Different tinders for use with the firesteel

Hey guys, today I wanted to show you a couple different materials that you can strike your fire steel with to get fire and a couple methods. My way of doing it, it's not to say that it's the only way, but it works for me. Here is an old broken down ash tree, it was pretty old, the emerald ash borer got to it, so I have the use of all this ash bark and that's going to be my platform for starting the fires because the snow is just melting and it's pretty damp on the ground I like to have my fire up off the ground regardless so I got a piece of basswood here and all I'm doing is just making little shavings little curls tiny ones that I'm going to strike with my fire steel I had no idea when I got my fire steel that this could be used for tinder and a couple of good folks from bushcraft USA gladly shared their knowledge with me and see how it really works alright next here I got a bit of birch bark it's like the curly birch you can find this on some trees some some trees has more the birch like this a straight one but I want to show you that curly birch kind today as you can see I'm right next to some train tracks there's a train going by as we speak right here I've got some fatwood do same thing the pretty pretty much the same thing you would do with the basswood it make it into little curls like that or a little little scrapings even i'm going to do that right now and uh lastly i've got this reed this frag Phragmites reed and uh it's more of a flash when it goes up but it'll go i hope you can see this this curl here so uh there's strikers obviously that you can use but i like to use my knife and my fire steel what i do is i push down on the tinder and just strike down with the knife and as you can see works pretty good okay so that was the first one that was the the dried basswood shavings. Now I'm going to go on to the curly birch, the birch bark. So same technique, just hold down, and there she goes. And that'll burn for a long time. Like, it's still burning, it's been a few seconds, so getting a fire going with birch bark really is no problem, no matter how you light it. All right, next I've got my fatwood shavings, just a little pile of them, that's all you need. See, scrape it off of there. Sorry, bear with me, the camera. So the fatwood shavings, same thing. And there they go, you can see that. The fatwood gives off like a black smoke and it burns for, if not longer, just as long as the birch bark. I'd say it burns a little bit longer. There's no real need for me to show you. You'll catch pretty much anything there. That old oak leaf on there goes up. So as of now, my favorite are the birch bark curls and the fatwood. All right, next I've got the reed phragmites. Very, very fluffy. It's more, like I said, it's more of like a flash bang than a long burning one. Scout, don't eat my basswood. What are you thinking? All right, so the reed phragmites, that's a little hot. As you can see, it works very well too, as long as you can get something on top of it really quick. That's about it. The technique, like I said, is to hold it down with the fire steel and then strike it. Holding the fire steel away from the tender really doesn't work for me. the sparks considerably lose heat the longer distance they travel but I hope this was helpful for some of you I know a lot of you guys already knew this but I don't know have fun you guys take it easy