The best way to use a Ferro rod / Fire striker

Description

In this tutorial we take a look at how to make very efficient focused and large sparks with a ferro rod. I'll also be showing why the idea of showering massive sparks everywhere isn't the best method of fire lighting.

Paul Kirtley's video on the same subject

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5R0uFHcfQw

#bushcraft #survival #outdoors #wildernessskills

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Tags: Bushcraft,Bushcraft Skills,Wilderness Skills,Outdooors,Hiking,Camping,Survival,Survival Skills,woodcraft,wood craft,fire,sparks,swedish fire steel,ferro rod,tutorial,outdoor gear

Video Transcription

hello hello and welcome to another video tutorial a lot of people have asked for more tutorials so here I am doing one for you and today I'm gonna be revisiting a tutorial that I did many many years ago and I still kind of stand by what I said in that but what's happened is since then my knowledge of my skill set has moved on and improved and increased and I want to share some of that knowledge with you so today I'm gonna be having a look at this the barrel rod fire strike witness steel if you want to get it wrong strike light whatever you want to call it I've got lots of different names but we're gonna have a look way to use this much more efficiently I'm gonna look a couple of different types of this which I have in my pocket and how those different types will affect the way that you're going to use this mainly what I'm gonna be doing is showing you how to use this particular type of feral rod to get really really good sparks and get your fire lighting to be much more efficient than it is already there's a lot of people using these in different ways and I have experimented with different ways and I think the main way that I see people using them can be massively improved upon I don't think it's very effective or efficient at all so without any further ado let's get into this and have a look at how we can improve our use of this piece of equipment so what I've got set out here is a selection of the bow rods that I use and I also see commonly used I do have more than this I do seem to acquire these things left right and center I've got two unbranded ones and then two of the branded ones which is pretty much the only brand that I use now these two are very very similar to the ones that I see used very regularly they're wonderfully well crafted this one was made to go with my knife it matches my kind of fixed blade knife and that was made for me by liam wind spur it's very very nice Farra rod and i've got one here that was given to me as a gift from somebody he used to my colleague Ben honestly I can't member who made it but it's a lovely little striker and it's kind of like moss and bits of stuff suspended in a resin handle and these two here

the Swedish brand like my fire and these are without a shadow of a doubt my absolute favorites these are very very pretty

these are very very efficient I've got two models are like my fire one here I've got the Scout 2.0 and I think it's the military 2.0 if I've got that wrong I'll stick it up on the on the video what i tend to find with these nice custom ones is while it's the very very lovely and nice the actual rodder that's used in them is a little bit hard for my liking I prefer it to be slightly softer and the reason for that isn't you'll see in the tutorial well that affects the way that you have to use it so what I see is these are usually very big and very hard so we see a particular technique being used so properties away so they don't go flying everywhere and demonstrate exactly what I mean

so technique we see with these is using the back of the knife which is absolutely fine and then we use the rod and it's either a push with the knife like so like that or a pull back on the rod so you can see we're getting quite a lot of sparks there with that particular technique well the kind of everywhere it's very erratic and I'm kind of like I'm having to put a lot of force and power into this to actually get the desired result and if I've got a small amount of lightweight tinder here that's that's gonna go everywhere I'll show you just with the other one as well so this one to the moss I'm resin one has a slightly different composition in the kind of in the makeup of the rod but again I'm having to use a very similar technique and life is always popping off the end here and many times I've had my little tinder bundle here and it's just been ineffective because I'm smashing it all over the place

the other technique which we see used in force

one of the little striker tubs which used to be actually my very favorite way to use

