You are right, that´s good thing about magnesium, however at the same time it burns for a short time. Several minutes of scraping the Coghlan´s block gives me a flame lasting around 3 seconds. That´s why I use it almost exclusively as an accelerator. If everything is dry, the mag. shavings alone suffice. But if I need to dry some wet wood up I will have to scrape the mag. for several tens of minutes to get a long lasting flame.

However Izzy recently posted a thread about firestarters where the ferro. rod is glued to a soft magnesium cylinder and from the demostration video it looked very promising - several strokes with small saw generated big pieces of magnesium that then burned for a long time ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzkJQZFyfVQ ). Some day I will have to get it to see it for myself. Have you already tested it, Izzy?

I would say one can´t go wrong with magnesium block, you have ferro. rod plus the magnesium. If you don´t like (scraping) magnesium, you can just leave it there and use only the ferro. rod with tinder you carry for it. If you happen to be without tinder or just need an accelerator for something that is not fibrous etc., you can use the magnesium. So it´s quite good backup tinder/accelerator that´s always with you if you carry the mag. firestarter. Therefore I think mag. firestarters have advantage over the classic ferro. firestarters like Swedish Firesteel because of this "layer" of backup. Just my perspective. (Note that I am not comparing mag. firestarter vs. lighter/whatever, just magnesium firestarter vs. classic sheer ferro. rod.)
Actually I have been thinking about chipping a big piece of magnesium off the Coghlan´s block and putting it into the Strike Force compartment along with other tinder (instead of the WetFire). This way I would have more options, as far as tinder is concerned.


What exactly happened? I can´t imagine how dropping mag. block into a campfire would result in a wildfire. Unless it exploded or something like that .