About a year and a half ago I posted something complaining about strike-anywhere wooden matches.
I tend to go through a lot of wooden matches, and the issues I feared with those particular matches didn’t come to pass. The matches were fine. The boxes were shite.
If you’re using “kitchen” matches in an actual kitchen, that “strike-anywhere” feature isn’t very useful. Are you really going to scratch that piece of phosphorus across the face of your cabinets, over and over again? I didn’t think so. Yet the striking surfaces on the box will not survive the 250-300 attempts per box you’re about to inflict on them. They just won’t. Trust me on this, you’ll run out of box before you run out of matches.
Not long ago, I inadvertently stumbled on an improvement.
Matches are important tools to me, and I tend to pay full-price for name-brand tools unless there’s a good reason not to. But I needed matches one day while I was in the dollar store where I do a lot of my food shopping, and I was feeling cheap. So I just bought a package of whatever was on the shelf there. I expected them to be inferior crap, but it was summer and best-quality matches weren’t as critical to my comfort as they are in winter.
To my surprise, they were superior. Oh, they’re basically just matches. Strike them and they light up. And they’re not “strike-anywhere.” But here’s something I hadn’t realized before, or at least hadn’t noticed: Strike-anywhere matches are harder to light, which means you’ve got to bear down, which means that when you always strike them on the box you tear up the box.
These “strike-on-box” matches are much easier to light. Which means you don’t have to beat hell out of the striking surfaces, which means that the box will actually last through the end of its contents. Which is an improvement.
I have never used the “pilot light” on a gas stove when I ran propane, which was most of my life until I moved here, so I’ve always lit the burner with a match. Early on I learned to glue a little strip of fine sandpaper to the box when I first opened it. The “strike” place on the box has almost always been crap, and I almost never bought the “strike anywhere” kind because I’m cheap… 🙂 Besides, as you said, the dumb box stays by the stove so “anywhere” is pretty meaningless.
I did buy a few boxes of “strike anywhere” matches specifically intended to use outdoors. They are much smaller and incredibly hard to light successfully, especially if there is the slightest breeze or moisture in the air. I tucked one of the little containers, closed into a zip bag, into various camping and “bug out” bags, figuring they’d be better than nothing… but not by much.
Just on a whim a few years ago, I put some regular matches in old film roll containers, with a little strip of sandpaper glued to the outside. BINGO! They’ll light every time, darn near anywhere out of a gale force wind. These replaced the zip locked boxes very quickly.
I’m still too cheap to throw out all the goofy little matches, so I hope I find a use for them someday. Maybe someone who smokes a pipe might like to have them…
Oh… and does anyone know what a “responsible forest” might be? Just read that on the box…
I gotta ask…
WTH is a “responsible forest”? Do irresponsible forests pelt the squirrels with acorns and deny the sunlight to smaller trees?
I went through that with the original post I linked to. I know the forests are responsible, I just don’t know what they’re responsible for.
Aw, com’on Joel, even a girl’s girl knows that’s what jean zippers are for. Didn’t your dad teach you ANYTHING?!
My bad. Tunguska. Got it. Makes more sense than the antimatter flying saucer crash theory (met someone who really — and still.. well back then anyway, not too long ago — believes that one.
So Rush’s “The Trees” is just a war ballad inspired by the _first_ Russian revolution. I wonder if it was communist or nascent democratic. And who claimed the win.
Jay, my pants have buttons.
And I bet you don’t wear leather soled boots, either. And you trim your thumbnail too short. Dang, you really are up a creek out there in the middle of the desert. I feel your pain (no, not really)
I just strike on the frame of the wood stove where the door will cover it. But then, I also lay my fires up-side-down.
As for responsible forest…well, my guess is it’d be an upstanding one, as opposed to those lay down on the job ones like they discovered after Sandy passed through.
=0)