Survival- Fire Steel for Beginners- Tips & Tricks

hello fellow outsiders and welcome to today's episode I thought that today would be a great day to do a firesteel beginners tutorial a lot of people buy these without really knowing how to use them it seems simple but there's a few tricks that you can do to make it a lot easier to start a fire with them so people buy them get frustrated and end up not using them because they've never really realized how to use them so I just have a few tips and tricks for those of you beginning with fire Steel's and if you've been using fire steels for a while you might even learn a couple extra new things the first thing that I like to recommend with getting a fire steel is that you buy the proper one and a lot of fire steel companies like to advertise that their fire steel can take up to 30,000 strikes or whatever it is that it can last a long time but that's actually a bit of a gimmick and really what that means is that their product is inferior when fire steel advertises that it can withstand a lot of strikes it's only because the material that they use is too hard and so when every time you make a strike there's not a lot of material coming off of it and therefore you don't have a lot of spark and so it's good to get a fire steel that is has softer material and so every time you strike it there's more material coming off which means a much bigger spark which is what you want if you want to start a fire so I like to look at companies that advertise maybe 3000 strikes or less when it comes to using their fire steel and a lot of companies may not even advertise how many strikes is needed or how many strikes they last for but I do recommend a light light my fire fire Steel's they have a smaller model and a larger fire steel which is about the size of this one but this isn't a light my fire fire steel this is a Colin's fire steel and I'm just testing it out today to see how it works so now that you've bought your fire steel and selected the one that you like I highly recommend getting a fire steel with a striker I've used the back of my knife before to light fires but I find that a striker is much better and that's because strikers are specially designed to get the most material off of your fire steel with every strike so definitely get one with a good striker and with this striker and maybe I'll give you a close-up so you can see but one side of the striker works better than the other and you'll see that the front side of this striker the edge is kind of soft and curved a bit and it's hard to throw sparks with that side but if you turn it over to the back side of the striker there you can see there's a bit of a lip around the edges and you're going to want to use that lip to scrape the fire steel because that's going to basically claw off as much material as it can which again creates a much bigger spark and so make sure you do that not all strikers have the lip on the edge in which case you just use whatever side you want but just make sure to look for that when you use your striker the next thing that you'll need to do with your fire steel is to look at the rod here and you'll see that it's black and color usually and that's because there's a special coating on the rod to keep it from rusting or from being damaged before you start using it and what some people don't realize is that this coating needs to be scratched off first either with your knife or with your scraper before it will actually start throwing sparks and so I've known some people to buy a fire steel to try and get it to work and it's not throwing a spark and really they're just they're just starting to get the coating off and then they have they've already given up and they don't they think that the fire still doesn't work so when you get your first fire steel you're going to want to make sure to thoroughly scrape off the black coating and then you'll start to notice that the sparks will get bigger and bigger as you expose the actual fire steel to the scraper as well I like getting fire steels with a good handle on the end to grab on to the bigger the better it is a lot of fire Steel's are very short and small and that is fine if it's a good fire steel but I always say that more material is better to work with especially when you're starting out learning how to light a fire with your fire steel wow it's raining a lot today this is a good day to test the fire steal out it's a really wet and soggy day so we're going to see how this does when you're starting out with your fire steel the best thing to do is to do something that's easy don't just go off into the bush and try and light some twigs on fire or something even with a fire steel you need the right material to start a fire with and so I would recommend to start out just to get comfortable with your fire steel to use a cotton ball and to throw it try throwing sparks on a cotton ball outside obviously not indoors because fire is dangerous but take it outdoors and throw your sparks on a cotton ball and and that'll be kind of a way that you can get comfortable with it because obviously cotton balls take sparks really quickly and and as well what I like to do when I first started camping with my fire steel is I would always take a handful of cotton balls with me so that I could use to start a fire but as well I would take a bit of vaseline or my friends in the UK petroleum jelly and the reason why I carry Vaseline and cotton balls with me again to start fires in the beginning but as well Vaseline I find is really good if I cut myself in the bush if I need to keep working sometimes a band-aid doesn't work I'm too sweaty I'm too dirty for the band a to stay on or maybe I'm bleeding a little bit too much but often I'll just take a bit of Vaseline and smear it on on my cut and that'll be enough to stop the bleeding and seal it for a time until I can get my work done and get out of the bush but anyways what I like to do when it comes to starting fires for the first time with my fire steel is to take a cotton ball and to dip it in Vaseline and throw a spark on that and the reason for that is because the cotton ball and the Vaseline together make a sort of really basic candle the cotton ball acts as a sort of wick and the Vaseline acts as the wax that holds the flame for a longer amount of time so that you can build up a proper fire around your cotton ball a cotton ball by itself burns off rather quickly but when it's dipped in Vaseline your cotton ball can burn for for several minutes before it goes out and by then you should have a pretty good fire built up so as you can see with the petroleum jelly or the Vaseline and cotton ball it has now been around four or five minutes and it's still burning quite strong and so you can see how effective the combination of the two is now when it comes to striking your fire steel over your cotton ball or whatever it is that you're doing I see a lot of people who try and strike it as quickly as they can and try and throw a spark as fast as they can but that often isn't too effective it's better to be slower and press harder on the fire steel rather than just quickly do some quick strikes on it because that only throws a bit of spark off into the end of the cotton ball or whatever it is that you're aiming at but like I said slow and steady wins the race make sure that you put a lot of pressure on the fire steel and if you're slower that's fine as long as you've got good pressure just like that and the last thing that I recommend is that you aim the rod at whatever it is that you're start trying to start a fire with and that seems like a very simple piece of instruction but what I found with myself when I first started learning how to use a fire steel is I kind of aimed the rod up and like over the material that I was trying to set on fire so when I struck the fire steel I would shower sparks over the the kindling and I would miss a lot of the kindling with my sparks and because I kind of imagined that when I struck the sparks that they would kind of fall and shower down on the kindling but if you watch people using fire Steel's in slow motion on a side view you'll see that the sparks generally shoot straight off of the end of the rod and so it's very important that you aim the rod down at what you're trying to hit and as well when it comes to striking I know some people recommend different techniques and you have to find what's best for you but what I find is best is to try my hardest to pull the rod away and hold my hand my striking hand firmly in place rather than just trying to push off all the time because generally what happens when you do that is you end up hitting your own pile of tinder with your striking hand and and stopping it from catching the spark nerville yes'm these pieces are pretty much all these pieces are going to dry out because it's so wet right now pectins that's what I love about birch bark it really really takes the fire well yeah and it is burning already yeah even when it's wet it's got that oil inside of it that is very very flammable another thing that I'd like to remind beginners of is that when you buy your fire steel it comes with a striker on the string here but make sure you take the striker off of the string and separate it out because otherwise it's way too hard to strike the fire steel if it's still on the string and to some people this might be kind of a common sense thing but it's amazing what we can forget or what we miss when we're first learning something so again make sure to take that striker off the string first before you use it on the fire steel and most importantly be persistent it only takes one good spark to light a fire but it can sometimes take dozens of strikes to create that perfect spark stick with it and take care

Channel: The Outsider

Views: 761,492

Rating: 4.8352714 out of 5

Keywords: Fire, Steel, Striker, Firesteel, Survival, Outsidefun1, Outsider, Bushcraft, How to, Hack

Id: u6diTROxK7I

Length: 10min 52sec (652 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 15 2016