Fire steel

One of the things I wanted to work on this summer was my fire building skills. Last night I used our ferrocerium “fire steel” to light a nest of dryer lint and wood shavings which I built up into a good fire (Able and Eli were whittling, which is why Able has a knife here.) Ferrocerium is fairly easy, next I’ll try the same technique with less engineered components; a carbon steel railroad spike and a hunk of chert from a boulder of it I hauled out of the woods last year.