Hey Guys! Welcome back to King of Random cooking.
Today we're whipping up a batch of DIY survival style fire-starters
using items you can probably find around the house.
The materials for this project are pretty simple,
I just went down to the grocery store and picked up some of these cotton facial cleansing pads
And i'm going to melting down and reusing this old candle I've had sitting around
but if you really wanted to, you could use a box of crayons.
Now I recently went down to a survival seminar, where they were selling flint and steel fire-starters
The idea is you strike the two together and make sparks
and you can you can use that to ignite the tinder of your survival fire.
The thing is, the units they were selling, were anywhere from 20 to 40 dollars.
Which I think is a little on the high end.
But I did get one of these things.
This is a ferrocerium rod which is basically a glorified version of a little flint that you would find in a thumb strike lighter.
Now ferrocerium is a synthetic alloy combining alot of diffrent metals.
now the idea is that you take some kind of steel striker.
and run it down the side and it produces hot sparks.
Now, I don't have any steel strikers but I do have an old hacksaw blade
and I found that these things work just as well.
Now the first thing we need to do to start making these wax impregnated cotton fire starters is to simply throw our candle in a pot and melt it down.
You can also just throw it in the microwave for about four minutes,
that seems to work just as well.
So, here we are guys. Our wax is completely melted and we've got quite a bit of it here.
It's actually a lot more than we need.
So, for convenience, we're gonna pour some out into a plate so it's about a quarter of an inch deep
and then we're gonna use that to soak our cotton pads for just a second on each side.
And we are gonna need a place to let our wax fire starters cool down
and, ideally, we would use wax paper or aluminum foil but I couldn't find any so were just using a Ziploc bag.
Alright, here we go.
Let's get started with these White Cloud cotton squares.
These are 100% cotton and typically used by women for applying make-up and cleansers.
Now what were gonna do is take these pads and dip them into the wax just so they get a light coating on either side.
And it would be good to have a pair of tweezers,
but I couldn't find any of those either so I'm using a fork.
Alright, here we go. Test number one.
We're just gonna dip a little bit on that side there, flip it over, a little bit on that side, and pretty much call it done.
Set that off to the side on our Ziploc bag...
...to cool down.
number two whoops I guess that'll work too you could just pop them in and scoop
them out I think the key is we just don't want to have too much wax on there
Now for variety I picked up some of these cotton rounds
these are also 100% cotton and are used for facial cleansing.
are the kind of things I've seen other Preppers using on the Internet as well
Dyanne just enough to get the wax in there and drips it off this one here I'm
just going to try one side we're just going to let that soak for a second then
take it out so it's wax infused on one side cotton on the other but you can
already see that wax poking through and while it's taking up all these cotton
pads I couldn't resist picking up a box of tampons as well these things are
mostly made of cotton so we may as well throw them in the mix as well beautiful
that looks amazing
alright guys it's been about 5 minutes our wax has cooled down and it looks
like our firestarters are ready for testing
now just for comparative purposes I have some of the original cotton and some of
the wax infused cotton just so we can see the difference in the burn times so
test number one we're just going to see if you can use some sparks to actually
ignite this cotton at all so I'm just going to fluff this up so it exposes a
little more surface area making it easier to light and we're going to start
a timer and see how long that burn let's light it up first try
Cotton's burning you can see that little fluff took off and no no time flat I
don't see a whole lot of flame because this cotton is compressed there is some
flame down here but it's burning very quietly okay we're getting some more
orange flame up here and I suppose if you lifted this up off the ground a
little bit you can get it to burn a little bit hotter to start your fire at
this point most of the pad has been consumed we're just going to wait until
the flame actually goes out and there's the last little bit of flame there we'll
stop that we'll call it 50 seconds so we've got about 50 seconds maybe a
minute on the top end with one of these cotton facial cleansing pads but that
was with no wax so let's try the wax infused version and see if there's any
difference this pad here has the wax on one side and the cotton on the other so
we're just going to fluff up the cotton side the same as we did before to catch
