My wife makes fire starters from toilet paper tubes, dryer lint and those scented wax cubes. She stuffs the tube 1/2 full of lint, folds one end of the tube closed, then pours the wax in the opens end of the tube. She does this every day or so, whenever she changes the scent in there. Don’t have to buy anything extra for these. Charles
For at least 3-4 years now, I have gathered a couple paper grocery bags full of white pine cones that will drop in the fall. Yea, make excellent hot starters but are extremely short lived. I think somewhere was a person who rolled them in melted was and sawdust....now that oughta last for awhile longer!
I have 5 milk crates of fully open pine cones from some norway spruce in the back yard that fall all Summer andFall and maybe they're not dry enough even in nice open airy milk crates but I'm not impressed with them as fire starters.
Pine cones are ok, but are nowhere near as long burning as the wax/chip/ cardboard ones you can make.
I collect the longer pine cones from white pines trees. A few in the stove with some small branches on top gets the fire lit everytime for me. N Sent from my SM-T280 using Tapatalk
I'm probably spoiled with how nice well dried eastern white pine burns. I've got lots of dried up old branches I'll leave in a pile and when they dry and snap easy smash 'em with the tractor bucket and the stragglers with a maul, and every now and then if it's snowing or raining I'll sit for a few minutes with a hatchet and split up some nice straight grained splits of pine a bit smaller. It's something to do when you don't feel like doing anything.
This thread reminds me that will need to make more firestarters. Luckily my wife has owned that task recently. That's good, because I've got other things to do, that she can't.
Yes it does. I made some last year for the first time in my wood burning history. I used miniature cupcake cups. Filled them with planer shavings from the dust vac. Poured melted paraffin on them. They worked great.
Luckily I made a stash of them long before the move was happening and got them in a box. I I’ve got Fat wood for years it seems. The bin I have stuffed to the brim is that large black sturdy one with the yellow lid from costco. Thing of it is, the small box of fire starters themselves weighs nearly nothing, hoping I don’t toss it in the wake of moving things around...but I’m not running out of fat wood anytime soon.
It does seem that with Fir trees there is enough fat wood in any given tree to kindle the whole thing! I intersperse the fat wood amongst the stack so I can split up a couple of buckets full of 1/2" splits every now and then. They will literally start with a match and the fire takes off like an F-16 on afterburners. When we were first married and my beautiful wife was new to wood stoves, I had split up a whole rick of kindling. A few work days later she told me that it was easy to start a fire and it burned nice and hot but she had to spend a lot of time loading the stove with wood as it burned so fast. Would I please split some more because she was almost out. Full of dread, I rushed out to the shed and, sure enough, She had used up all the kindling as firewood! Lucky we didn't have a chimney fire! Now, of course, she is a seasoned wood stove operator and will build a fire at the drop of a hat and regulate it with skill!
Not quite worked out a plan so I’m soaking wax into cardboard tubes. No smell left in them if you ask me
Using Yankee candles for this might get you in trouble. Unless those are not candles? I use all the used candles and melt that all together.
My wife makes those with dryer lint in egg cartons and we use them out in the fire pit. I won’t use them in my cat stove though. For that it needs to be clear wax and wood shavings with no dyes or anything.
There wax melts, when the smell goes you replace the pot , this leaves you with a pot of up until now useless wax
