How To Start a Fire Without Matches

How To Start a Fire Without Matches

We all know how comforting a campfire can be. But in the wilderness, a campfire isn’t just about comfort, it’s about survival. Getting a fire started means you can boil water, warm yourself, cook food, and even signal for rescue. And if you’re in a true survival situation, you may need to start a fire without matches, lighters, or any other modern conveniences.

That may not be easy. There’s a reason we don’t usually start fires by rubbing two sticks together anymore. Quite frankly, it’s not a lot of fun. But if you plan ahead and practice your skills, you can make starting a fire much easier and (relatively) painless. Here are 10 ways you can do that.

First Things First: Gathering Your Materials

It’s absolutely essential that you gather all the materials you need to start a fire before you start trying to get a fire going. There’s nothing worse than finally getting a spark or ember, and then realizing you have no place to put it because you’ve failed to gather your materials.

Start by gathering your combustibles – tinder, kindling, and firewood – and arranging them neatly in your fire-starting area so that you can quickly and easily reach them.

Tinder

Gathering tinder is perhaps the most important step in fire preparation. Tinder consists of small, fine, easily ignitable materials that will be the first to catch fire. Most importantly, your tinder needs to be very, very dry.

Some of the best tinder materials in nature include dry grasses, bits of fibrous or resinous bark (birch bark is excellent), milkweed or cattail fluff, and tiny needle-sized sticks. If you have a knife, you can use it to create dry shavings from a larger piece of wood. Contrary to popular belief, pine needles do not make very good tinder.

Some man-made fibers can also be used as tinder. Check your backpack and pockets for lint, which makes great tinder. Fibrous rope and paracord can be unraveled for tinder, and you can even use a tampon or cotton balls.

Kindling

Kindling is the intermediate step between tinder and full-sized firewood. Look for sticks that are approximately the thickness of a pencil, which will catch fire easily. Sticks and twigs on the ground tend to be damp, so look for dead, standing wood if you can find it. Softwoods like pine, willow, white birch, and cedar are great kindling because they catch more easily than hardwoods.

Firewood

The idea is to continuously add larger and larger pieces of wood to your fire until you have a healthy, self-sustaining blaze. Once the kindling has caught, start adding slightly larger sticks about the thickness of your finger, and then gradually add in wrist-sized branches.

Full-sized logs should be the last thing you add to your fire. As with kindling, the firewood you gather should be as dry as possible; dead branches still attached to a tree are often the best option.

Fire Starting Methods: Four Categories

There are a lot of ways to start a fire without matches or a lighter. Some are more feasible than others. Many of these methods are very difficult to execute in the wilderness, and some are better in theory than they are in practice. That said, all the fire-starting methods discussed here use one of four basic principles:

• Friction – Rub the palms of your hands together rapidly. Feel them heating up? That’s friction. When you bring dry wood and tinder into the equation, enough friction can create an ember that can become fire. Friction fire starting methods are some of the most labor-intensive, but mankind has been using them for thousands of years.
• Sparks – Sparks are basically little baby fires. If you are able to create a spark and then capture that spark, you can grow it into a full-sized fire. It sounds simple, but we often learn that’s not the case.
• Sunlight – Was there a weird kid in your school who used to scorch ants using a magnifying glass? That kid is probably a serial killer now, but you can learn a little something from him about fire-starting! Namely, sunlight plus the right lens equals fire.
• Chemicals – There are certain elements that, when combined, will ignite and create a fire. These are arguably the least practical fire-starting methods in a survival situation because you’re unlikely to ever have these chemicals handy. Even so, we’ll touch on them briefly.

Method 1: Hand Drill

A hand drill is the most basic friction fire method, and also the most difficult. Many a camper has thrown down his sticks in frustration and walked off to mend his blisters after failing to make a fire this way. But with much persistence and some hardy hands, it can be done. You only need two things:

• Fireboard – A flat piece of dry, dead softwood, preferably about half an inch thick.
• Spindle – An 18 to 24-inch stick, ideally about the width of a finger and as straight as possible, sharpened slightly at one end.

A knife will also come in handy. Use it to cut a V-shaped notch in your fireboard, and make a small indentation adjacent to the notch where the end of the spindle will rest. This notch will collect any hot dust and embers that form.

To get started, place a piece of bark under the fireboard that you will use to catch the ember. Place the sharpened end of the spindle into the indentation, and use your hands to start rolling the spindle rapidly. As you rub your hands back and forth, you should also allow them to roll down the spindle repeatedly, which will increase the pressure and create more friction (i.e. more heat).

It will take time – probably quite a lot of time – before you start to see smoke or embers. Once you do, use the piece of bark to transfer the glowing ember to a nest of tinder, and begin nurturing your fire.