the spark alright got on the first try last time let's see we can do that again
there we go and it's off
the thing I know it's about these flat pads the flame doesn't get very high
everything's so compressed and I think the air is having a hard time getting to
it so we really need to do is stick some sticks underneath it so it has a little
bit of leverage that's the healthier flame than we found
the last one for sure you know if I flatten that back out again
the first thing I notice is the flame there's a lot more orange and a lot
healthier and it seems to be burning quite a bit slower we're already at 43
seconds and we haven't even drink through an eighth of that pad yet so we
just cross seven minutes in 30 seconds you can see our pad is charred now and
the flame has moved over to just the edges so I think we're running out of
the wax I think it's kind of on its last legs here
I wouldn't expect to see more than about another minute of burn time that's
pretty good okay so there's a crossover for 10 minutes it's been over 10 minutes
guys and the flame is still going now at about nine minutes I flipped the pad
over and found that the cotton on the bottom hadn't burned yet so once I was
exposed to the air it took off and gave us another full minute of good burn time
we are coming up on eleven minutes here and we still got a little flame going
it's almost gone there's the 11 minute crossover and that flame is just about
gone I think this is it five four three two it's done stop
eleven minutes in 17 seconds so we lit our cotton pad and it burned for 50
seconds we lit our waxen fuse pad and it burned for 11 minutes in 17 seconds so
looking at the comparison here it looks like that little bit of wax increase of
the burn time thirteen and a half times that's pretty dramatic especially in a
survival situation now in addition to using feminine hygiene products I also
tried dipping some wax cotton balls as well as some paper towel the wax cotton
balls work great because you can split them in half fluff out a little bit of
the cotton and strike it off the paper towel will not so much the wax is a
great fuel but it's a terrible tinder and it acts as a barrier preventing the
sparks from getting to the cotton so to get the best use out of these fire
starters we need to leave a little bit of white cotton exposed somewhere that
we can use as an initial starter now this disc I coated on both sides and we
found that the wax acts as a barrier and prevents it from igniting in order to
get this to light up I think we need to snap it in half and expose some of those
cotton fibers on the inside roughed them up and get them to a position where they
can capture a spark and hold on to it you're getting break them into pieces
and use it for multiple fire starters
there we go so guys good news these wax fire
starters are working really well one question on my mind is how waterproof
are they what would happen if we took one soaked it in a glass of water and
then broke apart and tried to start it would it act any differently it's making
tea have this soaking for about 60 seconds in a glass of water now if we
break it open and expose some of those cotton fibers let's see if we can get to
let off it is a little damp I can feel that it's it's moist
let's see how that affects the performance all right here we go
first try and there we go despite being soaked in a glass of water
for 60 seconds to still it off on the first try that is pretty cool so guys
based on our experience here today this is what we've learned
we found that burning cotton by itself works really well but it burns in a
flash and does we produce a whole lot of heat but if you take a little bit of wax
from something like melted crayons or melted candle you can increase the
amount of time it burns by about 1300 percent and not only that but you get a
lot stronger and hotter flame as well we found that soaking one side of our
pad in wax works better than soaking both sides because the wax acts as a
barrier to any sparks flying and making it a lot more difficult to relate to
tinder it's very important that we keep part of our tinder that white Cotton's
fluff so we have something to fluff up to catch a spark and cause it to ignite
we dipped our firestarters in water and let them soak for about 60 seconds and
found that as long as we could crack them open and fluff up some of the wax
and fuse cotton on the inside we could still get them to ignite we also tried a
wide variety of different cotton materials from facial cleansing pads to
cotton volve and found that they all seemed to work really well although I
can't recommend using tampon because for some reason that just feels a little
wrong so there you have it guys that's how to turn ordinary household items
into improvised survival tinder that will burn over 10 times longer and get
your fire going a lot faster thanks for joining me for this experiment I'll be
looking for you the next one talk to you then
currently wind resistant as well