How To Make A Fire Steel

In this video I’ll show you how I made a fire steel or ferro rod handle using knife scale off-cuts.

The Fire steel itself from a chinese manufacturer, but this could easily be replaced with a better quality product.

For this project I used an interesting material called Kirinite which is a decorative and durable acrylic. It is easy to work with and polishes up beautifully.

I used two sheets: one which was a pearlescent black and one 3mm wide fluorescent blue.

If you’d like to make this project you can find the materials here on Ebay in your country:

Kirinite on Ebay UK/EU: http://ebay.to/2eRFEGb 
Kirinite Ebay USA: http://ebay.to/2eRFEGb

The Fire steel itself from a chinese manufacturer, but this could easily be replaced with a better quality product.

Fire Steels UK: http://ebay.to/2dIDM5x 
Fire Steels USA: http://ebay.to/2dIDM5x

To begin I measured out and cut two pieces of the black and one piece of the blue glow. Each piece was roughly “”x” cm.

Then I keyed each surface that was due to be bonded and used a thick viscosity super glue to stick the pieces together.

I cleaned up my Kirinite sandwich on a sanding disk until I had a nice blank to work with.

After marking up I went over to the drill press. Stupidly I managed to completely miss my mark and ended up with an off center hole!

To fix this I went back to the sander and evened out the one side so that the glowing layer was offset to one side. In the end I think that this looked cooler anyway so it turned out to be a happy mistake!

Next I cut down a section of brass tube, drilled a hole through my handle and glued the tube in. This hole would allow the fire steel to hang from a paracord.

With all of my shaping was done it was time to polish. Kirinite polishes pretty easily but this was the longest part of the process.

I wet sanded the piece through increasingly finer grits of sand paper, working through to a 12,000 grit micro mesh, making sure that the surface was smooth, even and scratch free.

I finished up with a spot of my favourite car polish and rubbed the piece until it squeeked! If it’s squeeky the chances are it will shine like a mirror!

Finally I glued in the fire steel with my thick super glue and tied a paracord through the hole with a decorative bead (that I also made with Kirinite).

All in all I’m happy with my fire steel, and although I made a mistake with the drilling I think it looks cool.

If you like this video give it a thumbs up and support my channel by subscribing, sharing and checking out more tutorials on my channel!

You can also visit Zebranowoodcraft.com/merch and get yourself a treat!

Thanks for watching and see you in the next one!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *