I agree that lighting shavings using sparks is sometimes tricky. But it depends a lot on what kind of sparks are we talking about. For example a spark from Spark-lite is too small to light almost any wood shavings. However if you take some big ferr. rod like Strike Force and strike it really hard you get burning pieces of ferrocerium that keep burning for quite some time on top of the tinder and it makes a difference. I tried it with pine (Maya sticks) shavings and it does wonders. Though the pine wood shouldn´t be fresh. I have read that a fresh pine wood doesn´t burn well.