used to hate using my knife to get sparks what this works in very much the same way but you can see I'm still having to put a lot of effort in here and what I'm only not with is just a lot of shavings down the bottom that techniques a little bit easier with the light my fire models we get lots of sparks there that was not all of the sparks from that rod so the shavings that came off when I was doing it with the knife again you can see the sparks here I thought the quite minimal and the sort of stopping halfway up and the problem the main problem of these two techniques is that they actually start to affect the quality of your Ferro rod strike whatever you gonna call it so additionally to being less efficient we also start to see a problem with this technique where it starts to damage the the actual usefulness of the tool itself so you can see here quite clearly on this rod hopefully the camera is picking it up I'm starting to get these ridges forming and over time those ridges become more and more pronounced which causes whatever you used to strike it's kind of bounce along and you start to lose sparks and that's caused by running your striking device all the way along the the length of the rod and that as I said over time they get worse and worse and the thing just becomes very very difficult to use you can see here where I've just used it to strike with the knife it's actually missing bits of the rod so that's again like that's causing those ridges to come more and more pronounced and it's just reducing the effectiveness of it alternatively using the little striker you can see on this rod here it starts to create like a valley kind of like divot like a kink in the in the rod so that's caused by using the striker because you put lots of pressure in here and as you get to the end it seemed it's quite natural to reduce the amount of pressure and stand and skip the end of it and again that creates weak points in it and it reduces the effectiveness and if you ever get a chance to see it working I can't I physically can't film it for you what ends up happening is you get lots of sparks accumulating here and not as many go off the end so both of those techniques are completely valid and they do work but they are less efficient and do damage the equipment a little bit what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna show you a better what I think to be a better way of doing this so I'm gonna be using these two like my fire steels for this the technique that I want to show you doesn't work with these harder variations of these fire strikers the only brand that I've ever found to use to work with this technique are these like my fire ones up until very recently where I got to try a strike fire or fire strike brand and that seemed to work quite well and when I get myself one of them and experiment with it and I'll let you know how I got on with it so let's have a look at the the improved technique for using these particular types of Farah rods so what we're going to do now is we're going to use the back of the knife as we used to seeing people doing but instead of using this end of the knife where the back of the spine meets the handle where people kind of pull back like this that's not what I'm gonna do what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to move to the very tip of the knife and use that now hand position is quite important here you don't want to cut yourself and I can already feel the health and safety people saying oh it's really dangerous to do that you're gonna cut yourself well pay attention to where my my thumbs and hands are positioned and get a nice tight grip on the blade like this with the on the handle like this with the blade facing towards myself and my right thumb because I'm right-handed so you left thumb if you're left-handed it's gonna go on the cheek of the the blade here I'm gonna bring that to here and then my left thumb is going to go further down onto the cheek of the blade there in terms of where I'm striking the rod I'm about two-thirds of the way down towards the end is gonna be a little bit difficult on this particular one because it is

originally I talked about earlier but we should still get the same desired effect I'm using as close to the tip as a blade that I can and I'm using my right wrist to pivot the knife round what my left thumb just to push and give it just that a little bit of extra force much like you do a thumb cook the carving so let's have a look at that in practice so you can see that little divot is causing me a bit of trouble so I'm going to move over to the slightly larger rod so you can see the same thing in practice so again this is one of them like my fire brand wand and this is one I tend to use I'm still getting to grips a little bit with this skill on this knife on this rod because it is despite being the same composition you can see it's a lot larger and a lot thicker but it actually works a little bit better so again the same technique and you can really see that those sparks are super focused in to where I want them to be and even then when the knife slipped off the end because of my hand position is correct it didn't hit me it just hit the surface that I'm working on let me just demonstrate with the other kind of nice and made ones to show you that this just doesn't work this technique doesn't work with these types the composition is just all wrong so again same hand positioning work at the end of the rod and all I'm getting is shavings here that can be useful because obviously these shavings will ignite them in a moment you can use those shavings and I've got a nice pile of them there that's why do this well I can use this to ignited so you can see that this particular method is much more efficient I'm just going to really quickly show you the method that we used to see in it so you can see the difference so there's a knife set so we've got a couple of fails there that one's just straight up isn't working

see the difference it's really difficult and when I'm actually getting the sparks the kind of flying out all over the place which is not good and I've also - - just injure my thumb doing that banged into the piece of wood in a splint that went under my thumb now so another disadvantage to using that technique so why is this change in technique important that is quite a good question both techniques get big sparks of bright sparks the telling I just showed you is quite clearly more focused and slightly more efficient it's you know it's a lot more controlled it's less erratic but why is that important surely you can just get loads of Sparks and fire them into a bundle of birch bark and hope for the best

since being taught this technique two years ago by Paul curtly on of course I was with him my fire lighting skill has increased hugely because this technique can be used a lot more efficiently with a variety of different techniques in particular lighting of birch bark and the lighting of feather sticks is where I've seen the best improvement with this particular skill what I'm going to do today is I'm going to demonstrate with some birch bark to show that I can generally get it going sort of pretty much first time every time almost all of the time I am gonna do another tutorial on feather sticks where you will be able to see this in practice as well when it comes to feather sticks until I learnt this technique I literally could not get feather sticks

light with a spark at all because the sparks just always missed this gets all of your sparks into a single focused area and that is really really important so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead I'm gonna collect some birch bark literally off these birch trees right here it's not pre collected it isn't dried I'm getting it straight off the trees here and it's a little bit damp out today so hopefully we'll get it first time I'm gonna do the whole thing in real time and you can see this this sort of practice this technique in practice so just an additional little quick tip here the birch bark that I'm going for for this technique is the stuff that is naturally kind of peeling off the tree I don't want to damage the tree I'm not gonna cut into it and it's just really fine kind of downy stuff but I'm after

