Fire Starter - Magnesium Fire Starter Kit 12,000 Strikes Perfect For Survival And Camping

My 10 year old son used this flint & steel last weekend at a boy scout camporee and it worked great. It throws a good shower of sparks to light the tinder. I like that the flint is longer then most others I've looked at and the safety whistle meets the scout safety requirement.

I've never tried one of these before. I scraped off the initial coating and it throws a lot of sparks off, but after hundreds of tries I wasn't able to get anything to get anything warm let alone hot or smoking. The sparks just aren't hot at all. I tried various tinder - fat wood, very dry leaves, newspaper. Not even close to starting a fire.

I gotta say I was a bit dissapointed by this product overall. While the feature set is good, I think they need to focus on doing 1 thing well instead of doing 4 things okay.Lets start with the big one, fire starting. The actual mechanism will throw spark no problem. I purchased 5 of these for a boy scout course and needed multiple examples to teach the scouts. I used these in combination with quick tinder cotton fire starters and while you can get a fire going no problem, the magnesium bar fell out on 4 of 5 of the kits. Oh and did I tell you I didn't use the fifth kit? That's 1 hundred percent fail rate. Now while my audience was a beginning group and may have been a little more rough than experienced adults using the product. If something is rated for 12000 strikes, you expect it not to fail after 100 or so.The compass works well enough to give you general direction. You will not get accurate readings down to the degree or half-degree as the dial is too small for that type of orienteering. But it worked consistentlyThe whistle took a little finessing. Granted I have a beard. It was plenty loud enough. I would say in the 80 to 100 decibel range without having taken a reading.The saw, I am not sure what application would be good for. It is about 2 inches so the only thing I could thing of is taking shavings off the magnesium bar. The bar produces plenty of spark though.Listen up fire starter companies. Secure your magnesium bar with something other than a plastic hole and glue. It doesn't work. I have had too many issues with over 50 magnesium fire starters.I certainly would not take this with me as a means to survive.

Does the job suitably. I've used it to start a few fires now. Good for emergency kits, especially when coupled with some lint or coated cotton balls for emergency tinder.It could be a little better constructed. I wouldn't count on the accuracy of compass, but didn't buy it for the compass. It throws decents sparks and is reasonably priced.

I have not used these before in the wild, only tried other people's out, so can't compare relative to other models. The sparks seem pretty hot, though I think I've gotten longer lasting sparks when I've tried friend's versions. But that's from memory. How long the spark lasts of course makes a difference in how long it can act on whatever you're trying to light. This will easily light dryer lint, which is nice since it is easy to get a lot of for free and can be very compact. Other stuff like cotton balls stays together better so is perhaps better in wind. No harm in carrying extra materials that are so light. On materials like dry grass, it took a bit of prep to get it to where it would light. Really had to get it fine and thin, and that was when it was dry so that made it fairly easy to light.The string is a bit short. You can make sparks with the short length, but it is easier not having to worry about it. I also don't want to only use the material on the lower portion of the rod, which the short string would lead me to do. One end of the string pulled out of the black tab the first session I used it. I was thinking about adding length anyway, but I wouldn't have known it was an issue without trying it out at home. There was not much glue holding it in there, or if it is pressed closed it wasn't holding it well from that. I doubled the length and it doesn't interfere at all.The compass works ok enough to get a general direction. A regular one is better, but having some kind of redundancy is worth something. The whistle is not great either, but I don't have a whistle, so now I'll have something.

Got these for the scouts to start making their own survival kits. They we super fast in shipping them to us. When we tried them out they worked great and the kids loved them. Thank you!

Mine must have been a dud. The other reviews border on glowing. I ordered this because it was cheap and if was a reliable ferro rod, then I would have ordered more. I won't be and my reasons are as follows:It doesn't work well. The striker ... well, didn't work. I had to use strikers from other rods to remove the coating and hope to get some sparks. It took some working to finally get a few small sparks. Then, I went back to the striker that came with it. For each stroke, I may see one or two tiny small sparks that fizzled out and didn't really do anything. I'm not sure where the 12,000 strike claim comes from. I can't imagine, The Friendly Swede? Yes, you'll get 12,000 strikes and they shower and fall like little fireworks.With the order + shipping, a nano striker would have been a better buy. Even a twice the cost, at least it works, works well, and is guaranteed.As for the really good reviews for this rod, all I can think is that maybe those customers got a different rod. Even under dry and good environmental conditions, this didn't work.Ok, I figured out the problem. The metal striker in the ergo plastic is facing the wrong way (upside down). I finally got good sparks and the only way was to strike with my left hand and have the rod in my right hand. Now that I figured this out, I'd upgrade my review to reliable, but not by much.I already decided to just pay the money and buy a nano striker.