Disclaimer: We want to make it abundantly clear to everyone that Tortoise Gear is not affiliated with or endorsed in any way by Victorinox AG or their trademarked name Swiss Army. The FireAnt is a patent pending aftermarket accessory designed by us for use with the Swiss Army knife.
Everyone loves a good Swiss Army knife – they are an icon of quality and utility wrapped up in a small and easy to carry package! But let’s face it, unless you’re an alcoholic who only opens wine bottles with your Swiss Army knife, the corkscrew really is a tool with limited to no use. Until now…
The FireAnt is a custom sparking-steel fire starting tool designed to integrate with the corkscrew tool on Swiss Army knives. Every FireAnt will come with one Helix tinder. The FireAnt and Helix tinder transform the corkscrew into one of the most useful tools you can possibly have on a Swiss Army knife! Oh, and you can keep your toothpick…
The FireAnt adds firepower, a splash of color and glow to your Swiss Army knife instantly without any required modifications!
The FireAnt is a complete fire starter integrated within the corkscrew so ZERO extra pocket bulk is added AND at less than one gram it weighs almost nothing, yet it’s waterproof and can start hundreds of fires!
Just say NO to bulky pockets!
Every feature of the FireAnt is carefully engineered to increase utility.
Helix Tinder is waterproof and blended with special additives to increase the melt temperature so it won’t melt in your pocket. Helix Tinder also has a low flash point so it ignites easily even with very small sparks, this helps to prolong the life of your FireAnt fire starter.
One Helix Tinder can be used all at once for a large hot fire lasting up to 2 minutes or a small piece can be cut off preserving the rest for later. When separated or cut into 4 pieces each piece can burn for up to 1 minute.
Helix Tinder is waterproof so it is a very effective fire starter even in very bad conditions.
Wet hands, wet tinder, wet fire starter, wet knife, wet ground, submerged gear, rain, snow, sleet… no problem. The FireAnt and Helix Tinder combination just works!
We want to make sure everyone knows the FireAnt fire starter and tinder is a real survival tool that means business, check out this video.
Not only does it work great, it looks great too! The FireAnt can add a bright splash of color and luminescence to your EDC selection, and with three colors to choose from you can pick your complement of the day or activity.
FireAnt is designed for everyone!
YOU are how projects are successfully funded, amazing people like YOU kind enough to take the time to share this project with others. Thank you! Just tap on your favorite social platform icon(s) and share, it’s that easy!
Just click on the reward you want from the column at the right, enter the pledge amount and hit continue.
If you want more you can add that to your pledge amount.
For example: If you want the FireAnt 6 pack Early Delivery reward, but you also want a FireAnt 3 Pack reward, just select the FireAnt 6 Pack Early Delivery reward and add in the additional amount of the FireAnt 3 Pack. You can tell us exactly what you pledged for once we send out your backer survey after the campaign is over and it will ship with your earliest reward selection shipment time.
If we meet or exceed the $50,000 goal:
FireAnt will work with any modern Victorinox brand Swiss Army knife that has a smooth corkscrew tool. Older style corkscrews have a groove running down along them, most of these will work too, but there are some that won’t, especially if they are bent at all or have extra turns (really old ones).
We recommend using a knife model that has either a wood saw, metal saw (file), scissors, or an awl as these four tools work the best, but the FireAnt will work with any of these pictured tools:
The Firefly (our previous project) and the FireAnt both have their place. Here is a comparison of each and the reasons why you might want one or the other or both:
FireAnt-
Advantages over the Firefly
Firefly –
Advantages over the FireAnt:
Redundance is key in a survival situation and you can put different fire starters in different knives so we of course recommend getting both :)
We will ALWAYS Deliver!
We don’t just create projects on kickstarter, we help fund them too, and we know how frustrating it is to pledge for a project that never gets done. We will NEVER do that to our valued backers! If for some reason we cannot produce the product you pledged for we will send you a FULL refund guaranteed!
We have great respect for the integrity of Kickstarter and for the opportunity it and the amazing community of backers has provided and continues to provide for entrepreneurs like us.
If you help us reach our funding goal we WILL finish the project and ship your reward to you PERIOD.
This project is promoted by Jellop, the ad tech power behind the best Kickstarters with 1,100+ successful Kickstarter projects with over $460M raised between them.
We are well aware of the risks and challenges that manufacturing can present and we are ready, willing, and equipped to meet those challenges. We’ve got experience and grit! We have completed and delivered on two previous successful Kickstarter campaigns with thousands of happy customers around the world and we have learned some good lessons along the road. Our first project, SOL Water, was a success, and it taught us a great deal more about manufacturing than we knew before we started that campaign. SOL Water was a very complex project. We were able to develop and produce a new design of plastic, make 3 different complex production lines of tooling, design and manufacture several injection molded parts, ship all of our product to our warehouse from overseas, and deliver all of the rewards to our backers, all on a very tight budget. So, we’ve been around the block. You can check out the amazing SOL Water project and a link to purchase the product here and click the “Available Now” button if you’d like to purchase now for immediate delivery: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/740457940/sol-water-hydration-powered-by-the-sun Our second project, the Firefly, was even more successful with over 3,000 amazing backers! We really had fun with this one, but it also created a new logistics challenge of getting out a large number of packages to backers in every continent of the world in a timely manner. This time around though we had learned from our previous project and had most of the technical and logistics work and trials done before we even started the campaign which greatly reduced possible production delays and we were able to deliver a great product in full retail packaging to our large number of backers in a timely manner. Check out the game changing Firefly project here and click the “Available Now” button if you’d like to purchase now for immediate delivery: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fireant/firefly-the-ultimate-swiss-army-knife-accessory/description With this current FireAnt project we have done all of the leg work, trials, testing, and even prototype tooling testing before starting this campaign. Our sparking steel formula has already been perfected and tested with the Firefly project. Our manufacturing partners are standing by ready to make full production tooling and rapid FireAnt manufacturing pending delivery of funds. We are confident that if this campaign successfully meets its funding goal FireAnt backers will get a great product without delays! Thank you for backing this project and helping to make the FireAnt fire starter a reality!