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Letter Re: Easy Fire Starting Article

Hugh,

I found the recommended easy fire starter posted [1] a couple of weeks ago to be very interesting. That recommendation involved rolling 2-inch wide newspaper and soaking it in bees wax obtained from a toilet seal ring. My first attempt produced a marginal flame. I realized that I needed more wax absorption. On my second attempt, I used rolled up paper towel. This gave better but still just not adequate results. From the sight of the rolled up paper towel I came up with a better idea– tampons! As a 66 year old widower, I sucked it up and hid a box of tampons among the coffee and beer in my grocery cart. I also decided to use paraffin from candle wax. I tried a couple different techniques, but it is best I just list the procedural steps that worked:

For a couple burn tests I laid them on the edge of a vertical concrete block with the wax string hanging down. The vertical “fuse” readily lights. The cotton end is next to burn. Within 30 seconds the flame propagates along the top and down the 2-inch length. The robust triangular flame will be two inches by five inches (or more) for TEN MINUTES followed my another five minutes of taper off flame. When blowing on the flame, it immediately recovered.

[3]

I also tried soaking them still inside the plastic holder. This works but prevents 20% expansion and produces 20% less flame in a side-by-side test. They also had to be cut out rather than pushed out as hoped.

Like the original author, I also was not a Boy Scout, but I was a juvenile fire bug and that led to actually being a proverbial “rocket scientist”– engineer. – Rocket Man