What's the best place to buy firesteels?

The best place to buy firesteels and other fire-making tools is KnivesShipFree, and here's why:

• We stock a great selection of fire-making tools, including firesteels from Light My Fire, custom-handled firesteels from Bark River and KnivesShipFree, plain misch metal ferrocerium rods, Survivor firestarters and complete KnivesShipFree Fire Kits.
• Because we ship free, our prices are better than simply competitive.
• When one of our suppliers introduces a new product, no one gets it faster than KnivesShipFree.
• KnivesShipFree's customer service is the best you'll find anywhere -- we stand behind what we sell, and thousands of satisfied KnivesShipFree customers will back that up.

Using your knife to strike a firesteel

A firesteel requires a striker. It's possible to use your knife’s edge to get sparks flying, but doing that a few times creates a dull spot you’ll have to attend to later.

A better solution is to strike the firesteel with the spine of your knife. Some knives can do that right out of the box. On a knife with a "coated" blade, though, you'll have to remove a little bit of the coating.

Using a small file (like a triangular needle file), carefully remove some of the coating from a section of the knife’s spine. Try to maintain the squared profile of the spine, remembering that the idea here is to create a bare-metal section with well-defined corners that "bites" into the firesteel.