Hi Kickstarters!
We are excited to introduce ourselves and our newest product, “Ember Strike”. Our names are Bruce and Lynda Boepple, and Ember Strike is the name of our exciting new line of fire starting tools that we are in the midst of developing. Ember Strike is a custom made ferro rod with a hand-crafted fatwood handle.
Our fatwood is harvested from lightning struck, fallen trees that are found in the largest stand of Ponderosa pine trees in the world. When lightning strikes one of these sentinels of the high desert, the intense heat (over 1,000 degrees), instantly explodes and burns parts of the tree and cooks the pitch into the tree’s wood fibers. The resulting pitch-laden wood resembles very hard, prehistoric amber. We personally search the forests of Arizona’s Mogollon Rim high country (over 7,000 feet in elevation), to find the stumps and fallen trees from which we harvest our fatwood. We refer to the fatwood that we use as “Mogollon Bacon” because when we trim and cut into the wood, it resembles slices of cured bacon. When light shines through the pitch interlaced with the intricate wood grain, it also resembles stained glass. (look for the beautiful photos that we’ll attach).
Many of our followers and fans know of us through a previous product we invented, called Ember Nest, a natural fire starting tinder, made with 100% recycled and reclaimed materials and ZERO added chemical accelerants. It, like all of our other products we make, always utilizes renewable resources!
Due to Ember Nest’s success, our friends and our existing customers, mainly KOA campgrounds, Yellowstone and Glacier National Park concessionaires and sporting goods retailers, asked us to also invent a way to IGNITE our fire starter. That’s when we got to thinking…Hey, let’s work on a fire striking system, that follows our existing theme of naturally created products… and that’s when we decided to launch our KickStarter campaign, based on expanding what I and countless other outdoors enthusiasts have been doing in the woods for years…which is, lighting fires with fatwood.
When I find the perfect burned out stump of a Ponderosa Pine tree, I make test cuts to find the exact part of the root system and trunk that is harboring the hardened goodness that I’m looking for. The wood is so hard after being wood-welded by the lightning strike, that it requires a carbide blade on the chainsaw to excise the root burl heart wood that we begin with. Once I have the sections of trees back at the shop, I let the grain of the wood be my guide.
Some of the handle pieces get chiseled perfectly along the grain, resulting in a handle that produces perfectly straight toothpick-like “feather sticks” and scraped Maya dust and others are cut cross grain straight from the rock hard root burl system, which shows off the dark orange-brown hues of the twisted and pitch infused chunk I am working with. Many pieces will have black lines of charcoal either laced right in the middle of the handle, or along one of the sides, which only adds to each rustic piece! All of the handles smell like a cross between baked cinnamon and terpentine, a scent that fatwood aficionados know oh so well! :)
Each tree trunk and root system is typically laying on its side, as after the tree is exploded by the lightning, it falls over. Sticking out of the ground, the root ball many times is as tall as me, over 6 feet! The best part of the tree to find fatwood, is the weathered spike shaped roots that are now suspended above the ground. It’s easy to spot them! I just look for something that looks like the fictional Medusa of folklore, as that’s what the root ball of the tree resembles. These spikes, once cut off, make the perfect Harry Potter style handle for a beautiful ferro rod, resembling one that Voldemort would have used! (See additional photos that I will attach).
While there are other outdoors folks making fatwood handled ferro rods, all of them are making their handles not only to be just a handle, but also with a much lower pitch content, with not much extra fatwood left for actual fuel. Our handles are all oversized and include enough fuel for years of fire making! The reason fatwood from Arizona is so sought after and why indigenous peoples traded it greatly, was due to the low moisture and high pitch content found in Arizona fatwood.
In our highest rewards level, you will find that we are including a custom designed fire starting kit with flint and steel. Our flint & steel kits are comprised of a collection of items all created and sourced in Arizona and the surrounding Southwestern states. Each kit consists of a custom-made, high carbon steel striker with our Ember Strike logo, handmade char cloth, foraged pieces of flint, chert, jasper, obsidian and quartz, along with natural fiber materials from our area such as palm husk, shredded alligator juniper bark (also foraged and collected in Northern Arizona) and jute twine rope. It is all placed into a 4″ round tin container that doubles as the perfect container to char your own cotton cloth in the future. Our friends at Ember Lit in Utah, are designing our own high carbon, steel striker specifically for us, with our logo!
Since we already have a successful, 100% natural fire starting tinder, we will be supplying bags of our tinder along with the flint and steel kits as value added rewards for each ascending level that our friends partner with us! The emergency whistles are part of an existing line of back country survival products that my wife makes and we are including those too, for the gift levels above the entry level partnership.
We will be utilizing the KickStarter funds to purchase all of our materials in bulk, so that we can obtain the lowest steel pricing possible, (for the ferro rods, the steel strikers and the char cloth tins). The ferrocerium rods will be ordered in quantities of at least 5,000. The high carbon steel strikers will have our Ember Strike logo cut into the face, as previously mentioned and will be ordered in increments of 1,000+. Our Ember Strike logo is currently being developed and some funds will go toward the design costs. There is also a set up fee to design our striker in their CAD system to have each one produced by their plasma cutter. Each striker will then be tempered at the correct temperature range, to produce the maximum number of sparks with each flint strike. In addition, we are planning on purchasing a small rock crusher, to more efficiently crush the chips and pieces of rock to provide in each tin for the flint & steel kits.
It is our primary goal to work hard and diligently throughout our KickStarter rollout, so as to be able to deliver our awesome new items and hand made outdoor gifts to our KickStarter pledge contributors as quickly as possible! It is only after we complete this program with you, our partners, that we will then offer our Ember Strike items on our website, or at any outdoor retailers!
Thank you and together let’s get ‘er dun!
Blessings, Bruce & Lynda :)
Being that we already manufacture specialty items for the outdoor and sporting goods industries, we are familiar with the challenges associated with manufacturing, shipping and the deadlines that go hand in hand with getting goods to consumers! That is why we are so confident with this new KickStarter promotion that we are embarking upon. Through our relationships with our current customers, like Yellowstone and Glacier National Park and over 30 other KOA’s and sporting goods retailers and guide shops throughout the West, we actually have a “captive” audience of businesses just waiting to order our new “Ember Strike” fire striking tools, once we have FIRST finished developing them and sending them out to all of YOU, our KickStarter partners! We love the looks of the new tools we are coming up with and our prototype testing so far, has exceeded our expectations as to how well they perform AND how cool they look! We hope you will think so too! :)