Trick for Using a Folding Knife as a Flint & Steel Striker

From a practical standpoint, the real value in learning flint and steel is being able to use tools that you might be carrying to start a fire. Using a dedicated striker is great for practice and saving wear and tear on your tools, but it is important to understand that it can be considerably more difficult to use a piece of steel that wasn’t necessarily designed for this purpose.

A carbon steel folding knife as a striker can be a great option that serves as an emergency striker, but they are often shaped so that only a portion of the spine sticks up further than the handle. This not only means that there is less steel to strike, but you will probably end up beating up the handle with the stone as well. With a knife like this Opinel, striking the other direction would likely damage the locking ring.

Rather than opening the blade and risking cutting yourself or having the lock fail, lifting the blade up and putting a small twig under it will keep the edge covered while keeping the spine elevated enough to strike. It may seem counterintuitive, but I have had the best results putting the twig in parallel to the blade. While it will split a little, it creates a wedge that holds firm in the slot. Putting the twig in oriented perpendicular to the blade usually results in a snapped twig.

This likely puts more force on the hinge than leaving it closed, so there is potentially more risk of damaging the tool than there would be if you left the blade completely closed; but it is certainly safer for both you and the knife than it would be to use the knife completely extended.

The steel on most knives is not as hard as you would find on a dedicated striker or old file, so as I mentioned; it can be much more difficult to get a spark to land, but it can be done with the right rock and some persistence. The piece of quartz that I used was very crumbly so I would get a few really nice sparks and then the stone would fail.

It actually took three or four attempts with the stones exploding and the charred punk wood crumbling before I got a spark to land, but the footage was washed out in the sun and didn’t really add anything to the video so I chose to omit the Yosemite Sam moment this time.

The other thing I wanted to highlight in this video was the ease of gathering dry flammable materials in riverbeds this time of year. The heat radiating off of the rocks can be intense and just about any twig you find in the debris pile will be dry enough to use as kindling.

I found some dead fir boughs with the needles still attached, which can be almost as good as birch bark or fatwood for turning small flames into big ones. In order to pack this material densely enough to use it as a traditional bundle, you need to add a lot of material. Because of the dry conditions and the fact that I was using a little twig stove, I didn’t need three foot flames so I opted to make a small twig bundle with it that I used to fan the in into flames and transfer them into the stove.

Materials Used

Knife/Striker: Opinel #8 Carbone
Stone: Quartz
Char: Charred Black Cottonwood Punk Wood
Tinder Bundle: Dry Grand Fir Boughs & Needles
Kindling: River Debris Twigs
Pan: Bromwell Cold Handle Stamped 6”
Stove: Pocket Cooker

Music: Rêveur – PEYRUIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGOVmQOrLSU