I bought a tube, well three in fact, of hand cleaning gel, complete with carabiner clips from the 99p store. On examining the label I noticed the contents were listed as ‘inflammable’. Oh good! it may be useful as a firelighting gel or improvised stove fuel… Wrong! I tested some and despite a good going over with a lighter flame the b*gg*r wouldn’t burn!

I blame Them.

So what does burn the way it used to these days?

bloody health n safety. If I had kids, I’d be moaning about their inability to get into danger early in life and learn from their mistakes. How do you learn about the inherant dangers of combustibles unless you’ve tried to blow things up/set things alight as a kid. That’s what bonfire night is for!

Amen! But I’m still looking for common household products that burn like f***.

paper towels.

no seriously… i almost burnt my folks house down when going through a “fire fetish” stage when i was about 10.

tried to blame the scorched carpet and worktops on my dad’s roll ups… mum almost bought it, too…

Remember those dried flower arrangements that were popular with our folks back in the seventies/eighties? I can confirm that they go up and burn very hot for a very short time…taking your eyebrows, eyelashes and quite a bit of your fringe with them. 😳

Teak Oil.

The stuff that you rub into your lovely wooden table to avoid stains from Pot Noodles and chippy gravy, sorry this is STW, I meant Fairtrade Coffee and soup (from cartons, not in tins).

Even the cloth you use to rub it in can catch fire spontaneously, and it’s ace when you chuck some on a small fire; like the end of a Thunderbirds story.

Pringles. Great firelighters.

I watched a distant neighbour adding stuff to a fire in his back garden. ‘That’s a bit close to the hedge’ I thought. I can confirm, one thing that does burn well is a leylandii hedge.

I was thinking along the liquid/gel line…

But keep them coming.

[quoteI watched a distant neighbour adding stuff to a fire in his back garden. ‘That’s a bit close to the hedge’ I thought. I can confirm, one thing that does burn well is a leylandii hedge.[/quote]

Bahahaha

Nothing better than a good old can of Lynx body spray and a lighter. Just be careful the flame doesn’t decide to jump into the can and blow your arm off 😯

Non dairy whitening powder that we used to get in CCF ration packs, burns well, you can make trails across fires onto people sitting opposite 🙂

Mix some vaseline with petrol for diy napalm…fun when you make jam jars full of it explode.

Back on track, I have some booze based hand gel and it burns nicely enough.

Kevevs – Member

bloody health n safety.

On the other hand, since I was a kid we’ve got right into making clothes out of plastic. Or frozen petrol.

Pringles, you say….hmmmmm…….

A gorse bush in the height of summer goes up with a whoosh, trouble is the hillside follows afterwards if your not careful.

The fertiliser bombs we made as kids also went up with a whoosh – or a very loud WHUMP to be more accurate, especially if you aerated the sacks full of fertiliser with an airhose beforehand…..but again the barn could also go up so you had to be careful, our gas canister powered cannons used to fire stuff the length of the field, till we got cocky one day and used two canisters which blew up our concrete pipe and showered the farm yard with concrete, i guess we deserved the battering we got from my mates dad.

Kids these days wouldn’t know the first place to start wi a fertiliser bomb, which is prob a good thing if i’m honest.

Teak Oil.

Plus one, I purchased lots of meths today as well.

peanuts

The most alarmingly and surprisingly flammable household material I’ve used is wire wool – when its in the same toolbox as a 9v battery. The resulting fire is quite a thing to behold and putting the bastard thing out is practically impossible.

Kids these days wouldn’t know the first place to start wi a fertiliser bomb, which is prob a good thing if i’m honest.

I guy I was at college with made a chemistry set bomb as a kid which he set off in a telephone box. It took out all the windows of the old folks home across the road. He told me this whilst suffering from heat stoke as a way of contextualising why he’d gathered all the items in the kitchen that said ‘do not microwave’ and put them all in the microwave together.

Oxy-acetylene balloons were a personal favourite.

Proper loud bangs with them!

mac beat me to it. one of my earlier experiments was wire wool and a scalextric transformer. loved that moment the wool glowed white before the flames.

the woodburner is just an excuse to continue my experiments. mhahaha

Cats*. Especially if they’re doused in petrol…

*Don’t burn cats

Actually for household stuff. Candle – teaspoon of icing sugar – turkey baster. Great big puffs of carmel scented flame.

Myself and a friend (who’s father was a chemist) made gun cotton when we were 15ish. Mates father caught us trying to light it with a lighter and went nuts. Luckily we hadn’t waited for it to dry out.