Method 2: Fire Bow

The fire bow is a more advanced variation of the hand drill method. If you have the necessary materials, using a fire bow can start a fire more quickly, and will be less taxing on your hands. In addition to the fireboard and spindle mentioned in the previous method, you’ll need a few more items:

• Bow wood – The ideal piece of wood to make a fire bow should be about the length of your arm, sturdy but a bit flexible with a slight curve.
• Bow string – Almost any type of cord or thick string will work, including a shoelace. Paracord is ideal.
• Top piece/socket – This is to hold the top of the spindle while you use the bow to rotate it rapidly. Look for a piece of stone, hardwood, shell, or bone that fits comfortably in your hand and has an indentation that can securely hug the top of the spindle.

First, fashion a bow using the bow wood and string; the string should be taut, but not so tight that you cannot wrap it around the spindle. Set up your fireboard and spindle as you would for a hand drill (the spindle can be a bit shorter and thicker; about 12 inches long and an inch thick).

Wrap the bowstring around the spindle and place one end of the spindle in the indentation on the fireboard. With one hand, hold the top piece/socket on top of the spindle with enough force to hold it upright; with the other hand, move the bow back and forth to rapidly turn the spindle.

This method generates heat much more quickly than a simple hand drill. You may start to see smoke after just a few minutes. Don’t stop when you see smoke; keep moving the bow quickly for as long as it takes to form a good ember.

Method 3: Fire Plow

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The third and final friction-based fire starting method, a fire plow, involves creating a fireboard and spindle similar to what you would use with a hand drill or fire bow. But instead of rotating the spindle, you will rub it back and forth on the fireboard. Tom Hanks did it in Castaway! Here’s what you will need:

• Fireboard – The fireboard should be about half an inch thick. Any softwood will work. Instead of cutting a notch and indentation in your fireboard, you’ll cut a six to eight-inch groove that runs the length of it.
• Spindle – The “spindle” here is often referred to as a plow, but the ideal piece of wood is much the same. Look for a straight piece of wood about an inch wide and long enough to comfortably hold in two hands (16 to 18 inches is about right for most people). Cut one end to a dull, beveled point.

The groove you’ve cut in the fireboard will act as a track for the spindle/plow. Take the spindle in both hands, and rub its beveled tip back and forth in the groove. Hold the spindle to about a 45-degree angle relative to the fireboard. As you rub it back and forth, maintain enough pressure to generate heat and friction.

One of the advantages of the fire plow method is that the continued working of the spindle back and forth in the groove will create its own tinder, which will pile up at the end of the groove. Have some additional tinder ready to add to it once it ignites.

Method 4: Stones

You’ve probably seen a movie in which someone started a fire by whacking two stones together to create a spark. If you’ve ever tried to do it in real life, you probably learned quickly that most stones don’t spark no matter how many times you strike them. In a survival situation, finding the right combination of rocks often requires a lot of trial and error.

To reliably create a spark, you need flint, or a related rock in the flint family, which includes quartz, jasper, chert, obsidian, and agate. Your second stone needs to have high iron content. Prehistoric man used iron pyrite, which is known more commonly as fools gold today.

Fortunately, flint, quartz, and related rocks are fairly easy to come by in nature, though that might depend on your region. Look for (or break off) a piece that comfortably fits in your hand, and has a lot of sharp angles. For an iron-rich surface to strike it with, one of the best options is steel. This is one of the many reasons why a quality knife is such an essential survival tool.

Hold your flint rock in one hand, and strike it with the blunt spine of your knife. Try to hit an angled part of the flint at about a 30-degree angle. Keep your tinder close; char cloth is a great tinder for this method because you can hold it with the rock and use it to catch sparks as they appear.

One important detail to consider: if you are using a knife blade to create sparks, make sure it is made of carbon steel, not stainless steel. Carbon steel is harder and creates a spark much more easily. The Morakniv Companion with a carbon steel blade is a great, budget-friendly survival knife.

Method 5: Fire Striker

Carrying a fire striker on camping and hiking trips is a great way to create sparks and build a fire in any condition. It’s essentially a more advanced version of flint and steel, and it can be counted on even in situations when your matches have gotten wet or high elevation has rendered your butane lighter useless.

There are a few variations of a fire striker. Some are as simple as keeping a piece of flint and a piece of steel in your pack. You can even get a handy flint and steel kit that includes tinder, like this PSKOOK Emergency Flint and Steel Kit.

The more modern version of this system is known as a ferrocerium rod or Ferro rod. Ferrocerium is a man-made alloy that creates more and hotter sparks than natural flint when struck. To use one, strike a fire steel against the Ferro rod at about a 30-degree angle directly above your tinder.

The UCO Titan Fire Striker is one of the more popular Ferro rods; it’s good for up to 20,000 strikes. There’s also a version of the Morakniv Bushcraft Carbon Steel Survival Knife that has a magnesium-coated fire striker built into the sheath.

