Tinder bundles are a key skill in bushcraft fire lighting and one that isn’t as simple as it might at first appear. Like everything in bushcraft it needs practice to make sure that you get it right whatever the weather might throw at you. It’s an important skill due to the fact that many ignition methods don’t actually create a flame, rather just an ember. Here I’m thinking bow drilling, parabolic mirors, fire pistons, lenses and so on. We then need to take that ember, put it into a tinder bundle and blow it into a flame.
Last year we made a video showing you how to build and ignite a tinder bundle and, as the name suggests, it was focused on how to put a tiner bundle together and how to get your breathing right to make sure that it ignites, but stopped short of actually demonstrating lighting a fire with a tinder bundle. So here’s a short video that does demonstrate lighting a fire with a tinder bundle.
I’ve used a simple tinder bundle made of hay and a fire steel to ignite a piece of char cloth and then placerd the lit tinder bundle into a standard ‘V’ Lay, my preferred fire lay for lighting a fire.
We teach lighting a fire with a tinder bundle on our 2 Day & 5 Day Bushcraft Courses, the IOL Bushcraft Competency Course and also our 2 Day & 5 Day Survival Courses. You can see plenty of photos from all of these courses on our Facebook page.
