Flint and Steel Firestarting

Making fire with flint & steel is an excellent way to connect with our ancestors who settled the wilderness in a time before matches, lighters and ferrocium rods.

The benefit is that once you master flint & steel, you’ll never be without the ability to make fire; even without your kit, you can make fire.

Let’s first establish some basic knowledge:

FLINT:

The stone we refer to as “Flint”, actually doesn’t have to be actual flint. The stone called “flint” is actually a form of hard mineral quartz. Any hard stone will work so long as it has a sharp edge. Here are some examples of stones that I have found in my wanderings, all of them will create a spark.

Part of the fun of mastering Flint & Steel is in finding different rocks that will do the job; it’s not unusual to find me on a woodsbumming expedition to sit beside a creek picking up rocks and testing them on my steel.

STEEL:

The STEEL is just that, a steel properly referred to as a striker. Hardened steel will spark while soft steel won’t. You can use the spine of a knife if you wish, but I have found that the be a very efficient way of cutting yourself so proceed with caution. The “Striker” that came with your KSF Firewallet is specially made for this purpose and is hardened all the way through instead of simply case hardened as some I have seen. That means your steel will last several lifetimes or until you lose it whichever comes first.

CHARCLOTH:

Charcloth is simply charred cloth. It is made by burning cloth in a closed container so it cannot completely burn. Here’s why we use it. When we burn wood or cloth like substances the fibers combine with air release burnable gases which are released into the air and burned while the remaining solid materials turn to ash.

When we burn the cloth in a closed container, we don’t have the oxygen so the heat just turns the cloth into carbon which is a terrific conductor of heat and likes to mix with oxygen anytime it can; in other words, it’s very easily burned.

In short, we made carbon cloth out of the cotton material we started with. That’s an oversimplification but it serves our purpose for now. A spark contains a very small amount of heat but there is enough to start the carbon mixing with air which we recognize as burning.

JUTE / TINDER:

We also have Jute cord.  This is to be turned into tinder.  In it’s current state it’s a bit too big to do much with so we need to break it down a bit.

Cut off a foot long section of the cord. You’ll notice that it’s made up of three strands, separate those three strands. Those strands are made up of a bunch of jute fibers which is what we are going to use to start our fire.

Unravel those strands, this isn’t one of the tasks where being compulsive pays off, we’re not looking for perfection, just a loose nest of fibers.

I don’t sit and unravel jute cord when I’m ready to start a fire, I do that the day before, usually while I’m sitting beside the fire reflecting on the day. It’s a mindless task that keeps your fingers occupied, perfect for reflecting and relaxing. It somehow seems poetic to bask in the glow of today’s fire as I prepare for tomorrow’s fire; sort of tying yesterday, today and tomorrow together with life giving fire.

I take the bundle and pack it together and stuff it into a plastic bag which I carry in the fire wallet ready for my next fire.

THE PRINCIPLE OF FIRE:

To understand how to build a fire, we need to understand how fire works.

Everyone knows how to build a fire, but we still see people struggling before finally resorting to the douse and dash method of dousing the pile of assorted size wood with gasoline or whatever flammable liquid is handy, throw in a lit match and dash to safety.

Building a fire isn’t difficult so long as you have a basic understanding of fire itself.

I already mentioned that fire is really just the process of mixing the carbon in our fuel with oxygen in air to create carbon dioxide and ash.

The challenge is that for this conversion to occur we need heat, so the process of starting a fire is really just the process of generating sufficient heat for the conversion to sustain itself.

Now for a very fast and light visit into the world of physics for some definitions that will bring the entire process to light (pun intended).

Temperature and Heat are NOT the same thing. Temperature is the intensity of heat but it has nothing to do with the quantity of heat.

If you light a paper match, the paper is burning at 451° F. However even though there is 451° F within a foot of you, we don’t start to sweat. Why?

Of course it’s because the fire isn’t big enough to warn an area beyond a few inches of the flame.

If we use that match to light a big pile of rolled up papers we will create a much larger fire, care to guess what the temperature of the fire will be?

If you could get close enough to hold a thermometer in the flames you would see that the paper is burning at the same 451° F as the match that lit the fire.

Fire is about quantity of heat, not intensity of heat (temperature).

To again get a tiny bit technical; when you put wood into a fire it starts absorbing heat. As the wood heats up it releases the water and carbon dioxide trapped in the cells. Neither of these burn so the wood isn’t burning. When it reaches about 570° F something called pyrolysis occurs. Pyrolysis is the transformation of a substance, in this case wood, caused by heat. Pyrolysis of wood releases volatile gases, hydrocarbons actually, which ignite creating even more heat.

The key to building a fire then isn’t about how hot a spark you can generate, but instead building that tiny spark into a increasingly larger sources of heat so that you can overcome the thermal inertia of increasing sizes of fuel until you have the fire you’re looking for.

Magnesium burns at about 4000° F, Ferrocium sparks are 2500° F, impressive numbers until you realize that there isn’t much in the way of heat present in those sparks.

So building a fire is simply a matter of capturing the heat you have and transferring it to something that will make it a larger quantity.

Remember, the idea is to take a tiny amount of heat and develop it sufficiently to take us to the next step.

I’m going to take you to having flames in this article, before you do any of this, you need to have everything else in place to take the small flames to a full size fire. For me that’s a big pile of what I call “big tinder” another bigger pile of kindling in increasing sizes up to your fuel.

