Last Updated on September 13, 2020 by Lisa Vargas
Learning how to build a fire without matches is one of the most primitive survival skills that you could learn. There are several ways that you can start a fire without matches including:
- Flint and Steal
- Magnifying Glass
- Eyeglasses
- Binocular Lens
- Water Bottle
- Zip Lock Bags
- Bow Drill
- Hand Drill
- Fire Plow
- Coke can and chocolate bar
- 9V battery and steel wool
Man has been building fires since the caveman days, so as the saying goes….. “if a caveman can do it, so can you!” Once you learn how to build a fire using any of the techniques below, your survival skills will instantly jump up a notch and you can start bragging to all of your friends (just kidding….well kind of). It will also give you much more confidence in your ability to survive out in the wilderness.
Fire does so much more than keep you warm. You can use fire as a signal for rescue, you can use it to purify water and cooking your food, and it will serve as a light source in the dark of the night. Once your fire is started, you can keep it going as long as you need it.
But the hardest part is starting it, and after reading today’s post, you will know the skills needed to go out and start a fire without matches. So let’s get started!
3 Things You Need Before Starting Your Fire
The first thing you are going to need to do before you start the actual practice of making a spark, you are going to need three basics things to start a fire including tinder, kindling, and fuel. Below each one of those are discussed in more details.
Tinder
All of the fire starting methods below won’t make a different if you don’t have good tinder. That’s one of the most important things to remember when starting a fire with no matches. There are several different types of tinder you can use depending on the situation you are in. For example, if you find yourself alone in the wilderness, using more natural forms of tinder will logically be the best such as cattail fluff, cedar bark, fatwood, and birchbark.
At the same time, you should always have readily available tinder already prepared such as cotton balls and petroleum jelly, or tampons. And yes, you read correctly. Tampons are a great source of tinder because they are compacted forms of cotton.
They are individually sealed and will keep moisture out. You can put cotton balls and tampons in a container such as a plastic medicine bottle and then throw that in your bug out bag. Along with your fire starter, you will have the perfect, self-made fire starter kit with you at all times.
There are other types of tinder including lint from clothes dryer, char cloth, steel wool, pieces of vehicle tire, regular paper, lint from your socks and jute twine. You can get creative here. Find out what works best. Have it prepared and already packaged up if you can so you can have it ready when you need it.
Kindling
Kindling is more robust and is used to help enhance the flames of the tinder. Too large to be used as tinder, you will use kindling to get the fire going before you put on the logs. Kindling can be anything from small sticks, to pine cones, to small pieces of wood cut from a tree stump.
A material is considered good kindling when it is about as thick as your thumb, as long as your elbow to your fingertip, and you can hold an armload of it in one trip back to the campfire. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to try build your fire up too much.
Adding kindling slowly, one piece at a time on top of your tinder is vitally important. Too much too fast will surely kill your fire quicker than it took you to start it.
Fuel Wood
This is the final piece and is used for keeping the fire going. Most people tend to think that finding the biggest log or tree stump is the best fuel wood but remember to build the fire slowly. When choosing fuel for the fire, keep it simple.
Choose logs or branches that are about the size of your forearm. That’s all you will need. Look for standing dead trees as they are the driest and will burn easier.
Animal droppings can serve as fuel as well. Dried dung patties from cows, deer, moose, etc. can work well for starting and maintaining fires.
11 Ways To Start A Fire Without Matches
Below you will find 11 different ways to start a fire without matches. Always remember that practice makes purpose, so don’t just read this blog post. Make sure to take these methods, watch the videos so you get a good sense about the skill, and then go out and start practicing in your backyard.
1. How To Start A Fire With A Flint and Steal
Learning how to use the flint and steal method is one of the best survival skills you can have. Some say this is a more advanced skill to learn because there are much simpler ways to create a spark.
But with that said, what can be easier than striking two objects together right? Let’s go ahead and look real quick at how its accomplished. The sparks that are produced by this method aren’t as hot as other methods, but it will still work if you know what you’re doing.
To create sparks you simply are going to strike lightly and swiftly down with your wrist on the flint rock against the traditional carbon steel device. As you are reading this, you might be wondering where you can find pieces of these flint rocks.
If you are in the wilderness you can wonder around for a little bit and you should run in to them sooner or later. You can find them along a stream’s edge or scattered around on the ground. You will need a sharp edge so if you find the rock and its smooth you will need to smash a pieces off to create a thin, sharp piece of flint.
