Fire Starting Using A Ferro Rod And Wood Shavings | Wicked Edge Sharpeners

Hello! Today I'm going to be going over one of my favorite methods or preferred methods for starting a fire with a ferro rod and that would require some fine wood shavings. In order to do that I need a very sharp edge on my blade and I am using my Wicked Edge 130 to get that sharp blade. I did use this blade out in a field a couple weeks ago so it's not as sharp as it generally is. So since this blade doesn't need a ton of work the stones that I am selecting to work with today are going to start at a 1500 grit and I'm gonna finish off with the leather strops. The 4 micron and finishing off with the 2 micron. That will give us that super sharp razor edge that we need for fire building as well as give that edge a super shiny finish. For this demonstration I'm going to go through the sharpening process relatively fast. If you need more detail on the sharpening process you can check out one of my other tutorials. I will link it in the top right now. So let's go ahead and get our knife ready to be sharpened. I'll be using a 1500 grit to set up my angle that way I don't get rid of too much metal during the setup phase. Okay so we found our angle we're ready to start sharpening. Once again this blade is in relatively good shape so it doesn't need that many strokes especially on the lower grit. Okay we're ready to switch to a higher grit now to the 2200. Make sure that you clean off your stones. Switch over to the 3000 grit now. Okay I'm gonna switch over to the leather strops when it comes to really giving that nice fine edge. These are really worth it and when it comes to shaving wood it's just like shaving anything else. The more razor sharp that your blade is the more success that you're going to have. Okay so I'll go ahead and get these ready. 4 micron first. Now keep in mind these are leather strops so you don't want to cut down on that blade or you're gonna cut right into the leather so you kind of want to go up. And this is a shorter blade so I should be able to make it on one pass but it's also a good idea sometimes to just trail it forward and remember using those up strokes. And all the way at the end keep it going up because as soon as you cut down you're gonna cut into the leather and it's not gonna last very long. Okay so now we will switch over to the 2 micron leather strop. Let's make sure our blade is wiped down. Good to go. Let's finish it off. Clean any residue off of our blade and we have a nice shiny super sharp blade ready to attack our fire building. So I was gonna go ahead and build a fire in my fire pit or actually go to a campsite and build a fire but I figured that this would be a good time to share some advice that I usually share with my subscribers and my members when they come up to me and say hey listen you know I want to practice some skills but unfortunately I live you know in an apartment or in an area especially for fire building where I cannot build a fire. Well it's really all the skills of getting that fire started. So when it comes to an example like this I just came into my backyard I found a piece of wood in the back just looks like some old dry vine. I got a bowl that I had here so that I could have a contained area to put my wood shavings and then of course be able to start the fire and practice those valuable skills while I'm still in the comfort of my home. So like I usually say to them there's no excuses only priorities. So let's go ahead and get some shavings into this bowl. Let's get this all cleaned up. So we ended up with these paper thin shavings due to our incredibly razor-sharp knife. So nothing fancy when it comes to a ferro rod just something that I've had for years that I use when I'm out in a field and a simple scraper that actually has its own little ferro rod attached to it. But it's a good thin scraper and usually gets the job done. One thing that I do want you to keep in mind is when you are using a ferro rod you want to keep the scraper stationary and you want to pull back on the ferro rod. So once again scraper stays stationary ferro rod pulls back and you send that spark. Where there's smoke there's fire. Everything was a little wet as you could tell by all of this smoke coming out of it and steam. But we got our fire started and special thanks to the Wicked Edge sharpener for facilitating the process.