Flint and Steel Strike Angles & Wet Wood Fire

Change your angle, and stop flipping your char tin. When you start out doing things the wrong way, it can be hard to change. Muscle memory is a double edged sword, and can make things easy if you ingrain the motion correctly, but it can also be very hard to break if you learned a poor technique in the first place.

When I was first learning cast sparks down onto char, I did what seemed obvious and held the striker directly over the tin and swung the stone downward, hopefully stopping myself from over-swinging and hitting the tin. I got better at not hitting it, but still flipped it over all the time, often sending my char onto the wet ground.

Years ago few knowledgeable BCUSA members suggested changing my strike angle from vertical to horizontal, and I tried it but still found it difficult. What seems to be working well for me now is an angle somewhere in the middle.

Whether standing or kneeling, getting my body over the tin shields it from rain or snow, and allows me to swing my arm in an arc without having to stop it short. This type of long swing results in more sparks per strike and it is easy to adjust patch of the arc so that an overstrike does not contact the tin.

This isn’t perfect, and I still flip my tin using this method (as you can see in the first shot), but the more I practice it, the less often I screw it up.

Pardon the cheesy animations, but my goal was to make the idea as clear as possible for people that don’t read the description.

Someone on Instagram nailed it when they said it looked like a cheesy infomercial! I didn’t do that on purpose for comedy, but now I wish I had.

A piece of metal screen is great insurance for those times that you do screw it up, so check out that video if you are interested but missed it.

Holding a piece of charred material on the stone and swinging the striker is probably the most reliable method of all, but some materials like delicate punk wood and pith are too fragile and require that the sparks be cast onto them.

There are other methods including pinning a piece of char down with your striker that can work, but I find that one in particular to be very difficult as it severely limits my range of motion when striking.

You don’t have to use a tin to take advantage of this body position and motion though. Char can be placed on a dry surface, in the lid, or directly into a bundle and sparked the same way. There are enough advantages to striking directly into the tin that I will likely dedicate a video to that topic in the future though.

Special thanks to the BCUSA crew for introducing me to the idea of horizontal striking. A bit more of a slope seems to work better for me, but play around with different angles and you’ll probably find one that works best for you.

Tools and Materials Used:

Carbon Steel Striker
Altoids Tin
Candy Tin
Charred Black Cottonwood Punk Wood
ESEE 6
Western Red Cedar Driftwood (Tinder Bundle, Kindling, Fuel)

Music:

Jebase – Relax
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiMHMhqUDYo

Luca Stricagnoli – The Last of the Mohicans (Guitar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kbv1OpIpaA