Truth be told, you can essentially use any type of rock that has a registers higher than a 7 on the Mohs Scale Of Hardness to create a spark, but because flint is more easily accessible, most people aim to use this as the rock of choice.
Make sure you are striking the steel against the flint. It will take about 5 minutes of practice to get the skill down. Make sure you don’t miss because you can slash your knuckles open with the flint. You will be striking hard so you may even want to use some gloves while you are learning this method.
2. How To Start A Fire With A Magnifying Glass
The first thing you need to do is gather some tinder. Then essentially all you are doing is using the magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s heat on a certain spot on that tinder bundle, which will ultimately spark a fire.
Make sure that the lens you are using is at 5X power or else it makes it more difficult to ignite the fire. Again, with this method, you can use char cloth to almost guarantee your ignition as shown in the video below.
When positioning the magnifying glass, you will want to position it so the magnifying glass produces a dot of light directly onto the tinder that you want to use.
Make sure the dot is as small as possible because the smaller the dot, the more concentrated the heat will be. It should take about 30 seconds to 1 minute for the magnifying glass to generate enough heat to ignite the tinder.
This is one of my favorite methods to star a fire because, as you’ve probably noticed, it’s much easier, in my opinion, then the flint and steal method. You can buy a small magnifying glass, throw it in your bug out bag or backpack, and you’ll be all set.
3. How To Start A Fire With Eyeglasses
This is exactly the same concept as the magnifying glass, in that you are concentrating heat from the sun onto your tinder of choice, but instead of using a magnifying glass you are using eyeglasses.
The eyeglasses act as the conduit for focusing the heat to the tinder, just like the magnifying glass. As you will learn with this method, it is not as reliable as the magnifying glass because you should only try this method using simple reading glasses because your prescription glasses from you local eye doctor most likely won’t work.
The issue you might have is that the eyeglasses won’t be able to get that concentrated light point that you need to ignite your tinder that’s because technically they are corrective lenses and not magnifying glasses.
So if you are near sited, the lens of your glasses aren’t shaped correctly to form that concentration of heat point. As a matter of fact, your lenses are designed to spread light out to correct your vision and help you see further away.
Therefore, if you are far-sited, the glasses are made so that it creates a more focused point of light to help you see better. You have a much better chance of creating fire with these glasses than the near-sited glasses.
Even if you have far-sited glasses, you may not be able to use them. There are certain prescriptions that simply aren’t going to be able to fully bring a concentrated point of light to your ball of tinder.
So how do you start a fire with eyeglasses then? Well, the only true glasses you can use are reading glasses. They officially act as magnifiers to help you see the smaller text by magnifying that text.
Even then, it can be a challenge to get that light to create enough heat to light your tinder. In my humble opinion, I wouldn’t rely on this method in emergency situations unless you’ve practiced with your own glasses and know for sure that you can get it to work.
4. How To Start A Fire With Binocular Lens
Using a binocular lens to start a fire makes it convenient as most people use binoculars when outdoors hunting. The hardest part of using a binocular lens if figuring out how to get it out of the eye of the binocular.
Some binoculars are easy and some are harder than others. The video below from Red Dog Bushcraft is long (approximately 22 minutes), but it explains how to get the lens out first, and then shows how to use if for igniting a fire.
Again, this strategy for starting a fire can easily be done, but it’s a little inconvenient simply because you have to get the lens out of the binocular itself.
But, if you find yourself stuck in a situation that wasn’t planned and you have a pair of binoculars on you, you will know how to start a fire if you can get the lens out.
Some of the lens will just pop right out of the eye socket piece on the binoculars, but others will be more difficult and you’ll have to take a screwdriver and try to unscrew the lens from the binocular.
Once you get the lens pried out of binocular, then you are going to use it just like a magnifying glass to start the fire.
5. How To Start A Fire With A Water Bottle
Starting a fire with a clear plastic water bottle is one of the more interesting methods I’ve come to learn. It’s a good skill to have because at any given time we are carrying around plastic water bottles (even though they are bad for the environment) and you never know when you can get stuck in a survival situation with only the water bottle you are holding in your hand.
To ignite the fire with a water bottle, you are going to use the bottle as a lens to focus the sun’t heat onto a spot on the tinder of choice.
