Remember the blue-tips? We could throw them at the pavement and they’d light. Strike ’em on your jeans. Flick one with your thumbnail and impress your friends…especially when the tip comes off and sticks under your nail as it lights. These matches are dead, in case you don’t know. You can’t buy them any more. Oh, you might find some offered for $15-20 a box for ‘collectors.’ But not for general usage. Nosirree! You can make your own, and a few YouTube vids show you how. But why bother…read on, pilgrim!
The green-headed matches by Diamond are GARBAGE. They don’t light on anything after they’ve sat in your kitchen for a couple years. They may light if held to a flame…. To clarify, these are ‘greenlight, Strike Anywhere Matches.’ I bought a few boxes a few years ago to light my pipe. They’ve never been wet except by the low relative humidity here in Idaho. While they still look great, they don’t strike on the box, not on the wood stove, not on anything. I’ve tried baking them to dry them out…with mixed success. (That means they pretty much still don’t work.) They sell on eBay for anywhere up to ten dollars for a box of 300. Save your money. BUY THIS INSTEAD:
This is a “CLIPPER” lighter. I just bought a bunch. The ones I got are apparently old stock, but still readily available online. The newer Clippers have replaceable flints, but the ones I bought use piezoelectric sparks to light the butane.
DON’T BUY BICS. They are costly (over a buck apiece no matter how many you buy at a time) throw-aways that don’t last long. These Clippers are REFILLABLE!!! I bought 50 lighters for about $20, delivered. That’s 40 cents each. There are other finishes, and the diligent searcher will have fun looking. The only caveat is the button on these requires a stout thumb. That means your kids most likely won’t get ’em to work. Not easily, at any rate.
These work perfectly for lighting my pipe. In fact they work better than a dedicated pipe lighter I have which uses butane, and flint to light it. They’re very light and small, far more convenient in the pocket than normal Zippo-size lighters.
In fact, these Clipper lighters are the new Strike-Anywhere Matches.
anything that was re-created, after the nineties (when basically technology started it’s dive) the newbies don’t or won’t work. it’s made to make more money. that’s why they took the volkswagen beetle off the market. didn’t make enough money on the parts as hitler was too good a scientist! those white aluminium oxide fillings that poison you more than the silver mercury amalgams that my dad, for one, had in for 90 years without complaint or dementia. the white ones not only cause dementia, memory loss, anger, osteoporosis, skin problems etc but fluorosis. yes, they make holes in your other teeth. same as glyphosate (the weed killer) that kills you, the weeds and create more weeds. i don’t believe there are weeds:
a weed is a herb not yet discovered or one that has been long forgotten…. without these little blighters i cannot make my homeopathic remedies which help fix my animals and my broken bones, aching bones, cuts and bruises, shock, toxicity blah blah. cut out all th science. bring back Nature. there’s a cure for everything there unlike science where the guys are the same as politicians chasing their tails.