Spyderco Forums

I have a friend who is wondering which type of steel is the best choice to make a flint striker? I know that a high carbon steel is a good thing and that strikers need to be hard. I am wondering which steel(s) will throw the hottest sparks as that is the downfall of the common steel striker it does not generate very hot sparks. I suppose that materials used in modern day flintlock guns for the striker would be a good place to start? I am having a hard time finding material science for these applications.

I know some strikers are better than others. 1095 would be just shy of 1% carbon and is used in some fire steels. HC steel up to 2% is available but at what point do higher level of carbon just get tied up making carbides and does that even matter? The key element is that the flint can shave the steel and the steel will generate a lot of very hot sparks. Anybody know about this or have references? Thanks a lot.

I just found a wiki link which suggests that in Carbon Steel that about 0.7% carbon will result in the largest sparks and that the larger the spark the longer it will last, so AISI 1070 would fit that bill probably easy to find in steel leaf springs.
W1 tool steel has also been recommended for this application. W1 has about the same carbon % as 1070 does. W1 hardens to a round 50 RHC.
01 and 02 steel have also been recommended for strikers as has 5160 which will throw sparks just fine and 80crv2 , A comment here from a user "80crv2 I am told, is 5160 on roids, has thrown the best sparks I have found. You can hear the sparks sizzle and hiss as they hit the floor and bounce they are so large".

I would like to hear from anyone with striker building experience. Thanks.

I used to use a small Nicholson Points File that I ground one edge flat and it throws good sparks but it’s a little flimsy.

The best striker I’ve found is a 1/2” HSS parting off blade as used on a lathe. They are fairly cheap and you can cut it to the same length as your ferro rod and keep them both together. If you sharpen one end similar to a parting tool you can use it to scrape tinder too. :)

just found this link which suggests titanium is the go to alloy and it generates a much hotter and brighter spark than steel.

http://survivaltek.com/?p=4769

this is an interesting way to identify a metal and shows titanium to have very hot sparks.
http://www.scrapmetaljunkie.com/241/the ... g-metals-2

here is a video showing spark size pattern and color of low carbon steel, high carbon steel and a titanium alloy.

https://youtu.be/7PWCh6fdXdw

Jig saw blades work. Even have the holes in the blade already.

I wonder which matters more, the steel choice (carbon steel obviously) or the hardness. I have used a striker I bought off eBay as well as Kabar’s 1095 and the striker I bought off eBay works much better. I don’t know what steel it is or what the hardness is though. I think it is harder than the Kabar though because the flint puts less wear on the striker than the knife. The knife gets chewed up fast.

The rock matters too. Flint works best but has been harder to find where I have lived. Chert and quartz work well but not as good as flint.

I find that having good char cloth is key. The right cloth will take the tiniest of sparks. I have used all sorts of fabric and find thin dress socks work the best. I dont have many of them though so I usually just use an old T-shirt. Thinner seems better in my experience.

My point is that having a good striker helps but that there are other important factors to consider and crappy char cloth and crappy rocks will make it difficult even with a good striker.

bearfacedkiller wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 15, 2018 9:01 pm

I wonder which matters more, the steel choice (carbon steel obviously) or the hardness. I have used a striker I bought off eBay as well as Kabar’s 1095 and the striker I bought off eBay works much better. I don’t know what steel it is or what the hardness is though. I think it is harder than the Kabar though because the flint puts less wear on the striker than the knife. The knife gets chewed up fast.

The rock matters too. Flint works best but has been harder to find where I have lived. Chert and quartz work well but not as good as flint.

I find that having good char cloth is key. The right cloth will take the tiniest of sparks. I have used all sorts of fabric and find thin dress socks work the best. I don't have many of them though so I usually just use an old T-shirt. Thinner seems better in my experience.

