Making fire with flint & steel

[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)