I don't consider myself an avid outdoorsman, but I do like to learn survival skills. I especially like any that involve knives and fire!

My question is for anyone that has made petroleum jelly cotton balls. I whipped together two or three as an experiment, but I plan on making several more to have ready in case of an emergency. Here's the question. Do any of you just "smear" the petroleum jelly all over the cotton balls, or do you somehow melt the petroleum jelly so the cotton balls are completely saturated? Any help is greatly appreciated!

I've usually seen them put into a ziplock bag with the jelly and then sort of mashed around.


To me, pre-prepared stuff like the cotton balls are handy for hiking or camping or whatever, but not really a true practice of survival skills. Making fire with stuff you find in the woods is a lot more of a survival skill. I also suck at it. A lot.

True. Petroleum jelly cotton balls isn't really "survival skills." Poor choice of words on my part. I think emergency preparedness fits the cotton balls better, because in an emergency kit, everything should be readily available for use. I think just the fire starting aspect of my question had me thinking of survival skills.

As a side note, by sister and her husband are nuts about primitive survival skills! They do the whole stick rubbing thing to start fires! I tried it once, got a small bit of smoke, then gave up. Another time, I guess!

Well, at the college I go to, their motto is "learn by doing." I did just that. I melted some petroleum jelly and saturated a cotton ball. I may have gotten some water mixed in with it, so I'll try again. So far though, it seems that saturating the cotton ball makes it so a ferro rod doesn't work too well.

Don't saturate them buddy, you just want the outside well covered and then you can tear them open a little if need be to take a spark !

Try some cotton balls soaked in paraffin oil, I keep them in an old pill bottle or similar !

I've always done better with dryer lint than Vaseline soaked cotton balls, but maybe that's just me...

I find petroleum jelly soaked cotton balls all over the woods when I'm out there - you just have to know how to spot them in the wild. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

Yup. Learned this the hard way! I've messed with the cotton balls and petroleum jelly before, but I guess I had high hopes that with more petroleum jelly they'd burn even longer! Well, I'm sure they'll burn longer, but they sure don't take a spark that way!

Thepitbulloflove, the nice thing about the petroleum jelly is that it burns a lot longer than just a plain cotton ball or dryer lint. For someone like me, I need all the help I can get when trying to start a fire without matches or a lighter. I just like to optimize my chances of success!

Oh! Tell me more!

More seriously, though, I'd like to know where to look for fatwood! I have some that I found/bought at the grocery store, but I'd really like to know where to look for it in a tree.

Take the cotton balls and kind of work the jelly into them by tearing it apart a bit and working it in again. Now- palce them in a baggie or one of those orange match tubes that are waterproof. You can also make some nice firestarters by using old candle wax- wood shavings and some candle wicks. Simply melt the wax in an old pot on the stove and pour in a bit of the shavings- now take the wick from old candles and lay them in an empty egg caron- after the wax is melted- pour mixture carefuly into egg carton and let dry. After all is dry cut the 12 sections apart and you should end up with 12 dandy fire starters with a small wick sticking out of each one. This will stay lit for about 10 minutes allowing you to get a good flame going under any conditions. I just tell all the gals in the family to save old parts of candles for me and I make them for everybody <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbup.gif" alt="" />. Hope this helps- Thanks

Fatwood can be hard to find till ya really know what to look for !

Here is some I found the other day....



Once ya cut it and see the colour you know it's fatwood.....



Then just cut some thin curls....



Add a spark and your good to go.....