Yeah, what materials did you try?

Dry grass can be a pain - I bundle it, then "roll" it around so that the middle starts to fray (grab both ends and rotate it around kind of like bike pedals)

Leaves are crap.

Try bark? I know birch goes up like crazy. Trick is, flip the bark over, use a knife to scrape the bark into 'dust.' It catches a spark real easy. Youtube has a lot of demos if you look it up. That's the best and easiest tinder I've found. I don't know if other tree bark would work as well.

I agree that what you're doing is much harder in a humid hot environment. You might try a few dry fibers of cotton, cut or scraped from clothing or a dry sack. Lint from a clothes dryer is excellent (that's urban survival). Old dried moss from tree bark might also be good. Adding any kind of inflammable material - just a few drops - is also helpful. Rubbing alcohol. Gasoline (few drops only!). 100% DEET mosquito repellant. All might help to do the trick.

Keep us informed.

Pete #2

I have never generated a flame by using only a fire steel and all natural materials. It is a humbling reality check. Were you making it even harder by using an all natural scraper?!

Grass is often problematic. I'm not sure why but I think it has to do with it absorbing moisture. I noticed this when a wad of grass I carefully dried in the sun and which was working for a demonstration stopped working when a summer shower went through and and the humidity went up. Over an hour it went from igniting almost too fast at the touch of a hot spark to resiting great showers of sparks even though it had been kept well under cover.

As an aside, hair sometimes works when everything else is damp. In my experience the longer between washes the better it catches and burns.

An aluminum pie plate in our garage is our firesteel testing ground. We've experimented with many materials. The dryer and fluffier the better. Milkweed, cattails and birch bark work very well, but birch bark is best if you scrape the inside of the bark into a powder.

I've never had success with grass or leaves. They're not hot enough and simply go out too soon, not allowing the fire to eat enough to sustain itself.

You are right. Starting a fire with a steel in good conditions is not always as easy as it looks. Add in some wind, humidity etc and the fire starting is that much more difficult. Like anything else, fire starting with a steel takes practice before you may ever need it and I always find it disconcerting when I see brand new and unused (un-tested) fire steels in people's kits.

Excellent reminder, Eastree! Welcome to the forum!

Thank you, bacpacjac!

So I did a bit more reading on the subject, and found a few more suggestions.

Samhain: Is there a ready source of Spanish moss you might be able to take a little? I know it's protected in some areas, but if you only snag a handful, you may be able to cram a bit in your pocket and it's not enough to adversely affect its local growth.

Also, cedar bark is very fibrous and easily shredded. When I was a kid, I played with some bark from one of my grandfather's trees. Given time, you can get it almost fluffy.

Either way, the general advice seems to be that not many things, as they occur in nature, will take a spark, and even fewer will respond like a fluffy cotton ball and flare up so easily. But some people out there have made some suggestions:

Distress the tinder into fibers (or finer fibers). Rubbing dry grasses in your hands is one method; shaving bark with a knife is another.

Also, some suggest stacking tinder in the nest (and some even suggest using a nest if one is available!), so it's a pocket progressing from the lightest and airiest possible fluff to catch the spark to progressively thicker materials which will ignite and continue burning.

This is the perfect example of why people need to carry firemaking materials with them, and why the results can be so disastrous if they don't.

I'm sure there are people who think they can easily start a fire with some dried grass or leaves by banging two rocks together to make a spark. Yeah, sure!

Sue

As I've gotten older I've stopped being a purist and messing around with the finer points of using natural tinder. If I need a fire I use a lighter. Instead of screwing around with flints and bows and char cloth, and twaddling around with a technique which might work if I keep working at it, I just get the job done.

Flick ... fire.

No, I'm not much of an old-time woodsman but I can get a fire going in seconds. At one time I was practiced with a bow and spindle and was pretty fair with a spark rod but lighters are faster, lighter, and more reliable.