DIY live fire emergency fire starter

[Alan 13~7]

Do you suppose that the kapok could be used as a wick without being rapidly consumed?

I may be wrong but my thinking is NO! As kapok is water resistant there would be no capillary action necessary for "wicking" the fuel to the flame. Another charictoristic of a wick is fire-resistance, virtualy all wicks go through a process called mordanting which is to make them more resistant to fire, Without mordanting I imagine the kapok would simply burn away.

 

[Robson Valley]

I wondered about that because "blubber" is little more than raw animal fat. Chop it up.
Fats from bear/deer/elk/moose around my place ought to be as good as seal & walrus/whale from further north.
The proximity to the wick causes it to melt into oil. Thus, it is not watery/aqueous and should be drawn up
by a kapok wick. Without the expense of the wick being consumed. Lichens and cotton grass are easy to collect.
I thought that I'd fool with this with bear fat and pork lard. If I get lucky, I get 100+lbs soapstone with no freight next month
so I can carve a bunch of Kudlik this summer. (soap stone = messy, like to do outdoors in the shade!)

 

[Alan 13~7]

The proximity to the wick causes it to melt into oil. Thus, it is not watery/aqueous and should be drawn up by a kapok wick. Without the expense of the wick being consumed.

when you say it, it certainly sounds plausable, I imagine you would be spinning the kapok into a yarn to use as like a wick?
I will be interested to know how it goes, I've only ever used kapok as a tinder in it's fluffy form to light fat wood kindeling & even when wet with water kapok burns vigorously. It may well burn much slower if spun into a tight yarn & soaked in a hot & flammable liquid.

 

[Robson Valley]

The wick. I used to think like that = some sort of twisted, ropey thing like a candle wick = you light the end.
Wrong.
Make a loose rope of yarn, thick as your finger and 8" long.
Lay that horizontally in the oil along the edge of the dish.
Tease up points every 1/2" along the entire length and light all of them.

Outside a snow house, the temp may be -30C to -40C and windy.
Inside, the kudlik provides light and enough heat to make snow water and cook on.
Over time, the heat melts the inside faces of the snow blocks and that refreezes.
So there's nothing at all fragile about the structure after a week or so.

Quilliq is another word for kudlik but I'm not certain how the two are related, linguistically.
Both Inuktitut, I suppose?

 

[Robson Valley]

Let's see if I can paste this properly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13nZFZW-IEQ

I've got a coupleof big fat reference texts of First Nations artifacts.
One claims that the longest Kudlik they ever saw had a 36" flame.

 

[Janne]

I truly do not want to be nasty, but for an emergency surely it is best to have storm matches in a sealed waterproof container and some kind of easily lit, and slow burning, fuel, ditto sealed?

 

[Robson Valley]

Agreed. Storm fire starting stuff is the ace up your sleeve while you mess with everything else.
10 minnute railroad flares work well.

 

[Toddy]

I know a little about the quilliq, Robson Valley. I know that the women who lived using them for light, warmth and cooking ended up with lungs so black that they could have been 60 a day smokers. I know that autopsies on Inuit mummies showed the differences between the lungs of the women who lived in the igloos/lodge houses and the men who spent most of their time outside hunting/fishing, were quite profound.

If you are going to use the qulliq with burning animal fat, beware the soot.
Anthroplogists recorded the domesticity of the Inuit, pre and post, but with clear personal accounts and memories, Westernisation, and that included regular scraping off of the soot layer in the igloo. The aim was a tidy, clean and bright environment….that was the description from the Inuit themselves, but the soot had to be scraped off daily.
Pity they can't scrape out lungs though.

M

 

[Robson Valley]

Toddy, thank you. Unwritten in all of my books. Everything in the entire snowhouse must have been grimy with soot. How else can you get dirty in an Arctic winter?
No concept of the profound influence of the soot. My largest soapstone carving is a man, woman, dogs & sled outside the snowhouse which has a block of ice for a window.
So that would have been fouled as well.

I've got a concept to use some real candle wick pieces and some local bees wax.
I'll guess that the size of the puddle of melted wax has more to do with the temperature of the stone lamp.
I've got animal fats (bison, venison, bear, elk, beef & pork) and I know they really stink when they burn.

I'll wait until Easter/mid-April. I might be able to get travellers to bring me 40kg carving soapstone for the cost of the stone, no shipping.

 

[Toddy]

We don't really have soapstone here, but we do have serpentinite/greenstone. It's beautiful stuff, and I can carve it with flint, a pocket knife or a nail file.
It polishes up and gleams with veins of dark green or blood red.

Do you have photos of your carvings that you would share with us ? I'd love to see them. There's something incredibly tactile about soapstone carvings.

