Flint and Steel
Guy Radford May 1st, 2011
Back in February I did a charcoal making course and part of the course was to light the forge and do some forging, I chose to make a steel for use with flint. The Steel looked great once finished but did not work, I later found out that the steel was too soft and required a higher carbon content, this is often found in tool steel and an old file makes a good donor.
Yesterday I went to my local forge, old file in hand. Forging high carbon content steel is interesting, if you get it too hot it becomes very brittle and just crumbled when hit. We over came this but not getting the steel to hot and being more gentle with the hammer. After an hour of hammering and heating I have my steel, the next think is to test it.
Initial tests did not seem to produce any sparks, we tried heating the striking face and quenching in water, this changes the structure of the steel and hardens it. After this we got a few sparks but not the number we got of the original file, we assumed that the forging had burnt off some of the carbon.
To cool the steel after it had been forged we had dunked it in water and the same when we hardened it. After we had been chatting for a while I tried it again and it worked much better, even though I had dried the steel we can only assume that it was still wet and now it was fully dry it worked much better. I took it home to give it a proper test.
I placed the char cloth on top of the flint next to the striking edge, then struck the flint with a downwards swipe with the steel to produce sparks. This takes patience but after a while a spark landed on the char cloth and took, I could then gently blow the tiny ember it into a nice hot ember. At his point you would add it to your tinder bundle and get your fire going.
