#77 Another Way to Make Fire with a Fishing Reel
by PapaD Wright
A couple of posts back, I showed how to make friction fire with a fairly elaborate addition of a spindle to an Abu Garcia spincast reel. It did not go as well as some of my previous attempts using fishing reels. I most certainly did get a good ember, but the spindle broke off a couple of times and it wound up taking way longer than I felt it should have. In a real emergency situation, given the same fishing reel and the sun shining brightly, I would have opted for using the reel's shiny bell inside as a parabolic reflector and would have had a good fire going in no time.
Although the reflectivity of the inside of this fishing reel cover is marginal, making a good pre-tinder such as Chaga, ash-cloth, or other char or good punk desirable, it will also ignite tissue or paper or dry leaves. It just takes longer.
It just happened that the reel's bell had a highly reflective inside surface. Had the bell not been so reflective, another alternative for solar fire would be easily had, provided I had a piece of Mylar such as from a space blanket or the inside wrapper from any number of food products currently being packaged in such shiny materials such as Pop Tarts, raisins, and what-not. I could have lined the inside of the bell with the Mylar and have also had a good solar reflector.
Since this solar reflector is similar to many other posts I have previously made, I am not going to show the entire process in this post. I already had some still shots from last summer showing the reflective qualities of this same reel's bell, and it seemed reasonable to point out this method on the heels of the previous friction method using the same reel. Although the sun is not always shining (unless you are really cool), if it is, this method beats the friction method by far.
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