INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Industrial Revolution, the folks with ‘Light My Fire’ and ‘Uco’, offered several new products and improved versions of existing ones.

‘Light My Fire’ is selling a plastic protective ‘SporkCase’ for your Light My Fire plastic spork. If this was ‘Equipped to Commute’, maybe; but in an emergency / survival situation… um, no. (But if you insist – MSRP is $6.99)



They have also tinkered with the excellent ‘Swedish FireSteel’, giving it redesigned handles and an improved striker (it did seem easier to use), plus a built-in emergency whistle. The improved version is called the ‘FireSteel 2.0’. (Writer’s note: Stuffing a teensy whistle in the handles of survival gear –be it strikers, knives and the like - seemed to be a survival gear theme at SHOT 2011.)



UCO had two new products at SHOT this year. The first was the ‘Stormproof Match Kit’. No image is available from IR/UCO, alas, so imagine the old US Army / Boy Scout heavy plastic match case on steroids and you’ve got the picture. My biggest gripe with my old green Boy Scout match case was that it held matches for only a few days of fire starting (less if you use the waterproof “lifeboat-type” matches), and this one solves that issue. UCO claims it can hold 40 “lifeboat” matches, but I think that in a real world situation 30 is more like it. That is more than double what I got in my old Boy Scout match case. Also, it is large enough to use for other things besides matches you want to keep waterproofed. The one thing I wish it had was a loop for a lanyard or dummy cord. The ‘Stormproof Match Kit’ comes in green and orange, and has an MSRP of $5.99.

The next new product is a small, collapsible candle lantern, the ‘Micro Lantern’, which uses tea candles instead of the proprietary candles used in UCO’s larger candle lanterns. I’ve owned one of the larger UCO candle lanterns for 20 years, which we have used on many camping trips and during both the power outages after Katrina and Gustav. But during the aftermath of Hurricane Gustav we ran out of UCO candles, and our local backpacking store hadn’t reopened. Oops. So the choice of readily available, and cheap, tea candles makes a lot of sense in a crisis situation. Will the ‘Micro Lantern’ light up a room? No. But it will provide enough light to tune the radio, read your MRE flameless ration heater instructions, and keep you from bumping into furniture in a powerless house. As usual, it comes in a variety of colors, and has an MSRP of $12.99.




http://industrialrev.com