Russ and I have recently turned emergency preparedness into a small hobby. I like the sound of “emergency preparedness” better than “survivalist”, because the latter brings to mind images of bunkers and guns and hunting camo.
Sunday we basically had a day of arts and crafts, making fire stuff!
Paraffin Wax Cooking Candle
We started with small aluminum cans, cat food in this case. We rolled corrugated cardboard in strips just as tall as the cans, and shoved the rolled strip into the cans. Then we melted paraffin wax and poured it until it filled the can. This stuff takes a little bit to start (ie, a match may go out before it lights), but will apparently get hot enough to cook food and boil water!
Vaseline and Cotton Ball Starters
This stuff lights on fire super easy. Take cotton balls, and knead vaseline into it until it’s a gooey mess. This is really dirty and gross. 🙂 After we were happy with how much vaseline was in it, we dipped it in more paraffin to try to keep it sealed against water.
These light on fire super easy, and provide sustained heat. We placed one on the candle from above, lit it and it lit the candle. We imagine you could do the same with wood tinder if you needed.
Fire-Making Kit
Lastly we put it all together. Russ bought some fire-steel, which you strike one piece against the other to provide sparks, and we stuffed it into a small kit along with the cotton balls and some cinder cloth he’d made earlier. (no idea how to make cinder cloth…something about a smaller space and a tiny hole). The sparks from the fire-steel are enough to light the cotton balls, so we have a complete kit!
Then we dropped all of this into Miranda and mine’s emergency kit!
4 Comments
Kelly
April 11, 2016 at 9:37 amOnce you go down the “Prepper” path, you are committed. The funny thing is, most people have this perception that it’s all weird “tin-foil hat” obsession and paranoia, but I find that it’s actually quite fun and super interesting. It’s actually fun to imagine how you’d McGyver yourself out of a situation with just the stuff in your pockets. There’s something fun about figuring out if you have everything you need to survive the first 72 hours after a major earthquake. And putting together a “get-home-bag” for your car is like putting together a prepper puzzle… again, kinda fun.
One tip for the petroleum jelly cotton balls… I pack mine into empty “Kinder Suprise” eggs, and tape the edges to make them water-tight (although I can’t imagine water affects them much anyway) and tidy. My kid gets chocolate and toys, and I get something to create my “Tinder Suprise”.
As for those emergency candle / canned stoves, I’ve been meaning to use some empty shoe polish cans to make those. That way they would have a nice tight lid to protect the contents when shoved into a bag or other kit. And those cans are also great for making char cloth… you put the cloth inside, put the lid on, poke a hole in the top, and then cook the thing until the cloth is charred nicely. If you don’t have boot polish tins, I suspect the lidded ones for candies (the kind that grandma likes) would work just as well.
Craig Fleming
April 11, 2016 at 9:49 amYes! And both Miranda and I love planning and preparing for stuff (she’s currently obsessing about Retirement. :P) so it’s a fun little hobby we can enjoy together in places.
The other one Russ and I did recently was playing with radios. We both have hand-held HAMs for paragliding, so we tested out using them in the city. I’m at 16th and Granville and he’s on Prior near the viaduct. Miranda and I have a plan to meet in a park near our house in the case of an emergency, so I wanted to see if Russ and I could talk from there. With just the “rubber ducky” antennas, we couldn’t. So we both bought a coil antenna each. I went to the park with some fishing line and a garbage bag, tossed some stones in the bag, tied the line around the bag and the antenna and threw it over a tree branch. Suddenly Russ and I are having a perfectly clear conversation across the city, without using the cell network!
Yes, char cloth is what I meant, not cinder cloth! Do you cook it in the oven or stove?
Kelly
April 11, 2016 at 10:40 amI’ve actually never made the stuff. I intend to, but there are always other things higher on my to-do list, especially since jelly cotton balls seem to work pretty well enough in the same capacity, and are much easier to make.
As for the radio, HAM radios seem like a big step to take. I can’t argue that they would be really effective for emergency communication, especially since everyone I know works and lives several kilometers apart. But again, it’s a big step for anyone who is a casual prepper. I’ve actually been considering some special cel phone attachments that I’ve read about (I think the brand name was “GoTenna”) that apparently allows for cel phones to operate outside the cel phone network, but only to other GoTenna users. It would be much more dummy friendly, and much more portable, but I’m guessing a tad bit less reliable.
But that pretty much sums me up as a prepper. Lazy, dumb, but enthusiastically ADD (“ooh, shiny!”). As far as a hobby goes, this one is pretty useful, as it’s gotten me out of a number of inconvenient spots, saved me a lot of frustration and trouble, and impressed the heck out of my friends and family. I’m now the guy they always turn to when something comes up and everyone else looks around with a “what the heck do we do now?” look on their faces.
Craig Fleming
April 11, 2016 at 12:47 pmYeah, I think the only reason we played with radios was because we had them already for another use. 🙂 Paragliding sometimes you can end up in awkward positions where the FRS aren’t powerful enough and there’s no cell service because you’re on a mountain somewhere in the Fraser Valley. >.< I will look up the GoTenna, because that's a cool idea!