I need the amount well particularly for today's demonstration needs to be about the size of a golf ball when it's in its bundled up form so take you through the whole process that I use for lighting the fire in this way possibly going to be a little tricky because I don't normally light a fire on a on a curved surface like this I usually try and find something flat but literally the purposes of filming I can't find an easier way of doing it so it's gonna have to be on here but it should still work so I've got my birch bark fibers here and I'll start by just really quite hard just really buffing them up if you've got a wall along wilshire tall or something works very very well to do it inside like the tale of that all the way from the front part of it and what this does it's just breaking the fibers up really nicely so that they'll take the spot it's a lot easier this birch bark is actually very very dry I thought it's gonna be a little damp but it's not so you can see I've got a nice slightly warmed bundle of my birch bark here and I'm going to put the sparks right in to this section

here so as you can see already if I was kind of doing this every time the knife goes off its gonna squash the flames and send the bundle of birchbark all over the place gonna get on the floor it's gonna get wet but the way that we're gonna do it today using the tip of the blade gets it going really quite quickly so the interest of demonstration what I'm now going to do is I'm going to take the remaining amount of birch bark or slightly more here and we'll do the exactly the same thing but I'm gonna use the other technique we'll use the slightly more erratic more powerful technique so again I'm gonna buff this stuff up exactly as I did before I'm not I'm not cheating this I'm not trying to make it sort of more difficult to be the usual technique to work really want to show this quite clearly

okay so exactly the same birch bark and exactly the same tree nice and dry it buffed up to the same level using quite a lot here all that together so with this technique I'm having to make sure that it's not gonna it's not gonna fall off it's like the main thing here so that's buffed up exactly the same and I'm gonna take my knife and I'm gonna genuinely try to like this using that technique so I'm gonna pull back on this rod here so you can see I'm losing some of the the birch bark though when I'm hitting it when I move to the other rod but I have which is slightly softer but I still need to use the same technique one of them too many fair odds today so again same technique same birchbark see it's so much less less efficient get a lot of sparks this one I genuinely can't get this to light there we go I ended up just using brute force you can see how much more effort that was to actually get that one going I've got birch bark all over the place now

but it's going what's happening though he was quite interesting this is burning out a lot faster because the birch bark has spread in its bundle whereas before I might ask you that bundle really tight and it burned a lot slower so if I've got slightly damp water it's a very very cold day I've got less heat and it's more spread out here so definitely for me that that technique that I've been using the pork early show me is is much better

we still got a fire either way so there you go that is for me a much better way to be using your feral to get a fire it's much more efficient it's cleaner it's faster and I actually think it's a little bit safer you saw in that second clip where I was using the kind of this technique that nice kind of flying around all over the place and I really don't like that my technique yes you a lot closer to the cutting edge in there you lot closer to the sharp bit but it's much more controlled it's a smaller movement so it's also a little bit safer if you've got somebody else know you're kind of flinging a knife round all over the place

that knife could come out your hand if you know people are tired or hungry or whatever if somebody else could walk into where you're doing that and you could potentially stab them I don't know that is like a seriously low risk but it could happen

am I suggesting you go out and just buy yourself a like my fire barrel rod not not entirely find what works for you this is the best technique that I've seen this is the technique that I teach I've seen it work much better than any other technique that I've used and you can do this with a mora any of the more knives including the morel companions or the mora Clippers so even though they've got that rounded spine you can still use the tip of the knife to get sparks and I have I have experimented with that and it works just as well so yeah it does open it up for use with all their other pieces of equipment a curious thing that have noticed as well as I think this is actually that what's deemed to be the correct way to do it I have a traditional Swedish knife which has a little not cut out at the tip of the knife for striking on one of these feral rods so maybe you know that is the way that you should be doing it and everybody is actually doing it wrong which isn't what I'm trying to say what this technique does work better Paul Curley has also done a video on this which I found quite recently recently when I was researching for this video and I will link that in the description below it is a very very good video it's very very detailed it's very very nicely filmed I was struggling to actually get the camera lined up with where I am so well worth going having a look at that and what I've tried to include in this one is a comparison of the two the two techniques or the refine technique and the most commonly used technique I haven't been sponsored by light my fire light my fire haven't sent me this stuff for free I have bought this stuff in my own money it's the stuff that I recommend for my place of work to use they're the ones that we always buy they really do work much better downside is they're not quite as pretty but my big military style one I quite like because it's like reconstituted like coconut husk she's pretty cool so there we go that is the end of this tutorial the next tutorial is going to be hopefully if all things go well a nice tutorial on how to make good feather sticks and we'll be using this technique in that video as well tea to light a fire with the feather sticks as always I hope you've got something from this I hope you've enjoyed watching it please leave me a comment in the description below if you found this useful get out and give it a try please be careful not to cut yourselves as always please like share subscribe comment consider supporting me on patreon if you've got enough money to do that and I will see you all in the next video take care till then everybody