Written by

Craig Caudill

Making a Good Tinder Bundle

Survival folks spend a great deal of time on firebuilding, and for good reason.  If you have a fire, you have so many resources available to you that they would fill an entire book all on their own.  It is for this reason that we will be showing how to use the resources from a fire, and how to use a fire to make other resources.  However, you cannot do any of this without getting a good fire started and one method to assist you in doing this is making a good tinder bundle.

A well-made tinder bundle ranks right up there with a good ferro rod, lighter, or other easy-to-use ignition source as being an integral part of starting a fire.  Once you have determined you have a good ignition source you need fuel to make this fire happen.  A tinder bundle  can be utilized as this fuel.  In this video we go through the basics of tinder bundle construction, material and getting it lit and on fire.

As with all fire making considerations you must have 3 things to have a fire.   Those three things are oxygen, fuel and an ignition source (heat).  Here are some important tips of each.

Oxygen – this can come from two sources.  You blowing on the fire itself, or the air around you. The air around you can be a slight breeze, or in the case of this tinder bundle, swinging the bundle in the air.  Please know that too much of good thing is bad here.  So if there is heavy wind (or if you blow too hard), it will be hard to get a tinder bundle started and if it is started it will often blow a bundle apart.

Fuel – your fuel must be dry.  Never pick fire-making materials from the ground, anything found lying on the ground will almost always have atleast small amounts of moisture in them.  Smaller materials, with lots of ‘edge’ are good here, the more edges there are to catch, the better your chances of getting a good fire.  That is why a tinder bundle is such a good choice to get fire started.

Ignition source (heat) – ferro rods, matches, lighters, torches, sparks……need I say more?  There are so many different items to use as an ignition source.  We already have one video on the topic of using a Ferro Rod, I am sure we will have plenty more to come.

So knowing the three must-haves for fire (oxygen, fuel, and ignition source (heat) along with this video on how to build good tinder bundle should get you well on your way to building the all important fire!