Survival Skills: 3 Ways To Build A Fire (without lighters or matches!)

Matches and lighters should be your primary fire makers due to their effectiveness and ease of use, but it’s also smart to have some redundancies built into your survival gear. Add these backup methods to your kit, and you’ll always have a way to build a fire.

MAGNESIUM BARS Magnesium fire starters are common, inexpensive, and long lasting. The main section of the bar is magnesium, a soft metal that is meant to be scraped into shavings with a sharp tool. Some products include a tool for this job and for making sparks. As you scrape the attached ferrocerium rod to produce sparks, aim them at your pile of metal shavings sitting in a nest of dry tinder. When the sparks hit the shavings, the little pile will burn “white hot,” thus igniting the tinder.

STEEL WOOL Steel wool can be incredibly effective when combined with a small-voltage electrical source. A 3-volt (or higher) battery and some fine-grade steel wool will quickly produce a burning ball of steel fibers—just touch a tuft of steel wool to the positive and negative battery posts at the same time. Then place the burning steel in tinder. Use steel wool with grades from 0 to 0000, and batteries with the “+” and “-” terminals close together.

LENSES With a simple magnifying lens, you can concentrate a point of sunlight on tinder to create fire. The larger the lens, the better this will work. Find a sunny spot, flatten a spot in some fluffy tinder, and focus the light in a white-hot pinpoint. Once you have the perfect, blinding dot of light and the tinder is smoking, blow gently across the tinder to help it burn. Keep blowing steadily until the tinder flames up.

Want us to coach you through it all? We’d be happy to share this exciting skillset with you face to face. Consider joining our Ultimate Fire Starting class or one of our other survival classes that include fire building skills. You won’t regret it!

Written by Tim MacWelch First draft published on bugout.com