You can use leaves or paper for tinder if you haven’t prepared anything in advanced. You are going to remove the label from the bottle and then use the convex edge of the bottle to create the effects of a magnifying glass to focus the sunlight.
In the above video from The King Of Random, he uses paper as tinder to start the smoldering. Once the paper starts smoldering, you care going to fold another layer of paper over the smoldering piece.
After this, you are going to start swinging the papers around gently to create air, which after a few seconds, should start smoking and then eventually the paper will catch fire.
6. How To Start A Fire With Plastic Zip Lock Bags
This next technique involves a simple zip lock bag and some water. It is the same concept as above, except you are creating the focused edge for heat using a plastic baggy.
Simply fill a zip lock bag about half way full of water then tilt the zip lock bag at an angle and then twist the bag tightly to create a bubble which acts as the lens for igniting the fire.
In the above video, you’ll notice that the tinder, which is bark, is ground up to produce the surface as to which the start the fire.
Once you’ve got the tinder in place, you grab your ball of water and hold it there on top of the tinder pile. Once you see it smoldering, you can add a little bit more of your ground up tinder on top and repeat the process a few times.
Once you get the pile to smoke on its one, you are going to start adding small pieces of pine needle sized tinder to get the smoke going even more.
Gather some more grass and possibly shaved cedar bark possibly and add it to the fire. Creating something that looks like a bird’s nest should be your goal at this stage.
Once you have added this “bird’s nest” type of tinder to the smoldering pile, you need to give it some more air by just spinning around with it in your hand.
At this point the entire nest should catch fire in which you can then transfer to the ground to start building your fire up to a roaring flame.
7. How To Start A Fire With A Bow Drill
Using the bow drill method is the first of three methods we will talk about using friction as its base for getting your fire going.
With this type of method you are going to need a good string such as jute string, the bow itself, which is a flexible long stick, another stick to serve as a spindle, a fire board which can be made out of wood from chopping logs, and finally your fire pan that can transfer your tinder bundle to another spot.
You definitely need to practice this technique for awhile before you will get the hang of it.
The best type of wood you can use for making fire using the bow drill method are softwoods such as yucca, balsam fir, red cedar, cypress, tamarack, cottonwood, and a few others.
You can use hardwoods but it will be much harder to get the fire to start, which means you are burning precious extra calories to start the fire then if you were to use softwoods.
Step 1: Create the fire board. Create the fire board by splitting a log so that you end up with a few 2 inch thick boards.
Step 2: Create the pilot hole. Now you are going to create your pilot hole for the tip of the spindle. This is usually done with the top of a knife or a sharp rock. Create the pilot hole about 3/4″ away from the edge of the fire board. This hole doesn’t have to go all the way through the fire board, it’s simply a notch to guide the spindle.
Step 3: Make a spindle. Cut a stick that is about the length of your forearm between your elbow and your wrist. You want to round out both ends of the stick with your knife, making sure that each tip is evenly cut so that it distributes the same amount of weight into the pilot hole.
Step 4: Make a hand piece. You will be applying a lot of downward pressure onto the spindle so you need to have something to protect your hand and help force the weight down. You can use a little bit of lubrication as well such as candle wax, suntan lotion, or vaseline to help with easing the friction on your top hand. You can even use the top part of some knifes that have socket that the top of the spindle can be inserted into.
Step 5: Make your bow. Find a piece of wood that’s about 2 feet long. Create a notch in the bottom of the bow for your string to run through. You will quickly learn that the tension of your string for your bow drill is going to require a lot of trial and error.
Once you get all of your pieces in place, it’s time to start spinning your spindle and start burning out the pilot hole that you created in step 2.
Once you have the small hole burnt into the wood, you are going to grab your fire pan, which can be made from the bark of cedar tree, and start spinning until the friction creates a little cherry in the fire pan.
After this, you will take the hot, smoldering cherry and transfer it to a tinder bundle to start increasing the fuel you add. You soon will have a blazing fire.
8. How To Start A Fire With A Hand Drill
This is one of the most primitive ways to start a fire and also the one you always see the cavemen doing. It is similar to the bow drill method, except the hand drill method uses just the downward pressure from your hands to create the friction needed to ignite the flame.
The most important technique to learn in this method is the positioning of your hands and the spinning motion required. If you do it right, you can have a flame in no time.
