How to Use a Fire Piston

A fire piston is a device that uses the principle of rapidly compressed air to ignite a fuel — sort of like a diesel engine does. And in this case, the fuel is a tiny chunk of char cloth such as I’ve shown being made elsewhere in this blog series.

I won’t go into too much detail about the history of the fire piston except to say it originated about 100 - 500 AD in Southeast Asia among the Austronesian peoples ie - the Philippines, Malaysia, Borneo, Thailand, and other areas. The fire piston is closed at one end, open at the other, and a rod is pressed rapidly into the hollow to heat the tinder trapped inside.

My particular fire piston is made from a fancy grade of cocobolo wood with brass trimmings.

A fire piston is relatively easy to operate. A tightly wound string or a simple rubber O ring provides a tight seal against the bore of the piston.

The hollow tip is packed with a tiny amount of char cloth or other flammable material.

The rod is placed in the bore near the end… and struck down into the bore sharply and rapidly. The faster you can do this with some force, the quicker the air heats up. This might take a little bit of practice, but stick with it and you’ll get it.

This is my “go to” method for starting camp fires in the rain, because the char cloth isn’t exposed to the elements. Once you get a spark going, it’s pretty easy to flick the coal out into a tinder bundle or you can just do as I do. Since the hollow tip of my rod is brass I don’t have to worry about setting my rod tip on fire. I can just touch the end to a tinder bundle amd gently blow the smoldering ember into a full flame.