Mistwalker
Gold Member
- Joined
- Dec 22, 2007
- Messages
- 19,049
Today I went to my mail box and found I had gotten an early Christmas present, My first Going Gear firesteel, and one of the new strikers 
. Today....being as it has been raining and foggy for a several days now...was the perfect day to try it out 
You'll be able to see how wet it is up at the fire pit and how wet the wood is in the pics.
The first materials I gathered were some dried dead lower branches from a couple of small Cedar trees and some dried dead hollow branches from a Honeysuckle bush.
It had been my intention to start this fire without using any fatwood. I whittled a couple of small fuzz sticks from some of the cedar, a piece of pine, and a small piece of birch and made a little tinder pile...however while trying to light the damp fuzz sticks I had a reality moment when the mists became rain again. Because of that I got distracted by just trying to get the fire started and forgot to snap pics but I used a very small ball of fatwood fuzz to catch the sparks and ignite the fuzz sticks and smallest twigs of dead cedar. The Going Gear fire steel threw really nice hot sparks using the newly designed striker. And Storl was right the sparker works fine now matter which way you turn it or which hand you are using.
Now here is where the radiation vectoring comes into play. This is the exact weather circumstances that taught me to make my fires the way I make them. It is often wet here in the southern end of the Appalachian Temperate Rain Forest, in the winter months it's cold and wet. This is how I do a winter weather fire under wet and rainy conditions. Once I get my smallest limbs burning good I start laying larger limbs beside the fire to both dry and control the direction the heat travels, and then pile more smaller dead limbs on top where the heat is rising. These on top hold the heat in as well and dry faster in the building heat until they start burning. Pine work great for this because even dry soaked dead pine will not hold much water due to all of the pine sap.
. Today....being as it has been raining and foggy for a several days now...was the perfect day to try it out You'll be able to see how wet it is up at the fire pit and how wet the wood is in the pics.
The first materials I gathered were some dried dead lower branches from a couple of small Cedar trees and some dried dead hollow branches from a Honeysuckle bush.
It had been my intention to start this fire without using any fatwood. I whittled a couple of small fuzz sticks from some of the cedar, a piece of pine, and a small piece of birch and made a little tinder pile...however while trying to light the damp fuzz sticks I had a reality moment when the mists became rain again. Because of that I got distracted by just trying to get the fire started and forgot to snap pics but I used a very small ball of fatwood fuzz to catch the sparks and ignite the fuzz sticks and smallest twigs of dead cedar. The Going Gear fire steel threw really nice hot sparks using the newly designed striker. And Storl was right the sparker works fine now matter which way you turn it or which hand you are using.
Now here is where the radiation vectoring comes into play. This is the exact weather circumstances that taught me to make my fires the way I make them. It is often wet here in the southern end of the Appalachian Temperate Rain Forest, in the winter months it's cold and wet. This is how I do a winter weather fire under wet and rainy conditions. Once I get my smallest limbs burning good I start laying larger limbs beside the fire to both dry and control the direction the heat travels, and then pile more smaller dead limbs on top where the heat is rising. These on top hold the heat in as well and dry faster in the building heat until they start burning. Pine work great for this because even dry soaked dead pine will not hold much water due to all of the pine sap.
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