The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
Almost everyone carries one of those LED head lamps. They last forever and, as you may have seen, have an added benefit. They make fire. That’s if you have a bit of steel wool or other fine wire.
The principle is simple and will work with most electronics (including a cell phone battery). Inside your LED lamp you will have a cartridge which should contain 3 AAA batteries. On one side there will be two contacts which connect to the lamp itself. In your cell phone, you have a Lithium Ion battery. You take your steel wool and you place one end on one contact and one on the other. All you’re doing is completing a circuit. Because the wire is so fine, you will actually overheat the wires and they will glow red.
Just put your steel wool in your tinder bundle and blow it with a sustained current of air and voila! You might not spend the night cold.
I’ve had success with this using the battery from a cellphone and a headlamp, but it is much easier with a headlamp battery cartridge.
Do you carry tinder? What do you use?
