101 Ways to MAKE FIRE - #11 Empty lighter and Earwax

Описание: How to make fire with an empty lighter. Although most people seem to be searching for "How to light a fire WITHOUT matches or a lighter", I thought I'd show you this one. Which obviously includes a lighter. But then again, ThatguynamedTorrey used a lighter too, and he claimed to be doing it with ONLY a potato. 1,5 million views for that little bit of misleading text. Hmmm.... I know it was a joke, but it really says something about YouTube's recommendation system (a.k.a. relevance engine) when a video with thousands of thumbs down can feature so prominently in search results and related videos.
But I digress.... There are various ways to make fire with an empty lighter, I suppose. The simplest thing here might have been to build up a big enough pile of dust to get the paper of the Mad magazine to ignite. The inside pages are printed on newsprint, and after 20 years it has photolysed noticeably. That's a fancy word for saying it's gone yellow. A bit like pyrolysis really, except it's the ultraviolet rays from the sun, rather than heat, which have caused the chemical decomposition of the organic material. What it means is that it is easier to ignite. BUT...
And I repeat, BUT, the problem with lighters is that if the gas is all gone, there usually isn't much flint left either. With a new bic lighter, there would be more than enough flint to make up a nice big pile which would ignite easily from a spark. (There are a few videos on YouTube showing you how to do this). I'm thinking "SURVIVAL SITUATION" here. If you do happen to have a lighter on you (even an empty one), you'll be wanting to conserve it as much as possible.
The other option would be to fray the tip of the earbud an put it into the path of the sparks from the lighter. This particular lighter, though, was old with very little flint left, so the sparks I could get from it were not enough to light the cotton on their own. A small amount of dust is all you need to make a big difference. It has to do with the ratio of surface area to volume, obviously, but it is a bit more than that. It's also the temperature at which the ferrocerium burns and the fact that the powder is in direct contact with the cotton. The sparks from the lighter decrease significantly in temperature as they fly through the air. So they;re not really hot enough to ignite the cotton, but are hot enough to ignite the dust. The other problem with fraying the cotton out and trying to get it really close to the striker is that you risk getting the cotton fibres twirled up around your knob. And you wouldn't want that, obviously.
The ear wax thing was mostly because I have a mental age of twelve and love to gross people out. However, the wax also serves a practical purpose here: Firstly it help the powdered flint to stick to the cotton. The powder is very fine and not only does it blow away easily it simply falls between the fibres of the cotton wool. So the wax just helps to keep it on the surface where we want it.
The other thing about the wax is that it burns.
I'll be turning to ear wax a few times during the course of this series.
Who the hell invented the pogo stick? And more importantly WHY? I had a lot of fun falling off the thing repeatedly. Think I did about 20 takes. And yes, I do all my own stunts. Eat THAT, Bear Grylls.
Is your earwax flammable? I'd like to know. Join the debate, conduct the experiment, post the footage. Yeah, I know it's gross, but someone's life might depend on it. Be a Mad Scientist., just for a day. Stick it in there. Just the tip, just for a second, just to see how it feels.....

I always wonder how many people ever get to read these video descritpions in their entirety.....