LOL Callum the kids love it, I have had 4 year olds through to 90 year olds and they all love it. A fire steel offers so many advantages over a flame method of lighting a fire. A fire steel allows you to place the sparks exactly were you want them, without being effected by the wind.
When lighting a fire in wind with a flame it can be blown out, wind is its enemy but when using sparks with most natural tinders you need to introduce wind to blow the spark into flame, wind becomes an integral part of the process.
I would normally use flint and steel with char cloth as the tinder but you have to manufacture the char cloth, it is also vulnerable to moisture, The Fire steel and cotton wool has pretty much replaced flint and steel.
If lighting a fire using natural tinder it must be made up of material of a match stick thick or thinner. When people use natural tinder they normally use far to little we want to aiming for a bundle the thickness of two hand spans. From there we want to introduce the kindling of material of around pencil thickness and build up from there to you fuel. One mistake people make when their fuel is damp, they pile it on and the moister takes away the energy of the flame to cook off the moisture. This kills the fire out and you get frustrated. Make shore your tinder is bone dry and if you have damp kindling and fuel then strip of the bark, this is were most of the moister will be found.
So where do you find these magical, almost mythical materials? Well the best place is from inside a wood, for the tinder and kindling look up into the lower branches of the trees and you will find wind blown twigs balanced on the branches, these have been air dried and are perfect, even when it is wet once the bark has been stripped off you will find the wood inside is perfect. Your larger fuel should be free standing dead wood which are trees that have died band stayed vertical. If you cant find these you will be able to find trees and branches that have been blow down but arnt on the ground. You never really want to take wood from the ground unless you have a well established hot fire that has enough energy to cook off the moister.
I just found my old ImageShack account and this image of my old fire lighting kit, this is going back around 10 or 12 years.
Another old image with my trusty flint and steel, char cloth, jute coal extender and pitch pine along with my ever faithful Puukko knife and reindeer leather work gloves. As used by me on many loan trips to the boreal forest across Eurasia.
Image of me doing friction by fire
and here I am blowing the coal from the fire bow into flame with the tinder, the guy in the background used to teach this almost every weekend for two years so we had competitions to see who could do it the fastest or with the least tinder. Adults and kids reactions where the the same pure amazement.
If you can't find tinder and kindling you can split your fuel down and make your own in the form of feather sticks. In the Canadian wilderness we would have competitions to see who could process a fire from just a tree trunk each. Part of the trunk would be turned into feather sticks. Then you would process some down to kindling ranging from pencil thickness to around an inch in diameter and the rest as logs. using only a knife and a small forest axe and wooden wedge's we made from the trunk too.
When you have mastered fire there is no excuse but to survive in comfort and eat hot food.
Roast chicken anyone
What ever the environment
or the cooking method
