Used the beeswax that Dagwood sent me (thanks buddy!) , two blocks of paraffin wax, 3 blocks of Crisco and one big cast iron pot to cook up some cotton roll tinders. cooling off, about 1000 or so more... I added the Crisco, to soften the wax a bit so the rolls could be twisted and fluffed apart. Plain ol beeswax and paraffin, while 100% waterproof and float-able, required too much prep to use (slice them, smash apart and then fluff and ignite) the wax was just too hard to break apart,fluff up when hands are cold
its going on my Pelican cooler possibly....or maybe on my large Pelican case (tools etc) for the Jeep.
I had not thought to try Crisco, but I have found that petroleum jelly works the same without the risk of going rancid. My recipe is 13oz of petroleum jelly with 4oz to 8oz of paraffin and whatever amount of colored wax if I want something different than natural color. I generally reduce the paraffin when I add colored wax. This mixture will do well with about 125 to 130 cotton balls.
oooh never thought of the rancid part .....then and again, i use so damn many of these things that I don;t think it will have time to go rancid.....
How long will yours burn? Depending on how I shape it, I can get over 5 minutes out of each ball. Many years ago, before I really got into the many aspects of starting fires, I prided myself on making one match fires. Of course that is all about the prep, but since that was always my goal, I figure that if I can pull off a small piece of the PJCB that will burn about as long as a strike anywhere stick match, I think I could probably get up to 10 fires out of each PJCB and maybe more. So, a single batch of 125 of the PJCBs could possibly yield up to 1250 fires. They also only cost about five cents per PJCB. I am kind of digging the cylinder shape of yours. How do you get them like that?
I get about 5 minute burn times..... they come shaped like that. gimmie minute to take pics.... they are dental cottons , used to staunch bleeding and absorb saliva and blood during cleaning and worse...
Nice. I had tried to do the cylinder thing by putting the PJCB into a copper pipe and using a couple of dowels to squash it into that shape. Actually did a fairly good job, but it was too much effort just to get a different shape.