Hacksaw Blades and Magnesium Bars

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dragonist2

Joined
Nov 24, 2012
Messages
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One of my favorite methods of carrying fire is the magnesium bar. It's so convenient! You get a firesteel and some tinder in a small, easy to carry package. The only thing is that it takes FOREVER to get those little magnesium shavings.

Now, I've heard that lots of people use hacksaws blades to get their magnesium shavings. How exactly is this done? Usually I just scrape shavings off with the spine of my knife. If anyone can provide instructions or link to a video showing how to use a hacksaw blade to get shavings, that would be fantastic.
 
You can use the teeth, or what I have seen that is more common is to grind the teeth off and shape that into a sharp angle. Supposedly the steel behind the teeth is even harder and will throw more sparks. They have fallen out of favor compared to the ferro rods, but I prefer the mag bars myself as well.
 
When people do use the teeth, how does that work? Are they sawing with it so they get magnesium sawdust or what? I've scraping with the teeth, and it just results in a horribly messed up surface on the magnesium.
 
[video=youtube;lZ_LrBafzNY]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ_LrBafzNY[/video]
 
Thanks for the replies! So it looks like you just scrape the same way with the saw edge as you would a plain edge. OK.

I'll have to try the tungsten carbide. The only thing I'm worried about is its relatively large size and weight compared to a small piece of hacksaw blade.
 
Haha I just assumed that it would be about the size of a flare. I just looked it up online and boy was I wrong. It could probably fit on the lanyard attached to the bar of magnesium. I couldn't tell that it was only like 4 inches long :/
 
dragonist2 said:
It could probably fit on the lanyard attached to the bar of magnesium. I couldn't tell that it was only like 4 inches long :/
Click to expand...

You can actually file it down to make it shorter too ... but the hacksaw blade works fine if you want to go that route.

IMG_1074.jpg
 
The way I learned it was just to use the hacksaw spine to scrape at the magnesium, and then you could also use it to get sparks from a flint/chert stone. Exactly the same as using a knife spine.

The teeth are just there since you are using a piece of cut-down hacksaw blade.
 
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