Make Your Own Lighter

  One of the things that keeps people mystified is the disposable butane lighter. Thus, do they slave away most of their life so they don't have to spend ten minutes lighting a friction fire.

  They're really easy to make, from junk or less. One place to start is a small piece of copper tubing with an endcap. If you don't have an endcap, you can just crimp one end shut, and soldiers in previous era used spent brass ammunition casings. If you don't have metal at all, you can build this part with a clay or glass jar, and possibly other things.


  The main 'miracle' of a disposable lighter is a very volatile fuel which bursts into flames at a single spark. This is very easy to come up with.

 • Pine and fir needles and sap have a high terpene content, which is called turpentine when distilled.

 • Citrus peel oils are exceedingly volatile.

 • Dry moonshine will burst into flames from a spark.

 • Most spices, such as rosemary or nutmeg or allspice or clove, have a high terpene content.

 • Most desert brush is a cloud of terpenes waiting to burst into flames.

  ...and so on. If that's not enough for you, you can soak eggshells or seashells in vinegar and destructively distill a little acetone from the calcium acetate formed.

  So, butane is unneeded.


  Getting a container is unimportant, because if you don't have a scrap metal tube that is small enough, any jar, jug or glass bottle can have a wick put through a hole in the lid. You'll want to use a natural fiber like hemp, jute, twine, cotton, linen, or the like, because plastic will dissolve in your oil and just melts in flame, and if you're using the metal tube, you'll probably want to make a sponge - a cotton ball or loose fiber - to soak the fuel and put the wick through it. You'll probably also want to keep your fuel in a different container, and soak it when you want to use it.

  Now all you need is a spark, and that volatile oil (or moonshine) will burst into flames

  "Flint and steel" is infamous as a firestarting method of producing sparks. (flint and crude iron works better) However, flint is not especially important as a crude silicate mineral. Crushed rock quartz or jasper or agate or basalt have the same hardness range on the moh's scale (6-7), and will kick off little sparks of iron if they are struck together. Metamorphic rocks such as granite have a similar hardness. Jade also has a hardness between 6-7. You can't use sedimentary rocks like sandstone or mudstone or shale, but otherwise, "grab a rock" is perfectly fine.

  You can use the old wheels from a dead disposable lighter, if you can work up a spring mechanism, such as a bent stick, which will press it against whatever rock you use while still allowing you to flick it. Or, you can just use a rock and a crude iron hand-striker.

  Sparks + volatile oil makes flame. You have made yourself a lighter.

  This is not the only way

  We taught you how to replicate a disposable lighter from common ingredients (including "stick," if it gets that bad)... because it impresses people. However, there are "lighters" from historical practices which are just as good, and also options...

Consider piss

  If you pee on a bunch of cloth or dry grass for a long time, the white crust that builds up is calcium nitrate. It's a not-very-soluble salt, the other salts are soluble and get washed out, so it's what's left.

  Soak it in some water with plenty of wood ash, it becomes potassium nitrate - saltpeter. You can piss, or buy it online.

  One trick was to take a bamboo tube, whittle out the margin so it was it's own lid, soak a bit of rope in potassium nitrate, and shove it in there. Once lit, it would just smoulder with the lid on, and the potassium nitrate was the only oxidizer keeping it slowly burning as a mild coal. Take the lit off and blow a little air on it, and fire appears. Cap it again, and it's smouldering again.

  The shelf fungus Fomes fomentarius was valued as tinder, and several other materials would probably work. Its traditional use didn't involve bothering to isolate potassium nitrate - they just pissed in a pot and boiled it, and it would continue burning for a long time in a smothered basket. Dried himalayan blackberry stalks or very old sun-bleached wood also provide a lightweight tinder begging for this method.

  You piss lighters, bro. Or sis.

Why not a pipe?

  Nowadays, people use pipes mostly to smoke cannabis or opium or tobacco. Their original use, however, was as firestarting equipment. If you stuff it with, say, dried grass and put a small ember on it, you can puff it into a big coal.

  Of course, this doesn't turn into actual flame unless you drop it on some dry grass and blow on it a few times, but, well, you can do that, and carrying dry tinder is a good idea. A magnifying glass may be sun-dependent as a firestarter, but one of these and a pipe is probably a worthwhile durable investment in terms of fire.

What about charcloth?

  If you take strips of cotton rags and an old tin, and heat them up, smothered, until the smoke stops coming out and takes them off the fire, devoid of oxygen, one has prepared charcloth - literally, charcoal cloth.

  If a single spark hits this, it will burn as a smouldering coal, and can be used to create fire with a tinder bundle.

  Of course, friction fires work, and you might want to learn how. But you can literally make a lighter from almost nothing, anytime, anyplace... and if you don't have any iron in your area (melt the black sand, which pans out, for example), there are still other ways to get a spark and turn it into fire.


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