My point is that having a good striker helps but that there are other important factors to consider and crappy char cloth and crappy rocks will make it difficult even with a good striker.

the harder the steel the better as this all has to do with generating a great amount of energy upon impact obviously better flint will help but people use Quartz chert or obsidian or other very hard rocks Black English Flint Is considered the finest stone for flintlock guns and there has been far more science research there than in fire starters so I take them at their word just so long as your stone is harder than your steel and you use a very sharp edge to amplify impact. That's one of the reasons why you see so many good strikers made from files which will for good ones be RHC 64 or harder. for steel I keep reading that a carbon content around 0.7% is best. Old steel railway spikes seem to throw a lot of decent sparks I would be prepare to bet a piece of Maxamet would be special.

Titanium will strike a spark almost a thousand degrees hotter than a steel striker can because it has such a very low thermal conductivity.

I read that pure cotton is one of the best materials to use for charred cloth, I think that a porous material like a open weave cotton would work well because it would offer a very large and fine surface area for small sparks to strike and burn so fine fibers would be key along with an open dimensional weave.

My friend is wanting to be able to use non charred material for tinder so I think he needs a hotter spark Charred punk wood or fungus might work as well or amadou would do, the trick with any of them will be in the processing prior to charring. I expect that charred materials which are fine and fuzzy to begin with would also be good choices.

My friend is trying to keep this as "old school" as possible. So if he wants to stay true to that then its is old steel and natural tinder materials and not charred cloth. That leaves one last thing that I can find and that is to add an accelerant to the tinder. The most readily available one would be SODIUM NITRATE it is a white crystalline solid. Noncombustible but accelerates the burning of combustible materials. If large quantities are involved in fire or the combustible material is finely divided an explosion may result. May explode under prolonged exposure to heat or fire. Toxic oxides of nitrogen are produced in fires. Used in solid propellants, explosives, fertilizers, and for many other uses. Sodium Nitrite is found in urine. Tinder materials were boiled in urine by the Vikings to concentrate the chemical then dried. Might make for a pretty funky smell in your tinder bag though.

I have been reading that potassium nitrate can be found in bat guano and that can also be used as an accelerant for tinder materials just like sodium nitrate to make the material be able to catch and ignite on a smaller and weaker (cooler) spark.

I would love top hear comments form any of the Spyderco crew who do the grinding since the company has used so many different steels and find out from them (or other experienced folks) which easily available steels throw the most and the hottest sparks. Thanks.

I watched a video showing W1 HC steel which throws a lot of nice sparks which seemed reasonably hot.

You mention flint lock rifles a few times.
Do you understand how they work ?
Look more into that & get things the correct way around. You don't strike the rock with the steel.
The flint strikes the steel frizzen at about a 60 degree angle, scraping down the face with a sharp edge & scraping orange hot pieces of steel off. They are like grinder sparks. That is why 0.7 carbon works well. Old files are generally good.

The numbers don't mean as much as the results from trial & error with what you locally have at hand.
If this is for survival then you don't want to be importing English black flint. Just use chert from down the creek & find the right bit of steel to get it to work. Then it is repeatable at any time.
Try steel wool as tinder.
O.
P.S. Yes I do shoot a flintlock rifle. A Pedersoli Mortimer .54.

O,just,O thank you for your reply. About the confession in terms it stems from this; when starting a fire depending upon which way you want the sparks to fly it will determine what strikes what. Hold the flint with some charred cloth on top of it and you then strike the flint in a downward motion with the steel striker and the sparks fly upward onto the cloth, but if you want to throw sparks downward into a tin full of charred punk wood then you strike the steel with the flint swinging in a downward direction.
The carbon is there to help things burn. I am curious why the 0.7% is an optimum percentage? I am just trying to find out what the optimum steel is to generate a good quantity of the hottest possible sparks. This is because my friend want to do this in a way that would be more or less period accurate and that would not include using charred cloth though I suppose he could use other charred materials. Personally I would use the friction fire method before I would use a steel and flint. Thanks for your help.

I have a related question to this: I read that some types of bushcraft and fixed blade knives are better at being used to start fires when you strike a flint on them than others, having mostly to do with the rough or smooth finish on the blade. What do you know of this?

