Firestarting with Firesteel

You need to increase the surface area for your sparks to land on. Shed and fluff up your tinder as much as possible. With cotton balls, it is enough to rip them appart. With other tinders, such as paper and birch bark, I quickly shed the tinder with my finders, letting it drop into my cupped hands as i work it. Then, especially in winter, it helps to rub the tinder between my palms, which breaks it up a little more and warms it a bit. Pile the tinder among larger tinder (such as larger peices of birch park or paper) inside a twig bundle and hit is squarely with a shower of sparks. Voila.

This tip might be useful to anyone just learning firemaking; Try the Spark-Lite. It is the smallest and lightest setup which works for me. I ALWAYS carry this tiny box as a backup to my lighters.

Make sure you stretch out and fluff up the fuel material to 2 or 3 times its original size before ignition, and protect it from wind; it WILL ignite. Then, you will need the medium of very fine filamented material such as moss to grow the fire. Sometimes I cheat and use a few drops of my alcohol fuel or hand sanitizer.

If conditions are not ideal, it is tricky to get past initial ignition, but you are learning useful survival skill. For more techniques search for keywords "flint steel fire" on google.

http://www.1sks.com/store/spark-lite-survival-fire-starter.html

Pull the cotton apart some to expose surface area. Then make sure you throw the sparks right onto it from up close. Hold the striker still, and pull the fire steel back – that way you have better control over your aim and how close the spark is to the tinder.

My scouts seem to have trouble with the technique when they first learn, like they are afraid to make a big spark. They also have problems with aiming the spark and getting close enough to the tinder. Once you learn that part the rest is easy. Cotton balls with vaseline work very well. Natural tinder, on the other hand, is much more challenging. Many things will not catch a spark, and those that will require preparation to give them lots of surface area.

On a recent campout one of my scouts won a Swiss Army Knife by making a fire without matches or lighter, using natural tinder. I had given the troop a challenge months ago. This kid was very persistent. He worked at it all evening, and then in the morning, before finding tinder that would catch a spark. And it was 20 degrees F at the time.

I just got a bushbuddy and a FireLite starting kit this week. I live in northern California next to a town called Suisun (pronounced Sue-Soon) a Patwin Indian word for west wind. I think it really means stove testing hell. I actually burned up an aluminum wind screen once on a beer can stove when a 30 mph gust turned my stove into a blowtorch. 10-20 mph winds are the norm around here. It's said the bushbuddy doesn't like windy conditions so I was curious how it would perform here. I gathered some twigs and sticks from the tree in my front yard and went to a sheltered spot in my backyard, wind about 5-10 mph with gusts. I grabbed a Vargo titanium mug (750 ml) I'd bought on this site and filled it with water.

I'd read about problems with getting the spark to the tinder and thought I had a great solution. I placed a pile of small twigs on the grate and then placed a twig on the top of the burner near the edge and place a Tinder-Quik tab on the edge of the stove and the twig. My plan was to ignite the tab where it was accessible and push it onto the kindling when it ignited. It was soon obvious the wind made this a practical impossibility. Finally I picked up the tab, held it against the bottom of the striker with my fore finger, struck the steel and voila, flame. I was trying a half piece of starter tab since I was using very dry wood. I had fluffed it up quite a bit. I dropped it onto the grate of the bushbuddy where, in strict accordance with Murphy's Law, it landed as far away from the kindling as such a small space allowed. As I frantically tried to get twigs on top of it the flame extinguished itself. Lesson one, there's a chemical coating on the starter tabs, some sort of nitrate I suppose, that the sparks start. Don't fluff it up too much or you'll have less time to build a fire. On my second try I used a whole tab, unfluffed, and kept my kindling to the side of the stove. The tab ignited on the third strike. There's a crackling sound it makes just before it bursts into flame. I dropped it onto the grate and placed the kindling where it actually landed, not where I thought it would land. It took about 4 minutes to build up a fire to finger sized sticks and get flames out of the holes on top. At that point I put the water on.

It took 14 minutes to bring the mug to a boil. It required a lot of attention and feeding. I gradually moved to thumb sized pieces of wood which seemed to speed up the process. The wind prevented about a third of the top holes from ever igniting, even when I was directly in front of it acting as a secondary shield. I haven't tried the stove under windless conditions, I'm guessing more fuel was required as a result of the "bellows" effect of the wind. If you know the bushbuddy will be used under windy conditions I'd plan on a third more fuel and 40% more cooking time. YMMV. What was most impressive about the stove was that it didn't blow out in the wind like my alcohol stoves. I agree with others, the geek factor, fire, flint and steel,form and function, I love this stove.

Richard

Oh yeah, I'm cross posting this under Firestarting with Firesteel since I don't see Gerald Magnes on this forum and it seems to relate to his question. I read the forum policies and didn't see where this is forbidden. If I missed the rule my apologies for the cross post.