Fire Lighting with Char Cloth

By Mel Evans and Kevin Fuller

If you have been to any of our Forest School sessions you will most likely have helped us light the fire using a Fire Striker and cotton wool as tinder. Sometimes, we use char cloth as an alternative tinder. The char cloth is slow burning and has a very low ignition temperature. By hitting it with a spark from a Fire Striker or traditional Flint and Steel you can create a glowing ember that can be added to a tinder bundle. When oxygen is introduce to this (by gentle blowing) the tinder bundle ignites.

You can make Char Cloth by taking some squares of cotton and putting them through pyrolysis. Put simply pyrolysis is when something burns in an environment free of oxygen, giving an outcome of charring,

In the videos below Kev demonstrates how to do this on a Kelly Kettle pot stand.