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Unfortunately, behind great advertising and marketing you sometimes find a lie.

In one way or another we are all seeking to survive. If our society collapses then survival reverts to the most basic level. Food, Shelter and Protection. Making a fire is essential to all three categories. Cooking food, warming a shelter and any number of ways fire can be used to protect - signal fires, wild animal attacks, etc. So life without fire becomes difficult to sustain. Thus the need for a reliable method of starting a fire. We're not trying to scare anyone into thinking our Civil Society will end tomorrow. Our purpose is to provide you with an...

Fire Fast has done it again! Improving the quality of the Trekker and Kamper fire starters by buring the ferro rod 1/2 an inch into the hard wood handle. Fire Fast is the leader in manufacturing high quality fire starters.

Vera and I went into the workshop to show you what it takes to make a Trekker handle. This procedure has evolved over the years. The drill press in the video is my newest one and is incredibly accurate. We used to throw away as many as two out of seven handles because the magnesium hole that we drill in the top was not vertical or near vertical. Now every handle is very close to perfect.

Actually, right up until March of 2019 the wood we received from the mill were 15 feet long by 1 inch and 1 1/8" inch rectangular rods. We then passed each rod 4 times through the router to take off the sharp edges and then over to the chop saw and cut to length.

Eventually our wood mill became curious and asked what we were doing. I told them - and they told me that they would round of the edges at no charge.  'Bout fell of my chair! That saved enormous time and effort and far more consistent than what I did with my router. Then later we negotiated for the mill to cut the wood to length. Where we would do one at a time they do 50.

We now spend all our week days making fire starters and most weekends go to shows to sell in person (and will again soon after the virus scare dies down).

 

We've been making fire starters for years now and have used the same raw materials suppliers right from the beginning. We wanted to make a completely USA made product. Imagine our distress when we discovered that there are no ferrocerium rod (also called ferro rod or flints) manufacturers in the USA. In fact they are only made in two places - China or Europe. We looked into the prices and quality of Chinese flints.They were MUCH  cheaper but the quality was poor. We got samples from three separate manufacturers and discovered that if you buy in bulk they would cost...