How to Make a Fire Steel That Glows in the Dark

How To Make A Glow In The Dark Fire Steel

In this Instructable I'll show you how I made a fire steel or ferro rod handle using knife scale off-cuts. The final piece was beautiful and functional and I wanted to show that making your own survival gear can be fun!

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

*I am a member of the Ebay partner network so if you click through and purchase any item on Ebay using my link I get a small reward. It does not effect the price of your item or cost you anything, it just helps me to buy coffee to make more videos!

Measuring & Cutting

To begin I measured out and cut two pieces of the black and one piece of the blue glow Kirinite. Each piece was roughly 45mm x 20mm.

Kirinite cuts similar to acrylic and needs to kept cool during machining or it sort of melts back together! I cut mine on the scroll saw at a low speed and this seems to have done the trick.

These pieces came in a pack of off-cuts so it was great to give life to scrap material that would not have been used otherwise!

Gluing the Blank Together

With my pieces cut it was time to glue them together. I keyed each surface that was due to be bonded with 60 grit sand paper and craft knife. A thick viscosity super glue did a great job at bonding the pieces together.

Drilling a Hole for the Fire Steel

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!

Making a Hole for a Paracord

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.

Polishing the Kirinite Handle

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!

Assembling the Fire Steel

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.