Light It Up with Duct Tape

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We all know that Duct Tape has 1001 uses – even Mythbusters showed us how to make life on a deserted island survivable with it. But try carrying that huge roll of duct tape in your EDC and you’ll find that you are better off just doing without (*gasp*).

On Friday afternoons, we have a time in school called Preparedness Fridays, where we tackle a preparedness activity to learn from as we build our skills and build our preps. This week, we tackled Duct Tape.

I’ve seen this hack around the internet before and thought that it would be a perfect introduction to our new project schedule. It was easy enough to do, gave the kids a sense of accomplishment at doing their own project, and increased the effectiveness of our EDC without adding 3 more pounds of equipment.

1. Take a roll of duct tape and unroll it about 6″. It helped for me to brace it between myself and the desk to keep it steady.
2. Lay your Lighter (or whatever other object you’d like to wrap) perpendicular to the tape. It is important to do so to keep from spiraling the tape down the length of your lighter or creating bubbles as you try to straighten.
3. Begin to wrap your lighter with the duct tape – slowly so that you can get the alignment just right.
4. Wrap the lighter with as much duct tape as seems right to you. The more you wrap, the thicker your lighter is which might be fun to stuff in a bug out bag, but not necessarily in your pocket.

We have found, over time, that the lighter done in this fashion and kept in the pocket tends to get gunky and gummy over time. Body heat slowly melts the adhesive and everything gets stickly. So we’ve since decided that the uber-wrapped lighters will be for our emergency bags, and the lighters will be unwrapped for our pockets. It was great information for us to learn so that we can carry that forward in our preparations of other things. We’ve also since tried wrapping a credit card with a few layers of tape, which didn’t gunk up as much as the lighter did. However, it was a little awkward for the menfolk to carry.

See more ways to teach your kids preparedness skills here!