How To Strike A Traditional Flint And Steel

Description

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/ There's a little knack to striking a traditional flint and steel, also known as the strike-a-light.

This video forms part of a series of 20 FREE videos I've made to help people with wilderness bushcraft, survival skills and general outdoor life.

To get instant access to the other free videos, you should visit

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/free-tips-and-advice/

Tags: Fire Striker,Steel (Material),Flint (Rock Type),traditional,bushcraft,fire,firecraft,outdoors,camping,wilderness,charcloth,trick,wrist,How-to (Website Category),instruction

Video Transcription

hi there I'm Paul currently founder of frontier bushcraft and author reporter at Lee's blog the leading source of bushcraft information on the net in this video I'm going to share with you some simple tips and tricks for using a traditional flint and steel before we had matches people would use flint and steel on a day-to-day basis they'd use it for lighting the fires in their home and they'd also use it for lighting fires while on the trail explorers would use flint and steel set and frontiersman Doozer afoot the flint and steel set so they were a part of everyday life really for a lot of people these days not so many people know how to use them and in this video it's my aim to show you a few tricks and a few tips on how to use them efficiently it's also a useful skill set to have because it teaches you about a broader range of highlighting skills and certainly if you're using a modern sparking device those sparks are very hot and as you'll see in a second the sparks you get from a flint and steel set are not as hot so it gives you the ability to light things in a way that you maybe wouldn't be able to otherwise

also if you're interested in learning fire by friction being able to take a smoldering ember to a tender bundle to flame there's a lot of parallel with how you take your smoldering piece of tinder from your flint and steel set to flame as well so it broadens out and strengthens all of your fire lighting skills and learning how to do this so what we need is a traditional traditional

steel this is a relatively small one this is ideal for carrying with you and you can also get larger ones and also a piece of flint and you need a couple of sharp edges on that and to keep you going and if you look at this when we when we strike two things to note first off the sparks are relatively dull compared to say a modern fire flash one fire flash got very very hot sparks these sparks are a little bit less hot these are orange and yellow orange color which means they're not as not as hot as really bright white sparks that you get from the modern fire flash also note a lot of the sparks go upwards so if you try to stock sparks off this down onto a piece of tinder it's not very efficient you're better off putting the tinder on top whether that's a very very traditional tinder like a Madhu or something like a char cloth anything like that needs to be placed on top of the Flint rather than underneath if you're using the method I'm showing here and also the last thing to note is the wrist action but many people will take a very rigid approach to trying to knock a spark out of this as you can see I'm not really achieving very much what you need is quite a light touch and you're aiming to scrape and see that scrape the steel down the front of the Flint like so and in doing that you create a spark and you need to be able to have some flexibility in your wrist to do that like so so what we do I've got some char cloth here this is just cotton cloth that's been charred it's basically carbon that's left you can see that there place that on there on top of the sharp edge just behind the edge and then a strike

once we get our chart off lit here you can see it select actually you can see that once you get your chocolate roll this up and consolidate then you can take that to your tinder bundle

so to recap make sure that you're using the sharpest edge of the Flint make sure that you put your tinder on top of the Flint and not underneath it and make sure that you're using a fluid flexible action when you're striking the steel against the Flint and that should serve you well so there you have it some simple tips and tricks on using the traditional flint and steel hope you find those useful I hope they serve you well if you'd like to get more tips and tricks like this one please go over to my website that's Paul curtly co uk where you'll find 23 videos just like this one plus loads more information on there as well all the information on there is free so go over get you 23 videos now that's a Paul curtly co uk and thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next video