Thanks, your videos helped a lot. I was looking really closely at the sparks in your sparkslitetinder.wmv & qtip.wmv video and in slow motion playback I noticed your able to get a much bigger and stronger spark. I'm thinking it must be my SparkLite's flint. Either it got chipped and now it's to small or it was just a bad batch. I'll just have to order a new one, at least they're pretty cheap.

I know fluffing couldn't really be the problem because I been fluffing all the ends with a needle. The only time I can get it to light is when I'm doing rapid sparking.

On a more positive and side note. In my last post I said I was going to the desert to check out some volcanos. I did and sure enough my Doug Ritter Pocket Survival Pak saved the day. My college classmates were climbing into some caves and one of my female friends slipped on a rock and broke her finger and took some nasty cuts on her hands. I was able to use the pencil and duct tape to make a splint and stop the bleeding with some cotton clothes I had put in as extra flint. Wasn't a survival situation but it helped none the less. What really got me mad though was no one else had any medical supplies at all - professor included! The only First Aid supplies was on the bus which was located miles away. I will say this experence helped a great deal. I was so focused on fire making that I almost removed some of the material in the pack thinking I didn't need them. If it wasn't for last night I might have never realised until it was to late, just how important simple things like duct tape can be.

Now I'm just wondering where can I find replacment rolls of duct tape as small as the one supplied in Ritter's kit.