Doan magnesium firestarter -how to use

Sharp Eye

Sharp Eye

Joined
Feb 21, 2008
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I went on a day hike today and tried out the Doan magnesium firestarter.
I must be doing something wrong. It was really hard to get any shavings from the block using my Bark River Mini-Canadian. When I did, the little shavings flew everywhere.
Then, I put the shavings on a piece of bark and tried to light them with a ferro rod. I could not get a spark to catch. I did work up a sweat and give my fingers a good workout trying to get shavings.

Can someone offer some insight into how to use this tool? It will have to work a lot better than today's fiasco to justify a place in my PSK.

Sorry that there were no pictures. When I started out, it was raining so I left my camera behind.
 
my outright honest opinion-ditch it and replace it with a swedish model and a film canister of petroleum jelly cotton balls. in my experience, this will work much better.

but to actually answer your question-the magnesium is hard to scrape off, try using the spine of your knife (careful of the cutting edge!) to scrap off shavings like you would scrape shavings from some wood.
you really need to make a good sized pile, at least as big as a nickle or quarter really (which takes a long time). i have heard of making the pile on a piece of ducttape to keep it all together, but replaced the thing before i had the chance to try. the magnesium also needs to be right under your next stage tinder, as it burns off really fast.

as for striking, you should be getting a big hot shower of sparks on it, if you aren't then work on your striking some more. hold the spine of the knife against the rod and scrape slowly and hard...hopefully someone has pics of this...

after using mine for a while, i froze the starter and hucked it at the driveway and popped the rod off. i carried the rod with a thing of cotton balls from then on until i wore the rod in half. set the long half in a handle and its still going strong in my brother's kit. i brought the mag block to a bonfire and had fun with it.

hope this helps...if anything is unclear please ask...
 
Another thing you can do is use the saw on your SAK and saw into the block, this will get a pile a little bigger quicker and its alot easier and takes a spark better, because all the shavings are the same size.
 
A method i found extremely effective is to shave the magnesium into a cotton ball, with one corner of the cotton ball dabbed in vaseline. The fibers of the cotton ball "snag" all the shavigns and hold them in place, and provide the stage of tinder to ignite.

2 cents.
 
doing this in bullets to be brief as i broke my wrist recently...

- put shavings into a cupped leaf, bandana, depression of bark, or do so onto duct tape. also use or make a wind break of sorts if needed. a depression in the ground can be made too and lined with the fore mentioned.
- the best thing for making shavings in my and others opinions is a piece of hacksaw blade, the backside, not the teeth. this is also true for striking. can't explain to you as exactly why other than the squared edge works really well. you could also square a section of your knife spine for this purpose. all my users have a squared spine.
- get enough shavings for the the tinder. dime size to quarter size.
- REMEMBER, fire is a three part equation; heat, fuel, oxygen. while be it a hot heat source, magnesium is short lived - don't get caught up in the ignition. focus on your tinder and prep.
- some add tinder to magnesium they ignite. I ADD MAGNESIUM TO THE FINES OF MY TINDER BUNDLE AND THEN LIGHT.

evolute has great info on tinder and using a metal match...
http://www.mikespinak.com/articles/Essays/e996thepsk.html
http://www.mikespinak.com/articles/Essays/e994firesteelhowto.html

here is a site with tinder bundle pics - learn to make a good tinder bundle!
http://www.wildwoodsurvival.com/survival/fire/tinder/bundles/index.html

good luck. peace, chris
 
I have never liked them because of the problems that you describe. It's hard to keep the Mg shavings in place while trying to hit them with sparks, especially if it's windy. You can also use a file (the files on a SAK or multitool work well) to get a pile of finer shavings.

I no longer use one of these, I find the large Swedish Army firesteel coupled with vaseline-soaked cottonballs to be a much easier system.
 
I love my mag bar. By now I have a bunch of them, at least a half dozen. I use the teeth of the hacksaw to scrape/chew of a nice pile of mag shavings, then I use the broken tip of the hacksaw to strike the spark. Imagine the hacksaw is a match and the ferrocerium is the strike-strip. I strike sparks hard and in quick succession, and it has never failed to make a flame for me. If I don't have mag shavings, I hold the tinder together with the hacksaw blade and strike the two together against the ferrocerium as a unit. The only thing that hasn't worked yet for me is fatwood and sparks. I think that for me, it is just a matter of time, however. Practice makes perfect. I'm not knocking great balls of fire, because I have a stash of them as well, and as others have said, they work VERY well. But I don't have what I would consider to be trouble with the mag either...
 
I've use a small piece of file to shave and then strike. I never did get good with a mag bar, though.
 
I just make a small depression in the ground, close (VERY close) to my second stage tinder. I just use a piece of hacksaw to get shavings. It does take some work to get enough, but I allways seem to have enough in 0.5" diameter pile of shavings. It's just to get my second stage tinder started. The firesteel rods that are glued to the magnesium, are one of the best firesteels. I rate them in the same class as the Light my Fire, firesteels. I think the Doan does have a place in a PSK. It's a sparktool with an added tinder.

Don't ditch it too soon.....try to work with it.

CZ
 
I never really liked the mag bars until I took the time to practice using one. I have a few stashed away in various kits and packs.

Scraping big slivers onto birch bark.
 
Thank you everyone for the great advice. :thumbup:
I plan to keep working on the mag firestarter. I haven't tried to get scrapings with a SAK saw , a hacksaw blade or a file.
I did not have much luck with the squared spine of my knife. This was one mean and hard block of metal.:mad:
In the mean time. I will keep a good supply of pjcb's on hand.
 
I also use the toothed side of a hacksaw blade to scrape the magnesium - I scrape the corners of the bar, and this seems to produce shavings very quickly - you can have a dime sized pile in under a minute. I then use the flat spine of the hacksaw blade to scrape the ferro rod. It works pretty well.
 
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