Flint and Steel Kits

Anyone can make fire with matches or a cigarette lighter. Flint and steel kits take the kind of skill our forefathers had to have to survive.

It's impressive to watch, it's useful and it's a real accomplishment to make fire using flint and steel kits.

How can I say it's useful making fire from flint and steel kits, when matches and lighter are so easy?

Well you can run out of matches or they can get wet and become useless. Instead of lighting, the head just breaks off or smears down the side of the match box. And cigarette lighters eventually run out of fuel, or they lose their flint.

This is where flint and steel firemaking kits come into their own, because the flint is a large enough piece that it will last for years many years.

The steel can be the back of your pocket knife or sheath knife, or a special striker included in a commercial flint and steel kit. It doesn't matter which.

All that matters is that you can make a strong spark, and can drop the spark into some punk.

Punk is super-fine, tinder-dry combustable material, such as charred cloth or the fluff from an electric laundry drying machine (you collect some at home). The punk needs to be kept in a completely airtight can or maybe a ziplock pouch.

You strike a spark into the punk and nurse that spark into a tiny ember. Then, by blowing carefully on the ember, it becomes a small flame. And the small flame is used to light your tinder... very small dry twigs and leaves that will catch fire immediately.

So now you know why people still buy flint and steel kits in this twenty-first century. It's for the sense of accomplishment, and as a back-up fire making system and the link back to our pioneer forefathers (and their women) who made fire every day using a tinder-box containing a flint and steel.