Make Your Own Egg Carton Fire Starters

George Vondriska

Duration: 4 mins

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Transcript

Description

George Vondriska teaches you a cool way to get your winter fires going with these egg carton fire starters! George fills empty cardboard egg cartons with wood shavings (he recommends soft woods like pine or cedar), then pours a layer of melted wax over each shell, making sure to get all of the wood wet. When the wax solidifies, you can use your woodworking band saw to cut the shells apart. Voila, you’ve just found an easy way to start a fire!

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6 Responses to “Make Your Own Egg Carton Fire Starters”

Mike Shultz August 18th, 2022

Why couldn't you lite one off for us? Just as a demonstration of how well they work. Also, would this process work for fire bricks? Or would they burn up too fast to be usefull?
Greg Just June 6th, 2022

Tubes from toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls work well too. Cut them into 2” lengths and follow the same process as the egg carton. I use wax paper under them.
KARLA November 14th, 2017

I’ve been making these exactly like you did, but before I got a bandsaw, I used my table saw to quickly cut them apart. I make 100+ at a time to last the whole winter. The wax build up on my bandsaw is definitely a problem. What’s the best way to clean off the wax?
leninsebastopol July 1st, 2017

Smiled the whole time. As a bee keeper this comes in handy and the smell of beeswax is a heavenly scent to work with. Thanks, George for the twofer.
william January 1st, 2016

Wow !!! I was surprised to see this video when I was viewing some of the wood video projects . When making my fire starters for my wood burning stoves, I basically use the same method but insert a small length a wick into the top of the fire starters ( saved from the used melted candles ) to get the starters burning or just bend over a side flap from each starter. I place my egg cartons outside on a cool day and the wax hardens in no time and then I just snap each one off, ready for the wood burning season........
C may November 30th, 2014

When I do it I use soy wax that you can buy online and I leave the carton together for camping that way it is semi weather resistant. If you dont like the wood shavings you can also use dryer lint.

A natural byproduct of working with wood is making shavings and in this case what I'm gonna do is set my shavings aside. How's that for alliteration? And I'm gonna use them for another application here in fact I'm gonna use them to make fire starters. This is a fire starter right here. What we've got is shavings, wax, egg carton. Boy, do these babies work they really work well for getting a fire going. So here's the deal I prefer shavings that come from soft woods like pine and cedar 'cause they're nice and long and curly, and shavings that come out of the planar from hardwoods they tend to be a little bit smaller and not quite as nice to work with for this They'll still do it, but I like pine and cedar better You need an egg carton that is the cardboard kind Not the foam kind. So what I'm doing here is I'm packing and packing and packing, to get the shavings really nice and tight down in each of those shells, cells, where the eggs used to live. Next thing we need to do is pour something on here to hold everything together so what I'm gonna use here is wax. And you can do this a couple different ways. What I've done here is I've gone to the store, and I've actually bought wax. And this is sold at a place where they sell a lot of canning supplies. And you can also as an alternative go to craft stores You can also just save stubby candles as they get too small to burn. Sit on those for a while. Well not sit on them. Keep them for a while, put them in a bag. save them like you do your shavings and they'll be ready for this process. I took the wax and I put in a double boiler. So water in here, can up here. The wax is nicely melted. So we're ready to go for the pouring step. And now what I wanna do is get each of these cells wet with wax. When this is done, I really wanna not have any dry shavings. And it's a little bit sloppy that's why I've got this piece of particle board laying on top of my bench. I don't mind getting wax on there. I don't really wanna get wax all over my bench. Although I do sometimes wax philosophic, I don't want to wax my bench-top. That looks pretty good. Now in time that's gonna solidify and look like this When we want this as a fire-starter, we want just individual cells. We don't want this whole thing, although boy would that work great, but we don't need to use that much to get a fire going. So I'm gonna come here to the band saw in order to cut these apart. Realistically, I guess the band saw is overkill as a way to cut these apart; however, I do like that it leaves them in a nice, neat cube. The alternative is to just grab that carton, and tear it and that will still work. But I like the neatness I get from using the band saw It's gonna leave a little bit of residue on your blade and a little bit of residue on tire of the band saw, but that will clean right off and it's really not a big deal. So great way to use a natural byproduct of wood-working all of these shavings, and make fire-starters for you or for your friends who I'm telling you are gonna think this is one hot gift to get from you.

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