Vivid Ready

Fire, heat and cooking

Make char cloth and firelighters

Char cloth catches a spark from a ferro rod or flint and holds it. Wax firelighters burn for ten minutes in wind and wet. Both are made in batches from waste, and both are worth more than they cost.

Two batch jobs, both made from things you would otherwise throw away, both done on a spare afternoon and stored for years.

Char cloth solves the hardest part of sparks-and-tinder fire lighting. Wax firelighters solve the hardest part of lighting a fire in British weather.

Why char cloth matters

A ferro rod throws sparks at around 3,000°C, which sounds like more than enough for anything. It is not, because those sparks are tiny and last a fraction of a second. They will not light a stick, and in damp British conditions they will not reliably light natural tinder either.

Char cloth is cotton that has been pyrolysed: heated without oxygen until only the carbon structure remains. It catches a spark almost every time, and rather than flaring it holds a slow-spreading ember that will happily sit there while you fold a tinder bundle around it.

It catches when almost nothing else will. That is the whole point. In wet weather, with cold hands, with poor natural tinder available, char cloth is the difference between a fire and no fire.

It does not burn with a flame, so it does not replace tinder. It is the reliable intermediate step between a spark and a tinder bundle.

Making char cloth

What you need: 100% natural fabric, a tin with a tight lid, a small nail, and a fire.

The fabric matters. It must be 100% cotton, linen or jute, with no synthetic content at all. An old cotton t-shirt, denim, a cotton tea towel, canvas, or jute string all work well. Polyester and cotton-polyester blends melt into a plastic lump rather than charring, and give off unpleasant fumes doing it. If you are not certain, hold a scrap to a flame: cotton burns to grey ash, synthetics shrink and melt into a hard bead.

  1. Cut the fabric into squares, roughly 5 by 5 cm. Bigger pieces work but you tear off what you need each time and the edges shed.
  2. Pack them loosely into the tin. Loosely: they need room for gas to escape. An old boot polish tin, a small sweet tin or a tobacco tin is ideal.
  3. Punch one small hole in the lid, 2 to 3 mm. One hole only.
  4. Put the closed tin in the embers of a fire, not the flames.
  5. Watch the hole. Smoke, then a jet of smoke, and often a small flame of burning wood gas. That jet is the process working: the gas driven out of the cotton is escaping and burning, and while it is escaping, no oxygen can get in.
  6. When the jetting stops completely, take the tin off the heat. This usually takes 5 to 10 minutes depending on the fire and the quantity.
  7. Plug the hole immediately with a stick, a nail or a dab of mud, and let the tin go completely cold before opening.

Judging the result. Good char cloth is uniformly matt black, still flexible, and holds together when handled. It should not crumble to dust at a touch.

Store it in a sealed dry tin. It keeps indefinitely, but it is hygroscopic and damp char cloth catches poorly, so the tin matters. Keep a few pieces in a small tin in your pocket kit and the bulk elsewhere.

Using it

  1. Lay a piece of char cloth on the flint, or hold it beside the ferro rod. A common method is to hold the char cloth against the flint with your thumb and strike the steel down across it.
  2. Strike sparks onto it. With a ferro rod, scrape firmly and push the sparks down into the cloth.
  3. A glowing orange spot appears and spreads slowly. That is your ember. It will not flame.
  4. Transfer it to a tinder bundle immediately, and fold the bundle loosely around it.
  5. Blow steadily until the bundle catches. This is exactly the transfer described in the bow drill page, and the same rules apply: prepare the bundle before you start, hold it away from your face, blow long and even.

Do not use a whole square each time. Tear off a corner. A single 5 cm square, used sensibly, lights several fires.

Wax firelighters at batch scale

These are better than shop-bought ones, cost effectively nothing, and burn for 8 to 12 minutes in wind and rain, which is far longer than paper and long enough to dry and ignite marginal kindling.

What you need: cardboard egg boxes (the moulded pulp kind, not plastic), dryer lint or sawdust or wood shavings, and old candle stubs or any wax.

  1. Fill each egg cup with dryer lint, fine sawdust, wood shavings, shredded cardboard, or dry pine needles. Pack it fairly firmly but not solid.
  2. Melt the wax. Candle stubs, broken crayons, the ends of tea lights, old wax from cheese rounds. Melt it in a tin standing in a pan of simmering water, never directly on the heat.
  3. Pour the wax over each cup until saturated.
  4. Let it set completely.
  5. Cut the egg box into individual cups with scissors.

Each cup lights with a match and burns long and steadily. Store in a tin or a bag; they keep for years and are unaffected by damp.

Variations that work well:

Other things that light a fire

Worth knowing what is around you, because the best tinder is usually free.

Excellent natural tinder, British:

Household tinder worth saving: