Posted: 8/20/2015 6:06:35 AM EDT
|
I haven't tried this but it looks interesting.
The Best Fire Starter for Wet Wood In addition to the cotton balls and dryer lint, there’s another type of fire starter you can make, which will burn hot enough to actually dry out the wood and get a fire going. This is made of black powder gunpowder and nail polish remover. You need to use black powder and not modern smokeless powder because it burns slower. The idea isn’t to make something that burns fast, but rather to make something that burns hot. The nail polish remover you use needs to be the oily type and must contain acetone. The acetone acts as a solvent for the black powder. I would recommend wearing rubber gloves while doing this, even though I have done it without gloves on. It is hard to clean the dissolved black powder off your fingers when it hardens. Test the gloves with a little bit of the nail polish remover, to ensure that they won’t melt. To make the fire starter, start with a small mound of black powder in a bowl; about an equivalent quantity as the size of a golf ball or ping-pong ball. Pour the nail polish remover over it, so that the black powder is totally covered. Immediately begin mixing the two together with your gloved fingers, forming putty out of it. Once in a putty-like state, the excess nail polish remover can be poured off. Knead the putty, just like kneading bread; folding it over time after time. The idea is to make the putting into hundreds of layers, so that the burn rate can be controlled. The more layers you can have, the better. The finished putty should be formed into a ball and stored in an airtight container. These will dry out with time, so check them periodically. You want to use them when they are wet, not dry. Dry ones burn too fast. A golf ball of ping-pong sized ball of this putty will burn at over 3,000 degrees for about 3-1/2 minutes. You can break that ball down into smaller chunks if you want, but they won’t burn as long. Nevertheless, it burns hot enough and long enough that it will dry out damp wood and get it started burning. With this sort of fire starter, you are prepared to start fires in even the worst of conditions. Attrib link |
I laughed all through that. That's how we use to make homemade rocket engines when I was a kid.