Making Char Cloth. Bushcraft Fire Starter.

Char Cloth, one of those strange and distant terms you’ve probably heard of it you’ve been around the Bushcraft community for some time, yet it’s just on the fringes enough most people have either never used it, and especially never made it.

Honestly, there are few things better to carry with a ferro rod and other fire starters, than a nice little packet of char cloth. There simply isn’t anything found in nature, maybe besides birch bark, that can take and hold a spark longer and better than char cloth. It’s be around for a LONG TIME. Since your mountain man fore fathers roamed the hills.

Making char cloth is super simple, you just new two ingredients and a nice fire with a bed of coals.

• Altoids tin (bought at any gas station).
• 100% cotton (old clothing, shirt, pants, etc).
• a knife or something for cutting
• a fire with some coals.

Cut up the cloth into little squares, maybe an inch or two. Then punch a hole in the Altoids tin on each side, don’t worry, its not think and anything will go through it. Fill it up, not packed too tight, with the 100% cotton patches.

Throw it on the coals, keep turning it until no more smoke is coming out of the holes. You got to watch it close because sometimes the cloth will like to catch fire, and you will see fire shooting out the hole you made. If this happens, just pop it off the fire real quick.

Once it’s cooked good and no smoke is coming out of the holes you made, get it off the fire and enjoy your new char cloth. It will take and hold spark in any weather, rain or shine, wind or not. It’s the ultimate bushcraft fire starter.

See video below!