Outdoor Life Prepare for Anything Survival Manual (62 page)

After spending many years as a welder, I became interested in fuel production. For many years, we produced ethanol fuel from our farm, and I’ve recently been branching out into biodiesel (all without any college education or engineering degrees). Here are some basics that anyone can master.

IT’S VERSATILE
Anything that will ferment—not just corn—will produce ethanol, and anyone can learn this process.

IT’S ADAPTABLE
Any oil seed (like soybeans, sunflowers, peanuts, coconut, canola, and many more) can be turned into biodiesel fuel. Every bushel of soybeans can be turned into 1.5 gallons (6 l) of vehicle fuel or home-heating oil.

IT’S GOT POTENTIAL
This type of energy production does not have to be in the hands of big business. If the public got serious about it, we could have tens of thousands of people safely producing their own fuel in a sustainable manner.

IT’S POSSIBLE
Solar is another great form of energy. I recently built a solar home-heating panel that heats air to 120°F (49°C) on sunny days, and my next project is to build a system that will stockpile some of this heat for use at night.

Firestarters and tinder are survival basics. While tinder can be almost any dry, flammable substance, some options are better than others. Here’s a guide to some flammable bounty found in nature—or in your pack.

TINDER FUNGUS
In northern areas, look for bulbous blotches of blackish wood on live birch trees. The inside of the fungus, which is reddish-brown, can easily catch a spark. Crumble it for a quick start to a fire or use chunks of it to keep a coal alive.

SNACKS
Cheese curls are dry, crunchy stuff soaked in fat. No surprise that they burn nicely.

SPANISH MOSS
Peel this from trees and it’s a great tinder, but be careful—it’s also a great home for chiggers and other nasty critters.

BIRCH BARK
Strip ribbons of bark from downed trees; it works just as well as bark from live ones and is already nice and dry.

CEDAR BARK
Mash the bark up with a rock and then pull it apart with your fingers to make nice ignitable strands.

CATTAIL FLUFF
Pull out the fluffy insides of a cattail and ball them up to catch a spark. Have more tinder on hand, as they’ll go up fast.

ROTTEN WOOD
Shave off small pieces of dry, rotten wood with your knife; they’ll flame right up with a good spark.

Archaeological evidence suggests that few of our ancestors could make fire with stones prior to the invention of flint and steel. This unlikely method can still work today if you have the right materials. To make a “fire stone” set, you’ll need pieces of iron ore, such as bog iron or marcasite. You’ll also need extremely fine tinder charred to improve its ignition abilities. Shavings of true tinder fungus (
Fomes fomentarius
) are a great choice, if you can find it.

You’ll need to scrape the tinder fungus with a sharp tool and place the fuzzy scrapings into a bundle of dry tinder.

Once you’ve done this, strike one piece of iron ore against the other briskly and quickly. You could also use a sharp piece of flint against the ore. Strike your sparks right over your tinder. If everything is just right, one of the tiny iron sparks will catch in the tinder, which can then be blown into a fire.

Matches and lighters should be your primary fire makers, but it’s also smart to have some redundancies built into your survival gear. Add these backup methods 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.