He showed us what happened when it was dry and all I can say is thank Christ he caught us when he did…..

On the other hand, since I was a kid we’ve got right into making clothes out of plastic. Or frozen petrol.

Having had my fleece catch fire it is alarming how dangerous our clothes are – its not just that it burns it shrinks and runs too, so your top stinks onto you while it burns, sticks (still burning) to your hands as you try to put yourself out, and runs down onto your jeans and sets them on fire too. Fun.

The Guardian

All that soggy wet liberalism makes it crap for lighting fires with. Give me an inflammatory editorial in the Malvern Gazette any day.

Cashew nuts
WD40 for annoying hornets
Pringles burn with an alarming blue / green tinge

Towelling bath robe or fluffy sports socks. If you pop a flame to either of those babies the fibres on he surface ignite and you get a wandering flame take off over the whole garment. I found out while frying an egg one morning, it then became a party trick as the whole thing didnt go up. Well it didn’t when I did, I may have been lucky, don’t set fire to yourself people.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wp9mbVfDMCQ[/video]

On the other hand, since I was a kid we’ve got right into making clothes out of plastic. Or frozen petrol.

Having had my fleece catch fire it is alarming how dangerous our clothes are – its not just that it burns it shrinks and runs too, so your top stinks onto you while it burns, sticks (still burning) to your hands as you try to put yourself out, and runs down onto your jeans and sets them on fire too. Fun.

Good thing the synthetic material the USAF flying jacket I’ve just won on eBay won’t burn, then… 😀

Custard powder and a candle in a can goes bang brilliantly well 🙂

haha somafunk sounds like my childhood but more excessively Pyro. I do miss burning stuff 🙁

My father is a chemistry professor – I spent my whole childhood blowing stuff up! Ammonia and iodine is great fun – you get purple mushroom clouds. It’s a contact explosive, very sensitive, so also funny to paint it on the bottom of someone’s mug.

Made guncotton too – if it’s not confined, it just burns quickly. And of course while it’s not technically an explosive, thermite is very entertaining…

Being kids with access to a mates farm coupled with my dads engineering workshop was the ruin of me, or rather the ruin of the remote scottish countryside where we stayed. Our childhood went hand in hand with blowing stuff up by whatever means necessary and i figure these days the authorities would take a very dim view of the stuff we got up to back then and if i tried these days to recreate the kind of pops/bangs/whumps we did 25-30 years ago i imagine i’d get prosecuted pretty severely under some form of anti-terrorism laws.

Our greatest achievement involved stolen dynamite and control gear from a forestry road building operation and our “experiment” made the local tv news and newspapers as we caused a minor landslide, we laid pretty fekin low for a while after that one which wasn’t hard as our parents wouldn’t let us out of the house for weeks.

Some stuff i blew up earlier……

On our local army range where the feckers have fired 7000 or 30 tonnes of Depleted Uranium Shells into the Solway coastline nr our town

Grenade! (only a spent smoke grenade)

Found this cartridge container but it was sealed with a big lock 🙁

Pah!….namby pamby health and safety nonsense 😉

I haven’t blown anything up for years…..getting an itchy trigger finger just thinking bout it 😀

That tank looks a fixer-upper…
This should entertain you lot, the jars on the hotplate are fun, as is the plastic coke bottle with a bullet fired through it, all ultra high-speed photography:
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUZ-e2SkeMI&sns=em[/video]
[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntZPeosma2c&sns=em[/video]

you read the wasp factory Somafunk?

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=XchwE9zVdnw[/video]

you read the wasp factory?

Yeah, one of my fav books as a teen but i aint no Frank 😀 , we had a talk once by Iain banks at Oban High school back in the mid 80’s as one of his contemporaries at Uni was our English teacher, very privileged to have met him at that time and i love his writing.

Having had my fleece catch fire it is alarming how dangerous our clothes are – its not just that it burns it shrinks and runs too, so your top stinks onto you while it burns, sticks (still burning) to your hands as you try to put yourself out, and runs down onto your jeans and sets them on fire too. Fun.

This, of course, is why the Navy went back to making uniforms out of cotton/wool in about 1983.

Andy

So any of you lot been carted off under the prevention of terrorism act yet?

Back to the hand cleaning gel. I believe that They removed the alcohol because some desperate people were trying to extract and drink it from the gel.

So what common household (and relatively cheap) products can I use for fire lighting and improvised stove fuel?