Fire Pistons?

Well i'm back. After a long and restful christmas break, I'm still not ready to go back to school. But whatever. Over the break i watched a bunch of TV. I mean seriously...A LOT! I probably averaged about 25 hours a day. Anyway, I saw this cool survival show and in it the guy used a tool that was called a fire piston. It was this hollow rod with a little notch in the bottom where you could put a little bit of wood in it. By taking the piston and jamming it down into the rod, the wood would ignite into a smoldering pile! i wondered, how is that possible? So i thought about it using gas laws. Obviously the wood was ignited by a large amount of energy, more than likely heat energy. The hollow rod was airtight, so that meant that by smashing the piston down into the rod, he was compressing the air. Therefore he was reducing the volume of the air. According to the gas laws, when volume goes down, pressure rises and when pressure rises, temperature also does too. So in the fire piston, if the air inside the piston is compressed to less than one fifteenth of its original size, as seen in this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVCXZW4XFJ0), then the pressure would rise dramatically also resulting in a huge increase of temperature. I think that although the ignition temperature of woods vary, it takes a temperature of about 300 degress Farenheit to ignite your average piece of wood (Of course i could be completely wrong). So this cool little devious can probably produce temperature upwards of 300 degrees Farenheit, maybe even higher! Nice.