There are a few variations of a fire striker. Some are as simple as keeping a piece of flint and a piece of steel in your pack. You can even get a handy flint and steel kit that includes tinder, like this PSKOOK Emergency Flint and Steel Kit. 

The more modern version of this system is known as a ferrocerium rod or Ferro rod. Ferrocerium is a man-made alloy that creates more and hotter sparks than natural flint when struck. To use one, strike a fire steel against the Ferro rod at about a 30-degree angle directly above your tinder. 

The UCO Titan Fire Striker is one of the more popular Ferro rods; it’s good for up to 20,000 strikes. There’s also a version of the Morakniv Bushcraft Carbon Steel Survival Knife that has a magnesium-coated fire striker built into the sheath. 

Method 6: Battery and Steel Wool

This is one of the more MacGuyver-esque fire starting methods, but it’s surprisingly reliable. One doesn’t typically get lost in the woods with a supply of batteries and steel wool, so this requires some advance planning to pull off. You will need: 

• A 9V battery – A 9V battery works especially well because it has both the positive and negative terminals at the same end (and it has more “juice” than most other batteries).
• Steel wool – You know the stuff; chances are you have a few steel wool pads under your kitchen sink that you’ve forgotten about.

The setup here is pretty simple. Gather up a nest of tinder, and place a small bundle of steel wool in the center of it. Touch your 9V battery to the steel wool so that both terminals touch the steel, and it should ignite right away. 

You can do this with two AA or AAA batteries, but that’s a little trickier. You’ll need to tape the two batteries together so they form a circuit, and then unravel the steel wool so that it touches both the positive terminal at one end of the batteries and the negative terminal at the other.