Homemade fire starters...on the cheap.

The coffee can I have been putting dryer lint in was full, time to make some starters. Dryer lint, egg cartons and wax are the ingredients. The metal tablespoon I have been using is short and by the time I am finished with one carton of starters, the spoon is hot. I had enough of that so I came up with this to protect my delicate fingers I had a short piece of dowel laying around so I zip tied the spoon to the dowel. Worked great. I made 7 dozen fire starters.

 

Pine cones dipped in wax work good. I've also made my own fatwood from old dead pine trees, from the stump end of lower branches.

 

Ever since you posted this thread Tim, I’ve wanted to make some. FF a couple years and I found a decent size block of wax. Game on.




Used up all the muffin papers we had so I kept chugging along.

Hope the shredder paper works ok. Ended up w/ 76.


Thanks for the share of info. Can’t wait to try one. Probably light a fire even though I don’t need it.

 

I agree...dry noodles, especially pine, take off quick and burn hot...I've never tried making these fire starters, for me its just some noodles and some small pine kindling and its off to the races.

 

Noodles alone won’t light full splits easily. And I’m flirting with the idea of kissing kindling goodbye. If I switch to noodles, I’ll have to use paper cups like earlier in this thread. Which is doable. I usually keep 2 black garbage bags of them, but I used the last I had about a month ago. Hardly ever saw on pine but I do have 2 large chestnut oaks to fall soon.

 

Can you make some type of paper brick firestarters? Use the press mold for noodles and wax maybe?

 

Cardboard egg cartons, dryer lint and wax make great fire starters.

 

I saw a post on someone doing this, I thought it was on here, but maybe it was Youtube. Looked like something interesting to try.

 

It was him using a press and shredded paper to make bricks

 

I've got several just like this. A friend gave me a couple gallons of wax, they were somehow used in making solar panels.

 

I've used one of these before, you can buy them individually, and I used a large knife to cut them up into small squares to use as fire starters. One good size fire log can make a lot of fire starters.

 

I bet I could with some noodles mixed in. I think lots of compression kills the ability to light easy. I don’t think I could simply light one of those bricks I made.

 

Working excellent on full size splits.

 

I noticed the cupcake papers are getting so thin that sometimes the paper will burn out before the wax lights off.
A few weeks ago i used paper/cardboard (solo) cups like people use in the bathroom. They worked really well.

 

I agree, I prefer the three ounce generic “Dixie“ type cups over paper cup cake cups. I’ve found the paper cup cake cups burn too quickly and often fall off the wax/sawdust puck completely.

 

So I found that the ones w/o cupcake papers tend to melt all over the split it's sitting on. I bought more papers because we couldn't find any dixie cups. I'll plop 'em in paper and in the oven for good measure.

 

No kindling needed.

 

I took some pics this morning when getting the fire started to show how I get things going with only one homemade fire starter and no kindling.
Doesn't take long to get a good fire.

 

We have been using the firestarters as mentioned several pages back.
Egg cartons "cups" burn long enough, and hold enough wax and noodles to light cordwood. I cheaped on noodles, and on wax on some, and I needed to use 2 rather than 1 to get a fire going. The wood were using was slighy less than 20%, so that may have had an effect.

I don't have ready access to pinecones, but will look for some.
While we'll keep kindling and newspaper on hand, the time and effort saved in using firestarters, is awesome.
So, I went to the dollar store, and grabbed 30 candles. I made 14 dozen firestarters in egg cartons, using pine noodles....maybe a 5G bucket full.

I used an old pot for the wax, on the stove. The wax was a little hot, and it soaked through some of the egg cartons. Turning the heat off on the stove, let the wax cool a tad, pretty quickly. And, it didn't soak through the cartons.

I figure we'll use 60 in the fall, and same in the spring. 2 fires a day for a few weeks, and then just a few over the winter.



The buckets will stack well. Im sure I'll make more this fall, to get ahead, and maybe give to fellow burners who are always short on kindling.
Sca