Firesteels

[Desert Ratxx]

I picked up a couple of firesteels for spares this weekend. They don't spark as well as I would like but they are not horrible. I was wondering if it is possible they are to hard or soft? Is there a test or something to try to tell. I think the steel is ok as far as the carbon content but I'm not really sure what they are made of.

 

[paulvallandigham]

Without knowing what metal was used to make them, you are limited in how to test for these things. The steel needs carbon, and it needs to be hard. The first thing I would do would be to heat them up to their non-magnetic temperature( Yes, use a magnet to test them while they are red hot) and then quench them in oil. polish off the scale from the striking surface, and try it. If its throws better sparks, you are okay to go. If not you are probably dealing with cold roll steels, and they just don't have enough carbon in them to allow you to harden them or get decent sparks. Throw them away. I would not recommend Case Hardening a soft steel striker. Case hardening only puts a few thousandths of an inch of carbon in the surface, and a good smack with your flint is likely to cut through that surface fairly quickly, putting you back where you began.

 

[Jeffrey Hecht]

You can do a spark test on an electric grinder and compare it to a good striker, you don't have to hit it hard or take of much. If it good steel I would bring it up to a bright orange color and quench it in water. I had some sort of alloy, it was on old car coil spring that I had a heck of a time getting to spark right. Try this first. Or if you in the south west Michigan area stop by and I will look at it for you.
Jeff

 

[ameling]

When you strike sparks, you are using the sharp edge on your flint to dig/chip out little bits of steel from your striker. The energy put into digging/chipping out those little bits of steel heats them up enough that the carbon in the steel burns. That's the sparks you see. If there is little or no carbon in the metal, then there is no carbon to burn. If the metal is too soft or not hard enough, then it is hard to chip/dig out small enough bits from your striker. Your flint digs in too much and tends to "grab" - or the steel bits are too large to heat up enough to burn.

So your striker needs to be heat treated HARD. The harder it is heat treated, the easier it is to get sparks. But that also makes it very brittle and easily broken. So you have to do something of a balancing act when heat treating strikers - hard enough to strike well but still not be too brittle. It needs to be heat treated much harder than a knife blade to work well.

And just resign yourself to occasionally breaking one. It's a know hazard of a good flint striker. Just like dropping a really good metal file on the cement floor, it can and will chip or break.

One thing to check on your flint strikers is the striking edge. Has the forging scale been cleaned/ground off? That forge scale gets in the way of striking good sparks. You need clean metal on the striking surface. Also, when forging up the striker you can burn a little of the carbon out of the outside layer of your steel. Grinding off a little bit of the outside will sometimes correct this by getting you down to a higher carbon layer - but you would need to know how good of steel they started out as.

I hope this helps answer some of your questions.

Thanks
Mike Ameling - out in the Hinterlands

 

[Desert Ratxx]

I took a file to the striking edge and it made a great improvement. Thanks for all the replys.

 

[LRB]

A file should not cut your striker. A very,very, light scratch, maybe, but not an acual cut.

 

[Desert Ratxx]

The file did very little to my eye, but there was some metal dust(?) on my fingers when i was done. Seeing how this is a spare striker anyway I'm tempted to try re-heating it just for goofs, but then part of me thinks why mess with it if it is seeming to work ok.

 

[Twice boom]

Dump enough salt in a can of rain water until an egg will float.Heat you iron to where a magnet will not stic as it was said before.quench it in the salt brine.. The iron will harden in the salt brine to where it might not in oil..
Rule of thumb for me has always been that you can harden in brine if hardnest is most important any steel whether it calls for oil or water... But you can't harden steel in oil that calls for water with the outmost results.........
I promise you that if there is a smidgen of carbon the salt brine will get it hard..

Twice B..

 

[TANSTAAFL]

I picked up a couple of firesteels for spares this weekend. They don't spark as well as I would like but they are not horrible. I was wondering if it is possible they are to hard or soft? Is there a test or something to try to tell. I think the steel is ok as far as the carbon content but I'm not really sure what they are made of.

Did you buy them from Iron Grip (Eric) at the rondy?

I got an oval one from him as it was a little unique, but it too is a bit weak on sparking, think I will re-temper it.

The best fire steel I have is sadly a cast one, marked India, it sparks like a demon possessed.

 

[Desert Ratxx]

That be the feller, Let me know how your re-tempering works.

 

[TANSTAAFL]

I tried Mike Ameling's suggestion (see below) this afternoon, worked like a charm, now sparks great.

One thing to check on your flint strikers is the striking edge. Has the forging scale been cleaned/ground off? That forge scale gets in the way of striking good sparks. You need clean metal on the striking surface. Also, when forging up the striker you can burn a little of the carbon out of the outside layer of your steel. Grinding off a little bit of the outside will sometimes correct this by getting you down to a higher carbon layer - but you would need to know how good of steel they started out as.

 

[TANSTAAFL]

Thanks Mike, I followed your suggestion and dressed down striking surfaces on the belt sander, made a world of difference and it now works great.

Tan

 

[ameling]

Glad my humble ramblings helped.

After you make a couple thousand flint strikers, you do tend to pick up a few hints and tricks along the way. The heat-treat is the most important part. When I started out with this living history stuff a number of decades ago, I purchased several strikers that were poor to bad. So when I started making them, I wan't to do it right. The first ones were for my self and friends, then eventually for sale. But when you sell stuff that you make, you really need to make sure the quality and functionality is there. It takes a lot of good experiences to make up for a bad one. So the "scrap pile" got a lot bigger as I learned a bunch of those "tricks of the trade".

I make over 500 strikers a year - in a couple dozen different styles based on originals from every time period they were used in - from very early Roman times on up to the present. But less than 10% of those are that classic C striker you normally see everywhere. ALtho, that C shape is one of the most common styles in hsitory, and crosses all the centuries from Roman times on up. So I try to base my flint striker styles/shapes on historical artifacts - instead of just the common shapes. But that's just me.

Good luck in your Quest for Fire!

Mikey - torturing iron out here in the Hinterlands

 

[Desert Ratxx]

Very cool, I got a little better spark with the file, I'll get more aggressive with a grinder or a sander and see what it does.

Mike your website is very interesting, lots of good info.

 

[Desert Ratxx]

Mike, I followed your instructions and re-heated the striker (grinding it didn't do much more) and it sparks like a charm. Thanks for the info.

 

[ameling]

Glad my humble ramblings helped.

Now just keep this in mind. The harder the striker is heat treated, the better is sparks. But the harder it is, the more brittle it is. It's something of a balancing act making it work well without being so brittle it breaks when dropped on grass!

That little tip from a knife maker friend about Thermal Cycling the steel 3 times just before the final heat treat did wonders for removing a bunch of that brittleness. It relieved internal stress in the steel put in there by the forging process, and refined the grain structure a lot.

I forged up a dozen fire steels today, and I had one break right after the heat-treat. But I had bent and straightened a narrow part of the handle several times while I was "tweaking" it - so I know what happened and it was my fault. I knew I probably had pushed the steel too far, but I still wanted to "salvage" the striker instead of adding it to the scrap pile and starting over. That old saying "tinker with it till it's really broke" just takes hold of me sometimes.

So it goes out here in the Hinterlands
Mike Ameling