I’ve burned holes in things using a magnifying glass (not a Fresnel lense, however). Do they work as well as a traditional magnifier?
And of course using that would require a fair bit of direct, bright sunlight.
Yeah, definitely you need a bright sunny day; but if you have one, why expend matches or lighter fluid?
You have inspired me to run downstairs, grab the fresnel bookmark I bought a while ago, go outdoors, and do a little practical pyromania. I see no way this could go wrong, do you?
Please post the exact supplies you think you need to do so and then make a short video of yourself actually doing it.
I spent plenty of summer afternoons unsuccessfully “starting fires” and I know you need 1 or 2 more things than you mention.
- you need a reasonably sturdy and flexible stick to use as a bow.
- You need a really hard and straight stick as the spindle
- You need a softer piece of wood shaped as a board that is stable enough to support the spindle and bow. Preferably it has a cut out channel to collect the embers
- To prepare all of the above you need 3 types of wood
- A really good knife and or a hatchet
- Something that will light up when a spark lands on it. Wool/hair/really dry grass/wood shavings - this is harder than it sounds.
- Good dry kindling.
- A reasonable supply of dry(ish) firewood.
You said shoelaces and lip balm, I’ll spot you the knife.
Good luck.
I thought wool or hair would only smolder, being keratin instead of cellulose.
When I first started bicycle touring I carried a guidebook that also served as a pillow support. These days everything is on electronics so carrying books and paper maps is no longer needed (unless you are bringing a book for pleasure reading). And since everything is electronic now (cell phone, Garmin, GoPro, etc. - I only bring a cell phone, BTW), you need to be able to keep things charged, so battery banks/solar chargers have emerged as a thing.
I always have a $20 stowed somewhere for emergencies, and a few coins for the rare pay phone I may encounter where there is no cell service and I have a rare need (essentially, almost never).
I see a lot of people trying to sleep in a bivy, and not getting a lot of sleep. One- and two-person tents are so light now it hardly makes sense to subject one’s self to a bivy.
Maybe not quite as well as a solid lens of the same size, but that’s not really relevant, since you’d have a very hard time finding a solid lens the size of a full page, and it’d be prohibitively expensive and heavy. But a 10-inch Fresnel lens compared to a 2-inch magnifying glass? It’ll perform much, much better.
All this burning glass/fire piston/whatever seems like it is for some extreme emergency/survival situations. For normal camping trips, I do not think the advice to pack a Zippo/matches plus some stormproof matches for backup is that obsolete.
I really suck at starting fires without modern supplies like a lighter. This may well be the reason.
Hell, for an outdoor picnic it’s not obsolete.
Nearly 30 years back, we were meeting up with a large group at an area park. We had reserved a picnic shelter, with grill, and brought hot dogs, charcoal etc.
NOBODY had matches.
We wound up borrowing some from the people at the next shelter - who, I hope, had a good laugh at us idiots. Pity I didn’t have my fresnel bookmark back then!
Alternate firestarting methods seem to be geared towards TEOTWAWKI scenarios: long term firestarting methods that you could use long after matches or even lighters would be used up, and self-reliance methods that don’t require the products of an industrial civilization. I suppose if you wanted to be really hardcore you could learn to drill a spindle by hand, or start from scratch making a stone knife with which you could produce a bow drill.
Paper maps - at least one basic one - are still useful. Electronics may not get a signal. Your system may steer you wrong, or just in an un expected way. Phones may fail for one reason or another.
Just this past fall a lost hiker wandered into our campsite. She went off alone, with her phone for navigation, and wound up in a dead zone. No directions, no backup plan, just wandering the woods at dusk. She got lucky, we were the only campers in the area that weekend.
At a minimum, get a .pdf or screenshot of a map loaded to your phone so you don’t need cell service to know where you’re going.
In the middle of Covid, I took a trip out west deliberately not taking a physical map because my latest atlas was several years old and I didnt want to risk relying on out of date information. So of course I got lost and my phone was out of range at the same time. I didn’t want to stop to ask for directions because the only gas station was so full of people that not only would there be Covid risk, there would barely be enough space to park. But it was at the intersection of two large roads, so I took the large road that was vaguely in the direction I wanted until I got to a McDonalds where I leeched wifi and found out that I had merely failed to go diagonally when I should have and was on the right road.
That would have been solved by downloading offline maps, but not if I were in a multi day hiking situation where my battery got drained.
A number of trailheads I use in the mountains have a map posted to a board at the start, and a lot of them include mileage between points. I always take a photo with my smart phone of the map as I start-off. Altho I am familiar with the trails and distances, it’s always good to have that reference. I also take a screen shot of the hike from a site like TrailLink or AllTrails (you can also download a map from these sites).
Not only that, but dead zones can happen even in a park, some people panic if they cant get help by calling on their phone.
My department (GIS) makes those for our county. Good idea to take a picture. Maybe we should place a hint above the map that taking a picture would be a good idea.
Heck, that’s the first thing I do when handling the wilds of Las Vegas - take a picture of my room number. Saves the embarrassment of having to go to the Front Desk and ask “Where the hell am I?”
Coleman lanterns still have their place. They are brighter and last longer in a large, semi-permanent campsite. LEDs inside the tent, propane outside is our rule.
No, they’re not. Coleman lantern max out at 1500 lumens AFAICT, with 700-900 lumen types being more common. I can get that in battery or solar LED very easily. I especially like the ones that work with my portable power tool battery ecosystem, the worklights are much brighter and the camp lanterns at least as bright (well, I see Milwaukee’s lantern is and I know my Ryobi is) but if brightness was my main criterion I could go 3000 lumen easily enough.
It’s 10 hours for a tank of gas (Cite). That Milwaukee I cited above is 18 hours on a charge.
And I know I never go “semi-permanent” camping nowadays without a solar charger.
I remember my first backpacking trip, with a youth group. I was eleven. I wore leather boots which each weighed as much as my head, and carried a cotton sleeping bag, the kind with a flannel lining with a mallard print, and a flashlight that weighed more than those boots. My backpack was, yep, canvas. As I recall, they horse-packed in the tents and camp kitchen and food. We could never have carried it in.
My last backpacking trip, our two-person tent weighed less than those boots. Ultra light gear all the way. I carried less weight than when I was eleven, even carrying half the food, the kitchen, the tent. The stove fit in the palm of my hand, our lights were teeny but brilliant. And nothing stank of mildew, either.
We never sat around a campfire – fires are rarely permitted in the back country these days. We took care to leave our campsite better than we found it – but we did that when I was eleven too. That youth group was way ahead of its time.