It seems that there is never enough wax and egg cartons to go around when it comes to making firestarters. Last year we mixed all of our leftover fats in with the wax and sawdust and that work pretty well, but now we are rendering those fats for baking, so that brings us to another kind of firestarter... Last year, some of you may recall, we were so short of wood that we made various paper logs to mix in with the pallet scraps and the small amount of seasoned wood that we did have. This is my favourite of those types of logs, and here is how you make them. First you must kick the cat out of your chair... You are going to need some tubes to fill. We save all of ours for these. Next you will need something to tamp with, I cut up a closet dowel and painted it red after the old lady burnt my first tamp. The PVC pipe is for a similar type of log that doesn't require a tube. The cardboard is to protect the table. You will need a good supply of burnables. These fliers work really well, as does dryer lint and coffee filters. We bought a reusable mesh coffee filter, so we no longer use coffee filters. Ok,here's how it works. Wad up one page at a time and shove into the cardboard tube, tamp when full. If you are filling with something other than paper, just do one sheet at the bottom and it will keep everything contained. Here is what one sheet looks like once it's been tamped. Once nearly full, fold the end of the tube over and then flip the whole tube over and tamp from the otherwise and then fold that end over too. Voila! I Ike to throw one of two of these in with a bit of newspaper. By the time the newspaper is done these are going and they seem to do a pretty good job of getting other things going. If you find that they don't burn as well as you had hoped, try packing them a bit less.
I've posted elsewhere that we use cheap candles and a $7 crock pot from Good Will to melt wax for fire starters using 3oz paper Dixie cups and shredded paper from the office paper shredder and sawdust from my table saw. They are really easy to light and burn for 12-14 minutes. (We don't engage the cat for at least 15 minutes if we use one.) We plug in the crock pot several hours prior to making the fire starters to give the wax time to melt. If I'm in a hurry I used a double boiler to melt wax on the stove. With dry wood we don't need kindling with these fire starters.
Yep, I better they would, but this is a system we use to get by when we are low on wax. I know she has bought candles like that in the past, I am not a big fan of it because I know I can make ones like this with no money invested. These are all the rolls from April until today for a household of five. I think we did pretty good.
I made a big firecracker like that once with shot gun shell powder. BOOM! I have found that sawdust and wax is excellent, the trick is to use just just enough wax that the finished product is sa bit crumbly, like a super cedar. I haven't used any kindling or newspaper yet this year.
