petroleum soaked cotton balls

  I've seen many YT videos on PJ cotton balls, read many posts in various sites about them, but have never made any till today.
  Found some cotton balls, a 1/4 full, small tub of petroleum jelly (Vaseline)and a zip lock bag emptied the PJ into the ziploc bag, added about 15 cotton balls and commenced to mushing the PJ into the cotton.
  Decided to try igniting one pjcb with a feel rod and was surprised at how quickly it lit up!  First strike on the fero ignited the cotton ball into a blaze!
  I took a clean (No PJ) cotton ball and tried igniting it same way, and it also ignited on first strike.  It didn't burn as long as the pjcb but it lit and burned.
  I now know why lots of people make and use these things.
I stuffed 13 pjcb into the emptied Vaseline tub and added the tub to my EDC and took ball and stuck them into an small ear plug container, I'll add this container to my laptop EDC.
 

Great fire starters! I have some stuffed in an old 35mm film canister in my pack.

I'm a fan of the ol jar of Styrofoam/gasoline "napalm".

I'm a fan of the ol jar of Styrofoam/gasoline "napalm".

  No sure TSA would like these!

Yep. Great fire starters...

You can melt one end of a straw stuff a few in and melt the other end nice and compact

 

  I have a few sealed straws with sugar, salt, pepper, and one with Tabasco.  If the straw was a super wide one I'd might consider maybe stuffing PJCB into it.  Getting the cotton balls out might take a little more effort than necessary. (You could simply cuts both ends and find a stick to plunge them out one side) But yes it would be very compact!
  I may do this though, that is, shave off a bunch of fatwood shavings and add them to a straw.  Save a little time maybe by having fatwood shaving duff already done, just cut tip and pour into pile, then hit with sparks from fero.

Time to make a video.