Beginner's Guide to Making Fire with Firesteels

Description

Firesteels are in most of our packs, but many people aren't able to get flames with them. This tutorial shows how to hold them and how to properly apply pressure to get powerful sparks and ignite your tinder.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods,firesteels,how to use a firesteel,how to make fire with a firesteel,ferrorods

Video Transcription

a lot of people keep these in their packs or their survival kits and they feel like okay I have a Ferro rod I know I can get a fire the truth is if any of you try to use these out in the field it's not as easy as you think and today we're going to do a really basic beginners tutorial on how to get flames with this I'm not going to go over how to set a fire but before you would do this you would want to know the basics of setting a fire and the basics of having a tinder bundle which is going to go into that fire and start it up so I'm not going to go over those two aspects we're going to talk about how to get flame using this there's two things we're going to need the first is a substrate a material that we're going to get to take flame and there's a lot of different materials we can use but if you struck into something over and over again

we've tried 20 times chances are that your material is not going to work especially if it's a dry material and we need this to be something that's thin enough but it's going to take like a dried grasses if you lay down a piece of birch bark and you use your knife at a 90 degree angle and you shave back and forth

you'll get up a dust basically like a birch bark dust that usually takes with a single strike from this today we're going to do it on not a super ideal medium we're going to use some of these oak leaves behind us the reason we're going to do that is you're going to be able to see what comes off of these we'll do some in slow motion too so you can see what comes off because some of this material is actually scraped off and when you do it with this technique that we're going to show I'm actually gonna have Brett who teaches with me here real wild you he's really really good with these and we're gonna use his technique and it scrapes off pieces of this that fall in you're going to be able to see how those pieces ignite and once you get a little bit of stuff that's glowing orange it's just another strike or two and then you'll get flames even though again this isn't a really really simple thing to get to take you're going to get to see a lot of coolness okay so here's these are red oak when you use these leaves and I'm going to be holding them in a little Bowl you can actually see the action of what's happening I this is not like trying to promote a certain brand video but I did do you know a test of this I'm just in really crappy conditions once so this is because I know people are going to ask what we're using it's a light my fire Ferro a rod this is their army one and I just really like these they work really well so especially with this technique that we're going to show you so one thing that one thing that a lot of people I see do is that they don't really know what to expect from this so they're like doing like this and hoping that they can get a fire like that yeah and so without knowing how powerful these things can be you might discern struggle trying to get a fire like this and then give up thinking I'm not doing this right or something's wrong a lot of people have trouble controlling the end of this what I've kind of started doing is putting my finger underneath here and almost is kind of squeezing like I'm using this thumb to press into it and then I can get a really steady that's great and I can really control where I'm aiming at so if I wanted to like light a specific finish like I can aim it and I'm not having a lot of trouble I've seen a lot of people kind of put it in there into the tinder bundle directly and then as they're scraping they start pushing their stuff away and by the end there's just got a big hole yeah it could be that all the time and so and that's what I had trouble with at first when I started using it and so probably cuz I showed you yeah partially but I was trying to do it on my own too but yeah so

if you can control this then you don't necessarily have to press it into it and you can leave it a little off and it's really just a matter of I like I'm using a lot of pushing down on my thumb and it's just kind of squeezing these two things together as I scrape so I'm like and you don't have to do it fast you don't have to be you know anything like that you just have to get a nice gig on pretty hard then you just drag it across you'll get a nice spark that's awesome kind of like roughly that angle give or take you'll have to find the right angle for you but kind of the scraper goes down like this a little bit so you kind of have to hold it at an angle and you can't really good you can't really get it straight up like that so you really just dig into it you can get a lot of parts and you've got our sorry guts and stuff catching in with these I find is useful to hold it in right angle so sometimes you can get it to ignite and if you don't catch that flame then you'll just leave it real quickly to the dozen laughs out of it you can get a there we go great okay okay so so I noticed you at a steep angle and you're dragging a lot of stuff there's no sparks flying around in there and then then light up and then when you saw orange keep at it once it's first more and we get flame yeah okay yeah and I feel like if you had this this material it's not too bad because it does dry enough to no burst into flames if you had a regular tinder bundle with some fluff in the middle or something like that once you got that coal I bet you could just blow it into life from that and you wouldn't necessarily need to get the full flames but with these a lot of times you can get it straight up flames with it and you don't have to even do the event you don't even really need to blow it to life if you're getting enough heat in that yeah it goes good on this decision is holding okay