Rough Rider Fire Steel

Good value

It gets 4 stars because of the very competitive price, but there's better steels out there.

First off, the striker is almost useless, it's modeled after a well known Swedish model, but yeah... I used it to get the paint off, beyond that you're better off with the back of a knife (my old LMF II works very well). The amount of force I had to use to get sparks with the striker was way more than was appropriate. A small cutting of a steel saw would have been better, but maybe that's unrealistic at this price.

The Ferrocerium is really pretty good though. Certainly good enough anyway, you get a couple of large molten globs with every strike and a smallish shower of sparks too. Supposedly this is a sign of a low quality alloy but for fire lighting i think it's ideal. The globs are big enough to burn your skin so getting birch bark lit was no problem. The upshot of this big globs is that you're taking off quite a bit of metal with every stroke. Lucky the rod is quite thick though so that's not really an issue here.

The supplied orange shoe lace is a thoughtful addition actually, a very bright safety orange. Useful for all kinds of stuff.

Overall, a very competent and quite good looking ferro rod. There's better stuff out there but nowhere near this price point.

Posted by Jaaaames on 3rd May 2012