Look at my new post - Blast Match Fail

By Fitzpatrick

To start, I’d say avoid this product or at least understand that it has limits… here’s my story, with the BlastMatch Fire Starter…

Okay a while back a friend and I hit the back woods and after a week of rain let me fix that during the week of rain, on that last rainy day. We were fed up with being trapped in side and decided to tarp up a site, make a fire and cook.

It was about 45 out, cold, and soaking wet out – tinder and everything was soaked, so I gathered up some birch bark, and worked on making some dry (drier) tinder while doing all this I decided to test out a blast match under those conditions using sparks to make a fire (and to be honest it’s a good product, if you have dry stuff to start with-you can even use it single handed.

I’d used it a few times before, but never in those wet conditions)…so that day I tried lighting grass, added some magnesium dust, and shredded birch bark, using sparks (hey rain was trickling down my gear at times at the edge of the tarp, so yeah, it kind of sucked).

Nothing would burn, everything was soaked to the bones about 25 mins in, being a person that never gives up, I kept showering the area with sparks, yet nothing caught, smolder and pfffft out.- finally the steel part of the BlastMatch got heated – and melted its way out of the plastic… what the heck.

I destroyed that sparkler. What a bummer…

At that point I turned to my friend a pulled my Bic out and used an open flame to start the fire, the point was to use steel and flint and not “cheat” and use a bic lighter, but I my butt was wet, and cold, and starting to get hungry… one thing I recall is with a week worth of rain, that fire still sucked pretty bad, but at least we got warm and were able to cook later on once things dried out some.

I guess the reason I’m writing this is stuff fails sometimes, even good products. it might be a good idea to plan for the failure or loss of a crucial item like this at its worst time… when you really need a warm fire!

Since I’ve used the BlastMatch more than a few times to make nice fires I had under estimated how wet things were, and how difficult it would be to manage under those conditions. Just something to ponder – glad it wasn’t 7 degrees out, in winter, with 20-30 below wind chills, or I’d be a Fitz-icicle.

Originally at: TheSurvivalistBlog.net

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Blast Match Fail

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