Making fire with flint & steel

[Mr. 16 gauge]

I bought a flint and steel last year while we were in colonial Williamsburg, VA. I used it most of the winter last year to start fires in the fire place (practice makes perfect:D ), and I dug it out a while back so I could practice some more as winter is approaching. Unfortunately, the steel doesn't seem to want to make the sparks it did before!:( I've tried putting a new edge on the flint, but that doesn't seem to work. Is there some way or something I can treat the steel with to get it to produce more sparks? The face is smooth, but so is the face of the frizzen on my musket.:confused:
Any thoughts or tips would be appreciated.

[GoodOlBoy]

yes many premade flint and steel kits come with a steel whose face only is hardened. What you can do is heat the steel then dose it to harden it.

Modern lighters overharden the steel so that the flint is what is chipping off to make the spark.

Old style flint and steels the steel has to be hardened, but really it is the steel itself you are shaving off when making the fire.

GoodOlBoy

[Mad Reloader]

Good point.

I've gotten off some really spectacular sparks at work (Geotechnical and CE lab) bashing away with an Estwing hammer on quartz and flint while trying to break up a specimen into smaller pieces.

And that ability seems to come and go (Impact hardening & re-hardening of the steel of my hammer???)

Seems to me the thing to do here would be to get ANOTHER steel--DGW has several makes & models--and use that one.

(unless in your locale it's less expensive to re-harden the one you have...)

OBTW: The sparker mechanism of a Zippo, Ronson or disposable butane lighter is not actually flint-on-steel like a flintlock...

but a manually-rotated version of a WHEELLOCK mechanism.

(Wheel-locks used PYRITE on steel. The striker wheel of a lighter uses a piece of artificial pyrophoric stone, the smaller fine sparks then ignite the naptha-soaked wick...or the FFFFg powder in the pan, depending!)

The wheel-lock came out around the time of the early Tudor period (Henry VIII & his dad) , cutting into the match-lock's turf, and making a practical handgun for the first time ever.

Unfortunately, the spring-wound mechanism was difficult to make ca. 1500, and tended to suffer mechanical failure if subjected to hard use. By the early-to-mid 1600's (Plymouth Bay colony, 30 Years' War, Oliver Cromwell) the early flinters had come into existence (Snaphaunce, miquelet, "dog-lock") and it was the beginning of the end for the 2 prior ignition systems.

Though a FEW matchlock muskets survived into the late 1700's*, as historical record was recently unearthed that in Virginia during the American Revolution a few dozen were still in Colonial TO&E and may have been issued to sentries!

(*Besides the Japanese "Tanegashima" pistol-gripped matchlock
which were "the only game in town" for the entire "Edo" or Tokugawa era of 1603-1868)

[SeekHer]

Try roughing up the face with a file...temporary but works...have used a hard rock when file not handy...you just don't have any surface to catch the flint...

also you might want to try getting one from a good blacksmith instead of those tourist kit sets that are available at major historic sites...don't get me wrong, they're OK, they just don't last long due to the hardening that they receive...

unless you have done it before DON'T try hardening on your own...

if you have gotten a nice, new, blacksmith made striker, than you might want to practice on heating the old one...you need a certain colour, a deep cherry red, before you quench it in a liquid...

some of the stuff they used in past...old wine, vinegar, beer, urine, sheep was the best and especially when mixed with honey...each gave a unique hardening to the steel...

[FIJI]

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