Sandwich Bag Fire Starter

Guess who just turned up at my place. It is Grant Thompson, The King Of Random.

G: What's up, guys?

D: Grant is actually going to show me a little survival tip. Let's say you're stuck out in the woods, and you need to make a fire, but you don't have, say... matches or a lighter. We're going to try to use a Ziploc bag to start a fire.

G: I guess when you're building a fire, the first thing you're going to need is some tinder. So we're gonna have to go scavenge around for some options. This stuff works pretty well.

D: Now this is pretty dry.

G: Yeah, we definitely want something that's off the ground if possible because we need it as dry as possible. The first step was to grind up the tinder into a fine powder. I'm just following Grant's instructions here. I'm not really sure if this is going to work. See that right there? That's the stuff we're going for. It's super fine. We're gonna take our base plate. We're going to pinch a nice little pile in there.

Okay, so at this point, we're pretty much ready to start the ignition process. So what do we need for that?

D: For that, we're going to need a Ziploc bag and a little bit of water. Now this is just a regular Ziploc sandwich baggie. We're going to pour that in till it's about halfway full. You let me know when to grab water from a creek or stream or wherever you like.

Now here's the trick: we want to develop this into some kind of a liquid sphere. We're going to be making a liquid magnifying glass. I do that by turning my Ziploc bag, you know, 45 degrees, so it creates this diamond shape, and then we're just going to gather these two corners together.

We're going to lose a little bit of water as we do.

Okay, I'm going to pinch that off, and the next goal is to twist it, trap all that water inside. You see, as I twist it, it creates pressure that exerts almost an equal pressure on all sides.

And now, while it's not a perfect sphere, it will eventually start to bubble out into a nice liquid sphere where we need it. We've essentially just made a makeshift magnifying glass, and you start a fire the same way you would with a magnifying glass.

Now, once I roll the ball around, you can see where it looks the best. We're looking for as close to a sphere as possible, which is right there. Now if I back it out...

D: Wow!

G: You can see it start smoking immediately. That's incredible! The focal length of the lens is the place where all of the light converges. That's really what we're trying to establish here, right?

D: Yes.

G: Position the tinder pile at the focal point of this spherical, biconvex lens.

D: Essentially?

G: Now you can see that's been smoking for a little while.

D: Mm-hmm.

G: We've developed a little bit of an ember base. It's burned a little bit.

D: Yeah.

G: So now I'm going to sprinkle a little bit more fuel on top there, and that will cause the heat to rise and burn that from the bottom, and I'm going to again from the top.

D: Nice.

G: It's interesting how you're like kind of bringing it down, so that the surface of that is not actually where the most concentrated rays are. You're concentrating even deeper down into the pile.

D: That's right.

G: Because we don't want the heat to dissipate too much, and if we're at an extreme focal point like this...

D: Yes.

G: The heat's going to bleed off. So if we can warm the surrounding area, it actually helps speed the process, right?

D: Right.

G: We're just going to repeat that process until it will stay smoking on its own. We've only been at this for a minute or two, and the amount of smoke we're seeing there is pretty significant.

D: A little bit of sprinkle, a little bit of sunlight, rinse and repeat.

G: We're really elevating the temperature.

D: Mm-hmm.

G: I just point our pile smoking pretty well on its own. Now I'm going to go ahead and take this plastic bag and just set it to the side. We could reuse this again if we wanted to.

At this point, we can probably start adding smaller pieces of tinder. You'll get a few of these little pieces here. We're going to go down to small. We want it to be extremely light, airy...

D: Sure, to still allow the oxygen to get in there.

G: Exactly, because if you take away the oxygen, you smother the fire.

D: Cool.

G: I think right there, we're just going to let it sit for a couple minutes now.

D: Well that's going, we can start chopping up some of these pieces we just found lying on the ground. They're dry.

G: It's almost like straw. We're going to pull them into very thin fibers. We want to make something that resembles a bird's nest, something that's light, airy, and can catch fire very quickly.

Now we need to transfer this without disturbing the coals as much as possible. The way that I like to do that is take this base.

D: Mm-hmm.

G: We're going to take this grass, we're going to put it on top, and we're just going to gently roll it over like this.

D: Oh, wow!

G: Now you can see all those hot coals transfer down into the grass, and we're just going to cover it over to help conceal, block it from some of the wind like this.

And now because of all that straw, the air can flow through it and help build the heat. One trick that I use, it looks a little bit funny, I just stick this in my hand and spin in circles.

D: See?

G: And it really works, honestly.

D: That's impressive!

G: You can already see it smoking a little bit more. We're going to give that a second just for the heat to build back up.

D: Yeah, but you can totally see there's a lot more fuel catching on fire now. What we want to be seeing is thicker smoke, and we want to see it progressing.

D: So we see the smoke dying down or getting weaker...

G: Like slow down, get out of the breeze, give it a chance for the heat to build.

D: This is ready. If you look down in there, you can almost see glowing red embers.

G: Now it wants to light. It wants to light! It just needs a little bit of a flick.

D: It's going to build up a little more.

G: A little spinning trick...

D: Oh, you see that?

G: Goes hot flame.

D: Oh, amazing!

G: Boom! And then we're out here.

D: Oh! Ha ha! Shoot.

G: Sorry, Derrick, is okay?

D: We've clearly demonstrated forming fire.

G: Well, that, my friend, is how to start a fire with a sandwich bag.

D: And bright side!

G: That's nicely done. I want to say a huge thank you to Grant here, King of Random. You should go check out his channel. There's lots of very random things, and it's taught me a thing or two, that's for sure.

D: A lot about survival hacks, and a lot of those things that you really shouldn't try at home.

G: And then we show you why you shouldn't try them at home.

D: Back? We just put a video on my channel trying to melt glass. We took a Dr. Pepper bottle and melted that in the back here, and it worked amazingly well.

G: So go check it out! I'll put a link in the description (www.youtube.com/c/MinhtanVietsub).