SpyderEdgeForever wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 17, 2018 10:51 am

I have a related question to this: I read that some types of bushcraft and fixed blade knives are better at being used to start fires when you strike a flint on them than others, having mostly to do with the rough or smooth finish on the blade. What do you know of this?

From what I have read on the topic a smooth flat surface is considered best. You are attempting to shave a sliver of steel off the edge of the steel with the harder flint material. It is the sliver of steel which burns making the spark. Easy to finish the edge of a knife to be flat and smooth. The type of knife steel will make a difference as some SS will not throw a spark. Try and see.

I think that a piece of old file steel 3" or 4" long would be my choice as you get not only a good striker as well as having a file in your kit which is very useful.

As to the steel, you want it hard but not so hard that your rock won't scrape bits of it off. Smooth is best also, so grind the teeth off a file.
O.

I could not find a Mohs hardness listing for Flint but Gatnet is listed at 6.5 and Quarts is listed as 7 on the Mohs scale and Topaz at 8. Lets assume that flint is going to be around 7 on the Mohs scale. Hardened steel and tungsten are listed as 7.5 to 8 on the Mohs scale. Just as a point of interest here are some harder materials listed on the Mohs scale to be in the 9 - 9.5 range (with Diamond being 10), corundum, silicon carbide )carborundum), tungsten carbide, titanium carbide, stishovite.

So it would be reasonable to assume that you don't want your striker steel to be much harder than about 66.5 RHC at most. Most files fall into the 60 - 64 range. This means that an alloy like Maxamet is going to be too hard to use as a striker if it is hardened to a high temper of say 68 or more knowing that tungsten starts at a RHC of 70. (I had previously speculated that Maxamet could make a fine striker material and that might not be the case).
While I have not tried I wonder if ZDP-189 (high RHC around 64 - 66) with it's very high Chromium Carbide content might make an extremely good striker if what I read about carbide tear out holds true. Chromium Carbides are huge in physical size as carbides go compared to the steel which holds them and as such they ought to be easily sheared off the steel resulting in large hot sparks. At this point this is purely speculation on my part as I don't know how hot Chromium Carbide burns at. Perhaps one of the folks at Spyderco who grind ZDP-189 might comment on what its spark pattern and color is like when grinding? I am simply thinking out loud here and would appreciate the comment(s) of those who are more experienced than I am.
All this said almost any file is going to fall into the perfectly usable range for a top quality striker steel and the bonus is that the tempering has been expertly and professionally done for you which seems to be one of the problems seen with strikers made by some smiths who don't have either the experience or equipment to do controlled tempering. I have read of strikes with bad tempers which have resulted in surface cracks resulting in strikers which sometimes will not throw a spark. I have read that some files do spark better than others so it would be wise to simply test any file first on the smooth surface of the tang with some flint to see if it is a good choice. Second hand shops are full with buckets of used files almost for free. I still think that a chunk of file in your camping or bug out kit is an excellent idea.

The tang of a file is usually still in the annealed state. Check it & see how soft & bendy it is compared to the rest of the file.
O.

Regarding the manual "Pull through" sharpeners, some have mentioned these before, but remind me: Is the main reason most serious knife users do not use them is because they can actually damage the blade? I ask because I see these sold by many different knife catalogs and sporting companies, and they always advertise how great the carbide or ceramic sharpening wheels inside them do such an alleged great job. I had two of them and they didn't do all that good a job and one looked like it was damaging part of the edge on a folder I ran through it.

O,just,O wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 18, 2018 3:53 am

The tang of a file is usually still in the annealed state. Check it & see how soft & bendy it is compared to the rest of the file.
O.

Good information, I had not known that. Easy enough then to smooth off an edge to do a test strike upon. No point breaking a perfectly good file if it wont throw a spark for you. Thanks for that.

As an aside I was wondering if anybody had tried either glazed porcelain tile (7 on the Mohs scale) or un glazed porcelain tile (8 on the Mohs scale) as a flint substitute? Easy and cheap to find. Toilet tanks are an obvious and the hardest highest quality ceramic I know of is the insulator on a spark plug that is the exact same material used in bullet proof vests.