Okay, so back in late October while cutting firewood, I sliced up a commercial firelog for use as morning firestarters.
This morning I noticed that I’m running low on slices, and thought I’d give you an impression of what I think of that method of making cheap firestarters.
In a word, eh. It works. You can get four useful chunks out of a slice, but unless you use a finer blade than I did (I used a chop saw) you won’t get as many slices as you hope. The process is very messy, but that’s forgivable. The reality is that whatever volatile these things are soaked with is quite noticeably volatile, and out of their package they quickly dry to the point where they can only be readily lit with a propane torch. Yeah, they’re constructed of flammable materials, but so is wood.
On a budget and if you happen to have a propane torch handy – which I do – it’s better than nothing. But not a lot better. It’s not the equivalent of commercial firestarters.
Maybe as idea try 1/2″ – 1″ thick cheap (scrap?) fiberboard or similar cut to preferred size (1″ x 6″?) and soak in a pot or pan of melted paraffin blocks/candle wax and set aside to dry? Cheap and sorta fun as it goes pretty quick. Over production can be sold 🙂
I keep firelighters for my wood-burning BBQ in a zip-lock plastic bag.
I use newspaper (usually grocery store ads) and half an egg carton. With a few chunks of split wood, the fire starts off good. I just have to remember to come back and add larger stuff a little later. Too late, and I have to start over. 🙂
What i use as firestarters is curtain cotton sash cord that is immersed in melted paraffin wax, then pulled out and allowed to cool. Cut into length about 1 1/2″ long – burns for approximately six minutes. Inexpensive, easy to make and works for me, maybe for you.
Thanks for the review, Joel.
Yep, I agree with others that firestarters are easy and cheap to make. A few years ago I experimented (for a Backwoods Home article) and made firestarters out of cotton balls, dried evergreen needles, wood shavings, paper, and other materials saturated with paraffin from old candles. Formed some in egg cartons, others in pie plates.
Even tried some with dog hair — of which I’m sure you have ample quantities. The dog-hair ones didn’t exactly smell pretty when lighted and the cotton balls were the most feeble of the materials I experimented with, but everything I tried worked.
I like the cotton sash cord idea.
Since you are necessarily making a bunch of firelog sawdust as you make your slices, a paper envelope full of that stuff should be enthusiastically flammable.
The stuff that evaporates is the paraffin they use to mix with sawdust.
I see there are other recipes for fire starters so what the heck here’s mine. I make mine from sawdust and paraffin with a small old pot, some paper cupcake liners and a cupcake pan my wife was going to throw away.
First melt the paraffin in the pot on low heat. While this is going on, put the cupcake liners in the cupcake pan and fill each of the cupcake molds with sawdust. After the paraffin is melted poor the paraffin on top of the sawdust in the cupcake pan making sure it’s good and soaked then let it cool. When the fire starters are cool enough to handle use a knife to get the fire starters out of the mold and vacuum seal these in individual small bags so the paraffin doesn’t evaporate.
While I store these in vacuum bags you could store these in Ziploc bags, mason jars or whatever you have around.