Method 6: Battery and Steel Wool

This is one of the more MacGuyver-esque fire starting methods, but it’s surprisingly reliable. One doesn’t typically get lost in the woods with a supply of batteries and steel wool, so this requires some advance planning to pull off. You will need:

• A 9V battery – A 9V battery works especially well because it has both the positive and negative terminals at the same end (and it has more “juice” than most other batteries).
• Steel wool – You know the stuff; chances are you have a few steel wool pads under your kitchen sink that you’ve forgotten about.

The setup here is pretty simple. Gather up a nest of tinder, and place a small bundle of steel wool in the center of it. Touch your 9V battery to the steel wool so that both terminals touch the steel, and it should ignite right away.

You can do this with two AA or AAA batteries, but that’s a little trickier. You’ll need to tape the two batteries together so they form a circuit, and then unravel the steel wool so that it touches both the positive terminal at one end of the batteries and the negative terminal at the other.

Method 7: Car Battery

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I wouldn’t exactly recommend carrying around a car battery in your hiking pack. But let’s say you’re driving down a remote mountain road and your engine breaks down far from civilization. It might be comforting to know that you can start a fire with your car. All you need is:

• A Car battery – As long as your battery isn’t completely dead, this will work.
• Jumper cables – You keep jumper cables in your car, right? If not, this is another good reason to do so.
• A metal object – Any conductive metal will do. This works with a paperclip or the aforementioned steel wool. I’ve also seen a variation of this method that involves splitting open a pencil to reveal the conductive graphite pencil lead within.

Connect one end of the jumper cables to the metal object and place it on the ground, as far from your car as the cables will reach. Cover the metal object with tinder. Connect the positive cable to your car’s battery, and then touch the negative cable to the ground on your car. The resulting charge should light the tinder.

A word of precaution: just like when jump-starting an engine, some care is needed to avoid hurting yourself or your car. Make sure there are no loose connections at the battery terminals, and wear insulated gloves, if you have them, to protect yourself. Once the tinder is lit, disconnect the cables as soon as you can.

Method 8: Glass Lens

Focusing sunlight through a glass lens is a tried-and-true method of starting a fire (remember that kid with the ants?) that mankind has been using since at least ancient Greek and Roman times. The only downside is that it only works when the sun is out. If you need to start a fire at night or on a cloudy day, you’re out of luck.

This method works by angling the lens toward the sun so that its light is focused onto as small an area as possible, generating great heat. It might take a little trial and error, but once you get the angle right, it works like a charm.

A magnifying glass is the classic lens for starting a fire, but a pair of eyeglasses or a binocular lens will work just as well. In case you don’t have a traditional glass lens, a few alternatives may also be effective:

• Plastic water bottle – A clear plastic water bottle (with water inside) can be used to focus the sun’s rays in much the same way as a lens.
• Water balloon – Similarly, a clear water balloon can also do the job. Fill the balloon about halfway with water, and twist it until it forms a tight sphere that can be used to focus the sunlight. This can work with a condom or clear plastic bag as well.
• Ice – A clear piece of ice will act just like a lens. The trick is finding a piece of ice that’s clear, and not hazy or filled with bubbles. Try freezing a small amount of water in the bottom of a water bottle. When holding the ice like a lens, use gloves to avoid melting it and dripping water onto your tinder. The ice should be as “lens-shaped” as possible, i.e. thicker in the center and thinner at the edges.

Method 9: Mirror

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A mirror can be used to focus the sun’s energy much like a lens, except that you’ll want to reflect a narrow beam of light off the mirror rather than directing it through the glass. Much like a lens, the trick is getting the angle right, but a mirror can produce an intense beam of white-hot light that ignites tinder quickly.

If you don’t have a mirror handy, the bottom of an aluminum soda can do the trick, though you might have to polish it to a high shine to make it reflective enough. You can polish the bottom of the can by rubbing it with clay or toothpaste, and melted chocolate will also act as a polish.

Method 10: Chemical Options

Starting a fire using chemical means is borderline unfeasible, simply because of the unlikelihood that you will have access to the necessary chemicals. But just in case you’re a high school science teacher whose chemistry field trip has somehow gotten stranded in the woods, you do have a couple of options.

• Potassium permanganate and glycerine – Look for a rock with a concave shape, and pour a small amount of potassium permanganate into the indentation. Add a few drops of glycerine to create an exothermic reaction. You will see a few sparks initially, followed by a pink-colored flame.
• Ammonium nitrate, salt, and zinc powder – Gently combine one gram of zinc powder, one gram of ammonium nitrate, and 0.25 grams of sodium chloride (table salt). Once combined, add a drop of water. The result will be a sudden exothermic reaction that produces a bright flame.

The above-mentioned methods are potentially dangerous, and should only be used in a life-or-death emergency. If you carry the chemicals necessary to start a fire, be extremely cautious to store them in a way that keeps them completely isolated to avoid an accidental reaction.