There is a strong cultural pull towards the difficult methods. Bow drills and hand drills are genuinely satisfying and genuinely worth learning, and they are also the slowest, least reliable and most conditions-dependent way to make fire. See run a bow drill, which is the right page for that skill and is not the right page for a cold wet evening.
This page is about the ordinary methods, because a household that can reliably light a fire in the rain has solved the problem, and the equipment costs very little and lasts for decades.
The order that actually works
Carry at least two different kinds, in different places. The failure you are insuring against is not the method, it is losing or soaking the one thing you had.
Stock matches now. They are among the cheapest and longest-lasting items in the whole app. Several boxes, kept dry, cost almost nothing and will outlast most of the equipment in the house.
Matches
- Ordinary safety matches are cheap, effective and useless once damp, and they need their own striker strip.
- Strike-anywhere matches are more useful and harder to buy than they used to be.
- Stormproof or lifeboat matches burn fiercely in wind, and many relight after being dunked. Expensive per match and worth having a small tube of for the situation where nothing else has worked.
- Keep them dry. A screw-top jar, a sealed tin, or a small waterproof case. Split them between several containers.
- Keep the striker strip dry too, which is the failure people do not anticipate. Cut spare strips from boxes and seal them with the matches.
- Dip the heads in melted candle wax to waterproof ordinary matches, and scrape the wax off with a thumbnail before use. Cheap and it works.
Lighters
- A disposable lighter is the most convenient thing there is, and it fails in the cold. Below about five degrees the butane does not vaporise well and it will not light.
- Warm it in a pocket or a fist for a few minutes and it usually recovers. This is worth knowing because people discard working lighters in winter.
- A lighter with no gas still makes sparks, which will light good tinder. Do not throw an empty one away.
- Refillable and windproof lighters are better in wind and worse in cold, and fuel evaporates from them over months.
- Keep one on your person, not in a bag.
Ferrocerium rods
The single most sensible thing to own after matches.
A ferrocerium rod, often called a firesteel, is scraped with a hard sharp edge and throws a shower of extremely hot sparks.
- It works soaking wet. Shake it off and use it.
- It works in wind, unlike a flame.
- It works cold, unlike a lighter.
- Thousands of strikes from one rod, so it lasts years of regular use.
- It costs very little.
How to use it:
- Prepare the tinder first. A rod lights fine dry tinder and it will not light a log.
- Hold the rod close to the tinder, a couple of centimetres away.
- Scrape with the striker, or the back of a knife, using a firm slow push rather than a fast flick. Slow and heavy throws bigger, hotter sparks than fast and light.
- Better still, hold the striker still and pull the rod back, which keeps the sparks on target instead of scattering them.
- Scrape off the coating on a new rod first, which is a lacquer that prevents oxidation and prevents sparks.
Practise before you need it. It takes ten minutes to learn and everybody gets it wrong the first few times by flicking too fast and blowing the tinder apart.
Flint and steel
The traditional method, and it is not the same thing as a ferrocerium rod.
A hard sharp stone, usually flint, struck against high-carbon steel shaves off tiny particles of steel which oxidise and glow. Those sparks are much cooler than ferrocerium sparks and will not light ordinary tinder.
They will light char cloth, which is what char cloth exists for. See char cloth and firelighters.
- Catch the ember on the char cloth, then transfer it to a tinder bundle and blow it into flame.
- It lasts essentially forever, which is the argument for it: a steel and a stone are not consumed.
- It needs char cloth, which you make from cotton rag in a tin on a fire, so it is a system rather than a single item.
- Stainless steel does not work. It must be high carbon: an old file, a knife spine, a piece of a leaf spring.
Worth learning as the fallback that never runs out, once the reliable methods are stocked.
Lenses and the sun
Free, unlimited, and useless most of the time in Britain.
- A magnifying glass, a lens from spectacles, a camera lens, or a clear plastic bottle filled with water will all focus sunlight to an ignition point.
- A clear ice lens works and is a genuine curiosity rather than a plan.
- Focus to the smallest brightest point on dark fine tinder, hold it steady, and wait for smoke.
- It needs direct strong sunshine, which rules out night, cloud, rain and much of a British winter, which is precisely when you want a fire.
Keep a small lens in the tin because it weighs nothing and never expires. Do not count it as a method.
Batteries and wire wool
Worth knowing because both are commonly to hand.
Fine wire wool, grade 0000, touched across the terminals of a battery, glows and ignites. A nine volt battery is the classic because both terminals are on the same face, and an AA works with a strip of foil or wire.
- Fast, and it works when damp.
- It burns out quickly, so the tinder must be ready.
- A car battery and jump leads will do it dramatically, and carelessly done that is a way to cause a serious burn or a battery explosion.
It is nearly always the tinder
When a fire will not light, the ignition source is rarely the problem.
Tinder must be:
- Fine. Thread-thin. Fibres, shavings, dust, fluff.
- Dry. Genuinely dry, not damp-but-nearly.
- Loose. Air has to get through it. A packed bundle smothers itself.
- Enough of it. A pinch is not enough; a handful is.
Everything is wet after rain except the inside of a dead standing branch. Split it, carve the dry heart into shavings, and that is your tinder and your kindling. Wood on the ground is soaked; wood still attached is not.
Prepare far more than you think you need, and prepare all of it before you strike anything. The commonest failure in the field is a flame that dies while somebody is scrabbling for the next size up.
Building it so it catches
- Three sizes ready before you light: tinder, kindling the thickness of a match to a pencil, and fuel the thickness of a thumb to a wrist. In three separate piles.
- Off the ground. A platform of dry sticks or bark stops the cold wet earth killing the fire from below.
- Shelter it from wind and rain while it establishes, with your body, a tarp or a wall of wood.
- Small to large, patiently. Almost every failed fire was fed a piece too big too early.
- Air. Leave gaps. A fire that is smothered is the second commonest failure after wet tinder.
- Top-down is the better lay for a stove or a long-burning fire. See light a fire top-down.
And before any of it, read ventilating indoor burning if this fire is going to be anywhere near a building. That page outranks this one.