You can take the flame we generate here and use it to ignite a “firestarter” if that’s your style, but I have a feeling that once you master Flint & Steel you’ll want to go full traditional and do it with what you find in nature.

Firestarting:

I recommend the KSF Firewallet to carry your Flint & Steel Firemaking supplies.  It provides a compact kit in a leather wallet so you will have everything you need to start a fire when you reach camp.

Open up your Firewallet and remove the Flint & Steel, a small square of charcloth and your tinder bundle.   One of the reasons I like the  KSF Firewallet is that I can lay the Firewallet on the ground and use it to position everything I need off the wet ground.

CREATING SPARKS:

Making a spark is really pretty simple. What you are doing is swiping the steel striker across a sharp edge of your flint so that it will remove a tiny shard of steel. The shard of steel is heated by the friction of being stripped off and is oxidizing in the air which makes it glow.

That is the same principle that creates sparks when you grind steel, we’re just making them by hand. Keep in mind that the sparks don’t last very long so we need to capture the heat in some other material and build up the quantity.

To create sparks, I hold the flint in my left hand between my thumb and forefinger. It really doesn’t matter how you hold the flint so long as the steel can swipe across a sharp edge and not run into your knuckles.

The steel is on my right hand, wrapped around my fingers between my first and second knuckles with my hand closed in a very loose fist and my thumb out of the way.

This is how I hold the steel, depending on your hand size and strength, you may need to change your grip. The goal is to have a solid hold on the steel so that it’s doesn’t rock from side to side but is far enough away that your don’t hit the flint with your knuckles. You can not generate a spark with knuckles against flint, I know that first hand (sorry about the pun).

Getting a spark comes very easily to some people and is totally illusive to others, I don’t know why but if you stick with it, you’ll make sparks quite easily.

I set the steel against the sharp edge that I will be using and move it to the top of the striking edge and then to the bottom. Do this a few times so you can establish the muscle memory so the steel swipes across the flint.

The stroke isn’t anything special either it covers about 18” (450mm) from top to bottom and isn’t a function of speed. Concentrate on having the steel SWIPE the face across the sharp edge of the flint. Think of each stroke as an independent action, “it’s going to happen on this stroke.”

You are going to be hitting the edge of the flint pretty firmly, so you should expect to hear a click when it hits.

Remember, it’s not a function of speed. It’s also not magic, you are simply stripping a tiny bit of steel off the striker with the edge of the stone, play with it a bit and you will get it.

After a while you’ll get to the point where you can make a spark every time. Once you can make a spark, you have made fire.

Remember, there’s a tiny bit of heat in that spark, all we need to do is capture it somehow and allow it to get something else generating heat that can grow in volume.

That’s where the char cloth comes in. Remember: it’s carbon cloth just waiting for some heat to transfer.

There are several different methods of holding or placing the char cloth.

In Boy Scouts the Manual showed putting the char in a pan and showering sparks down on it. Another method is to hold the char under the flint in your hand and have the sparks hit it as they pass by.

I don’t remember where I got my method but it works very well for me.

Take a bit of char and fold it in half. Place the char on top of your flint with the fold opposite the sharp striking edge. This puts two layers of char right next to the edge where the sparks are generated.

Your thumb sits atop the folded char, holding it in place and shielding it from snow, rain or sweat drops that are magnetically attracted to anything you are using to start a fire.

Tilting the edge down a degree or two will direct more of the sparks on top of the flint and into the char. What you want to happen is for one spark to fall into the char, when that happens, YOU HAVE FIRE.

Carbon is a terrific conductor of heat. As soon as that spark falls on the char, stop striking and bring the flint and char up to about chin level and blow gently across the char. You’ll notice that the char is now glowing and the glowing area is growing larger across the surface.

Remember, making fire is about building the quantity of heat.

Set down your striker and stone, holding on to the char while you lift your jute bundle.

The Jute bundle should be about the size of your palm and pretty thick in the middle.

Set the glowing char in the middle of the bundle and close it gently like a taco, pinching the open ends. Then pinch in the top and bottom of the bundle so the glowing char is surrounded by the bundle.

Gently blow directly at the bundle a few times and you’ll see wisps of smoke coming from the bundle.

Now lift the bundle slightly above eye level and hold it about 6 inches from your face and blow a bit harder. Long steady breaths are what we need.

You’ll see the bundle start to glow with each breath, one more long breath and the bundle will burst into flames ready for you to get it into your pre-laid fire.

What next?

A few things to remember while you’re taking your fire from spark to flame.

Heat rises. That’s why I had you lift the bundle as you blew into it. You were pushing the heat in the direction it wanted to go assisting it in heating the jute to the point of ignition. You may need to adjust the jute bundle to assure that there is sufficient fuel to ignite.

Unlike matches and lighters, wind is your friend. On a windy day, holding the bundle in the wind will work better than blowing your carbon dioxide laden breath on the fledgling fire.

Be careful with fire and follow all of the fire safety rules, don’t be burning down my woods by being too lazy or careless with your fire. It can be your best friend or your worst enemy, it’s all in how you manage it.

And last is an interesting aside. In the old days, one step in fire building was to roll a cigarette. As soon as an ember was raised, like the glowing char, it was used to light the cigarette. The thinking was that the burning cigarette was used as a wick to preserve an ember which could be used to light the fire. I really got good with flint & steel using it as my only cigarette lighter for a few weekends; not a reason to resume smoking but certainly proof that there is good in everything if you look hard enough.

© Sharpshooter Sheath Systems 12MAR2009