstick sized twigs, which set off half a dozen additional dry twigs about 1/8^th inch in size.  Once these catch well, move up to four or five 1/4-inch pieces, then 1/2-inch pieces and so forth.

True, you can go about it in bigger steps, but if you’re trying to get a maximum fire in minimal time, it is best to work up the size of your fuel source gradually but quickly.  The focus should be on keeping big flame going.  And yes, a person can go from kindling to a shaved 2-by-4 but whether you could ever get that to a useful fire would be a long wait and “iffy”.  Reason being you want oxidizing surfaces next to each other so they feed energy into one another, creating heat.

Too much fuel, too soon, means not enough oxygen and no heat and no fire.  That is why you always stack your firewood in certain ways: popular X settings of fire burn primarily at the X because the one piece of wood heats the other and visa versa.

Other Fire Starting Methods

There are a number of other methods that can be used to start a fire.  Here are a few.

If your bug-out-bag or survival kit includes a magnifying glass, with practice you can learn to touch off your charcloth that way.  Another suggestion and one that I have used often is to soak some cotton balls with a smear of petroleum jelly then store them in a tin or repurposed prescription bottle until fire-starting time.

The fire-starter I currently use is made up of  empty toilet paper tubes stuffed to the brim with dryer  lint.  I flatten the heck out of them, seal the ends, then store them in my pack until I need to start a fire.  It only takes a small bit of dryer lint to get things started so a single TP tube goes a really long way.

Here is one more fire starting tip:  take one of those “One Hour Fireplace” logs and slice it into 1” chunks.  Put 4 to 6 of these chunks in a plastic sandwich bag.  When the time comes, take one chunk, slice off a piece the size of your little finger, get it going, lean the rest of the chunk onto it, and now you can move right up to little finger sized kindling.

There are a couple of useful subordinate rules to fire making:

The fuel has to be quick enough to oxidize so as to support combustion. A lot of people don’t know that a mixture of rusty steel wool and aluminum power or filings will cause a violent kind of fire called a thermite reaction. Compared to this kind of mixture (definitely not something to be trifled with) a tamer kind of readily oxidized fuel is much easier to manage; paper and small pieces of wood come to mind.

The other thing is that oxygen is rarely an issue unless you get up in altitude and the air thins out. Then, you may have a problem.

When to Build a Fire

There’s no hard and fast rule about when to build a fire; the simple answer is “when you need it.”

Say, for example, some sort of disaster has occurred, the power is out, and you have a local health warning indicating that you should “boil water before drinking”.  That would be a good time to get a fire going (but as I mentioned earlier, not indoors, please).  And yes, local authorities have been known to tell you to boil water even though they are well aware that the power is out.

When it comes to building a fire, the best advice I can give you is to begin honing your fire-making skills and practice this skill on a regular basis.  Learn to start a fire now, when you can do it for sport rather than necessity.  Practice the basics of getting your fire going either using charcloth, petroleum-jelly soaks cotton balls, dryer lint, or something else.  Also learn to use a fire-steel, even if you have plenty of matches and lighters.

The Final Word

Part of being on the path to being prepared is doing things in a purposeful way.  To that end, learning to effectively start a fire is a skill which will take only a few hours to perfect and which can, at some point become very useful to your well-being and ultimate survival.

Just remember that when you start your fire, go through the mental checklist:

• Is it safe?
• Will it be seen?
• Will the smoke be an issue?
• Are there things that could take you from your job of fire-tending?

An unattended fire is a problem just waiting to happen and the risk is three-fold if there are young children around.  This means you must be mindful and alert at all times.

I can tell you from personal experience that there is a huge sense of accomplishment that comes with being able to start a fire from scratch.  It is also one of those personal survival skills that will set you apart from those who make it and those that don’t should the worse happen.

Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation!