Introduction: Effective Firestarter for the Wet Weathers

By
About: I'm a happy fellow in Sweden. I love to create things that makes my life easier, such as IKEA hacks, Outdoor cheats and so on (my wife thinks im lazy, but hey dont make it difficult when it can be easy and che…

Hello every body and welcome

Well, my idea for the firestarter started when I decided with my friend to go out and camp in the woods for some night fishing last weekend...we was out at 23.00 and it was raining here in Sweden for about a week in a row. The temp was about 1 °C and all the wood was soaking wet and in the dark forest it was almost impossible to find any dry wood at that time..it took us about 3h before we had a fire going.

I started looking here in instructables and I got my idea from a couple of posts like:

https://www.instructables.com/id/The-world-best-fir...

and

https://www.instructables.com/id/Camp-Fire-Starters...

The problem was that I needed something that would last for at least 15min in case I needed to start a fire with some wet wood in the future.

And so I improved their idea on my own and I got my firestarter working for 15 - 17 min with no problem on a hard windy day.

Step 1: Materials

I used a 4 Ømm PVC pipe that i cut about 2 inches high (5cm). (found these in the gross garbage room of my block)

A screwdriver and a plier.

Some cheap candles.. here in Sweden they coast about 35 SEK for a bag with 100pcs.

an old used metal can (found that in the gross garbage room too)

Some saw dust form my garage

and some 12mm MDF board that i cut about 1 inches by 1/2 inches (2,5 * 1 cm) .

Step 2: Preparing the Firestarter

Start by putting the PVC pipes on something that you wont be sad or mad if it get soaked with wax later.

I used some Aluminum for that mater.

  1. Put some of the wood sawdust on the pipes about 1/3 of the way.
  2. Put 2 pieces of the MDF over the sawdust.
  3. cover the sides and all the way up to the top with sawdust.. make sure you press down as much as you can while holding the PVC pipe firmly down.
  4. Strip the candles of their aluminum lock and put them in the metal can. (I used about 10 pieces of these candles to make 9 firestarters.
  5. Melt down the wax until it's completely liquid.
  6. pour the wax over the PVC pipes.. make sure to do that in rounds of about 30-40sec to give time to the wax to be absorbed by the saw dust.
  7. Let it cool-down for about 15-20min
  8. and then Voila it's done.

Now for the record I will not be burning the PVC pipes. but i will leave the firestarter in the pipes until I'm going to use it.. that's where i push out the whole thing with my thumb. I do that as i found that the PVC pipes make an excellent protector for the firestarter when packing the whole thing in my hiking bag under tons of other stuffs.

Step 3: Testing.. Testing

Well here are some pictures of the firestarter.. these pictures was taken with about 3-4min apart just to document how slowly the burning process is going..

Please put in your consideration that it was a really windy day witch usually result the acceleration of the burning process and still it was going for 17min.

sorry for the picture quality but my cameraman (my wife) had some stability problems.. but seriously.. she is the best helper I can ever wish for.