Steel for firesteel striker and able to use it as a flint and steel as well.

G

GhostWorks

Joined
Apr 15, 2012
Messages
11
Hi guys,

I haven't had any luck finding this out on my own. Hope you guys can help.

I'm looking for a steel to be used primarily as a fire steel striker. I want it to be able to create sparks and be as stainless as possible. I'm wondering if there's a steel out there that would also be able to create sparks when struck with flint.

If the stainless part is not possible than what kind of steel would you guys recommend for the fire steel striker/flint and steel roles?

Thanks.
 
Well-hardened simple high-carbon steel is probably your best bet. High amounts of chrome inhibits making sparks. So stainless is probably out.

I'll invite Rick Marchand to this thread. He has a lot of experience with flint'n'steel and stuff like that. For instance, he's told me that he's tried 440C and it didn't work at all. In the next few weeks I'll be sending him some hardened samples of tool steels to play with (D2 and CPM-3V) and see if they work.
 
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James has pretty much summed it up. If you are scraping a ferrocerium rod (firesteel), anything harder than the rod will do. Traditional flint and steel is a whole different animal. Steel type and hardness are very important. Plain carbon is about the best you can do. I have done a lot of testing with steels and hardness.
 
Thanks for the info guys.

So I should be looking at spring steels. Flint and steel wise is there that much of a performance/durability difference between the 1075 through 1095 or should I be looking at what's easier/cheaper to get. I'm most likely going to send it off for heat treat so I'm not really factoring that aspect into it.

What about tool steels when it comes to flint and steel?
 
Are you making some kind of special design, GhostWorks? I don't think you will need to farm out heat treating if you have a propane torch. Steels are easy to harden. Anything 1050 and above is fine. For an easy-breezy steel, just break off a piece of a file in a vice and grind the teeth off of one side... no heat treat necessary, if you are careful with your grinding.
 
Yes it is a special design. I'm basically looking to do a robust version of a hacksaw blade for a striker but could also be used as a steel to be struck with flint. I've been looking at something off the shelf that I could modify but haven't found anything yet. I tried a hacksaw blade but it was too small(edge to spine). Unless you have some ninja tricks to grind a file down quickly that's way too much work for me.

I don't have any equipment to heat treat at the moment. I'd like to learn it but for now that'll be something in the future.

EDIT: Wait... I was thinking bastard files, A small file like the leatherman squirt file could work...
 
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