Making More Dryer Lint Fire Starters

Today I was back in the kitchen making more fire starters.  I’ve been having my co-workers save me their dryer lint and I had enough to make close to four egg cartons of starters.  I bought me a miniature pan at Wal-Mart that I could melt the wax in.  I was using a can that I bent on one end for pouring but it got too hot for me to handle so I opted to buy a pan.

It was difficult to control the wax pouring from the pan so I melted the wax in my new pan, poured it into my bent can and from the can, onto the fire starters.  Where I was not melting the wax directly in the can and just pouring the melted wax into the can, it was easy enough to pour the wax from the can without getting too hot for my hands to handle.

The second and third rows from the left do not have waxed poured on them.  As you can see, I stuff the carton holes as tightly as I can with lint before pouring on the wax.

After pouring on the wax, I take the handle end of a butter knife, run it under hot water and then push all the lint down into the wax.  Before this procedure, I just grabbed a butter knife out of the drawer to push the lint into the wax and that did not work at all.  Where the handle of the knife was a bit cool, all the wax and lint was sticking to the knife.

I’ve read where you can also use sawdust to make fire starters but I do not have any sawdust on hand.  Go figure……..my husband is a woodworker and no sawdust!  A friend suggested that I try some animal bedding that you buy in pet stores but that came in such a huge package so I bought a small bag of wood Bar-B-Que chips to see how that would work.  You can see the wood chips that I used in the top left-hand corner of the previous picture.  I think they are a bit chunky so I think I’ll just stick to my dryer lint, which I know works, and call it good.  I guess where I have this all-most-full bag of Bar-B-Que chips I’ll just have to have a nice cook-out.