If you do it wrong, it will use up precious calories that are so vital to preserve in survival situations.
To start a fire with this method, you simply need a fire board about 1/2″ – 1/3″ thick, and a spindle about a pinky width in size.
Again, choose soft wood as its easier to use in the hand drill method. You are going to need to prepare your divot for your pilot hole, just as you did above in the bow drill method.
Once you’ve done that, you need to pay attention to the traction aspect of this technique. Without proper traction in your hands it will be easy to slip from the top of the spindle, all the way down without putting much pressure into the spindle.
You can use pine pitch to put on your hands to help ease the heat of the friction on your hands. You just need to take the pitch and crush it in your hand into a fine powder and the work the powder on the shaft of the spindle onto the first 2/3 of the spindle.
There are a couple of ways to start using your hands to burn the pilot hole. Try not to use just the palms of your hands. Make sure to use your entire hand because it will prevent you from getting bruises or soars and use nice, long strokes when spinning the spindle.
Make sure that your body is positioned correctly as well. You should be on one knee so that it allows you to crouch down so that you can bend at the hips and have your elbows and hands straight in line.
Once you’ve got the pilot hole burnt out, then you need to create a notch at the edge of your fire board. Make it clean enough so that the dust can easily slip through the notch onto the fire pan.
Once the notch is complete, you can finally start spinning and creating your hot cherry that will be transferred to your tinder bundle.
9. How To Start A Fire With A Fire Plow
With the fire plow method, you are using a stick to vigorously create friction on a fire board in order to create an ember that can be transferred to a tinder bundle. It can be labor intensive but its simple enough to create the ember that you need to get a fire started.
To start, you will need any type of softwood so that the interior is nice and spongy. You will use this as your base fire board. Next, you can use the same type of wood that you made your fire board with to make your plow.
The plow is typically cut at an angle so that it pushes the heat into one specific spot to create a hot enough ember. Typically a plow should be about 1/4″ – 1/2″ thick.
Once you have created your plow, then you will need to make a divit down the center of the fire board using a knife. This is going to be the path that your plow will run down.
At this point you can start running the plow stick back and forth to create the heat from the friction from the back and forth action.
This can take a while to get the heat going, but if you do it for long enough, about 3-4 minutes, it will certainly create smoke and a nice cherry for you to use in lighting your tinder.
10. How To Start A Fire With A Coke Can And Chocolate Bar
Using a coke can and a chocolate bar is a fun way to experiment when building a fire with no matches. It’s quite simple and its something you can demonstrate to your friends that is fun and super cool to show off.
To create fire this way, you will start by rubbing the bottom of the aluminum can with the chocolate bar. Next, you are going to wipe the chocolate off of the bottom of the can with a clean towel, essentially aiming at polishing the bottom of the can.
You are going to repeat this process as many times as it takes to create a shiny aluminum surface on the bottom of the can.
Next you are going to take the can and find the sun’s and tilt the can so that it directly reflects the sun’s rays. You are going to point those rays at a bundle of tinder that you’ve collected earlier.
This method is similar to the lens methods described above using a magnifying glass. You are essentially turning the bottom of the soda can into a mirror so that it can harness the heat of the sun into one focal point directed at the tinder pile.
11. How To Start A Fire With A 9V Battery And Steel Wool
Using a 9 volt battery and steel wool is a classic method that’s popular among preppers. You simply are touching the battery head against the steel wool (#000 is best because it’s thinner) and it ignites small embers racing through the wool.
This method to start a fire is fast and fun to do. You can prepare to use this strategy by packing this in your bug out bag.
Steel wool is good to use because it works well under damp weather conditions. When buying steel wool, make sure you buy the super-fine grade of steel wool, which is known as #000.
To pull off making a fire using this method, start by pulling the steel wool apart so that it gets more oxygenated. Then all you are going to do integrate the steel wool in your tinder bundle and simply touch the 9V battery to the steel wool and it will ignite the tinder flame.
Just a quick note, make sure to avoid breathing in the smoke from the steel wool because it’s probably a little toxic.
Final Thoughts
I hope you learned some new ways to start a fire without matches. Some of these are really fun to experiment with in your backyard. Make sure you go out and practice some these and find the one that is easiest for you to do and that you feel most comfortable with.
If there’s any other cool ways to light a fire with no matches, please post your comments below. We would love to hear them!