Some of the experimental archaeology stuff we did was to pound and burn the rubbery fat. It's rather weird, it needs a thin thin edge of flame, it needs care to keep it in good order…like a lamp wick does, or a candle wick so that it doesn't stutter and burns as cleanly as possible.

I don't know about the wick. We ended up using the inners from the loch rushes, the soft rushes used for basketry. I tried bog cotton, but it just flared up and burnt away like hair. In the end the best wick was just the edge of the fat itself.
The smell though, it permeated everything, and it clung for days afterwards.

Oily fish burn well too though, even if I did end up jittery on antihistamines and fish oil burns cleaner than animal fat does. No idea why.
The cleanest fat we found to burn was the hard fat from around the kidneys, the suet…..thinking on it, we didn't try burning the cawl as a wick for that, and it might work Anyway, suet melted down and soaked into rushes burns well, and stinks least of all of them that we tried. It still smokes really black though, especially if you don't give it enough oxygen.

M

 

[Hammock_man]

Coming back to the OP, think its about having an easy lit bigger flame to light an even bigger fire and then recovering the starter for use later. Add to that the idea that you can make your own cheaper then the tenner being asked for. Think part of the "game" is to have a nice nick-nack to carry around which can be used over and again, not just the best way of getting a fire going. A single waxy cotton wool ball will work but its a one shot answer so is to be ruled out. Storm matches are ruled out for the same reason. Me, I like Potassium Permanganate and Glycerin but that really is a one shot operation.

SO... what are you going to put in the tin ???

 

[Robson Valley]

Why be confined to a single waxy cotton ball? I'd use more than a single storm match. I'd be inclined to put several into it as insurance in an emergency.
Having finished wood carvings with melted beeswax, the mess is so horrendous that I'd make a dozen+ before I'd make just one.
Potassium permanganate and glycerine might be a poor choice in a pounding rainstorm but a railroad flare will never let you down.

My flares have a 1.25" steel spike base, they are 1" x 10.25" in size, weigh 200g and burn with the usual blinding glare for 10 minutes.
Accidents happen on Hwy 16 in the mountains in the winter in the blink of an eye. Those flares are so bright that they reflect off the snow for a mile or more.

 

[Hammock_man]

My flares have a 1.25" steel spike base, they are 1" x 10.25" in size, weigh 200g and burn with the usual blinding glare for 10 minutes.

Can you make them yourself for under a tenner and can you carry them around in the UK?

 

[Robson Valley]

Probably no, not. I'm curious about the over all water proofing as claimed. Yet you can carry potassium permanganate and glycerine components instead?

 

[Hammock_man]

Cotton wool, wax and a spark.... its works. Pot Per and Glycerine IT WORKS!!! It is just more Lab work than wood work!

Bit of molten wax, roll the cotton wool ball in it and will coat it then let it dry. End up with an "egg shell" of solid wax which keeps the water out. It is easy to break open and expose the dry untreated wool inside, that in turn takes a spark very easy and goes on to burn the wax. Pop 10 -20 in a bag and you are guaranteed a cup of tea for a week, it just does not have that air of wild outdoors about it.

Think the idea behind the tin is to use it as a giant Zippo lighter.

 

[Robson Valley]

I'll settle for a predictable and stable mix, such as the flares, if and when I'd ever need to start a fire with one.
I do like your wax "eggs." So much of anything else confronts the issues of waterproofing and stability.

Natural Resources Canada, Explosives Regulatory Division, is responsible for issuing pyrotechnician licenses.
I carry one as a supervisor for commercial display fireworks, up to 12" shells.
I carry another one as a full Pyrotechnician for theater, motion pictures and television. Gunshots, close proximity, etc.
Pretty much have a free hand for everything but Detonation Cord.
Would not dream of messing with PotPer and glycerine, even just for fun.
There are far more entertaining compositions.

 

[Hammock_man]

Plus they are cheap!!! ( like me)

 

[Janne]

You buy can buy mariime distress flares in any shop that sell boating stuff.
As far as I know they are legal to carry?

 

[Hammock_man]

Did a quick google and as far as I can tell you can not get one of these flares for less then a tenner. Sorry but that puts them out of the game. ( Still a way cool method of getting a cup of tea !!!!!)

 

[Janne]

If the OP means emergency as in emergency-possibly-life threatening I doubt anybody would mind to spend 10 Pounds?

I do not think 'gagging for a cup of tea' is an emergency! ( A cold beer - yes!)

Those ancient systems are fine in a normal situation, but not in an emergency.

What is the emergency need for a fire? If it is cold, you are wet or starting to get hypothermic.
It may work with a hurricane match or a flare and fat infused fluff.
It will work with a hurricane match or a flare plus a 'modern' fire starter