Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Finding Fatwood Heart Root Tinder

Description

In this episode of bushcraft basics we look at finding fatwood as a Tinder in a coniferous woodland to help us make a fire. Fire lighting can be very challenging in the wilderness but understanding where to find reliable tinder's like fatwood will help you travel light and become very proficient with your tools.

MCQBushcraft:

If your interested in Bushcraft & Survival skills, fishing, hunting, fire lighting, plants & mushrooms, camp cooking, shelter building, self reliance, wilderness & primitive living skills, weaving plant fibers, knives, axes, saws and maintaining these tools in the field and much much more then check out my channel page below for playlists and more videos.

Video Transcription

hi there guys it's Mike from mcq bushcraft here I've been doing a bit of work today taking advantage of this open area this is a coppice while they've been rotating the woodland round they use the wood for various things and they do a bit of rotation and promote the growth of various of the trees in the area by filling out some of the other ones but you get laughter these really nice stumps of poplar and ash to work on it's just great to come to this open area and get a bit of sunlight do some work and just focus on practicing some skills in a comfortable environment and he stops a nice to work on with an axe as well but what I've been working with is a root it's a root that I dug up in a coniferous woodlands he long ago it's the roots of a large tree in European large tree which is a type of conifer the type of pine tree and they promote a lot of resin in a previous video we looked at getting fat wood which is just a term used for wood infused with a resin off of downed trees that the shoulders of bang trees so that's where the branch joins the trunk it's usually referred to as a shoulder or a crotch or the branch and resin builds up there but sometimes that can be hit and miss and if you're walking along in a coniferous woodland and you find an old stump a bit like this it has to be a lot older than this mind

it's on the ground and the earth usually in coniferous woodlands is quite segmented in a respect that the moss usually loosens the soil and the pine needles and you can put your hands in and just pull out the roots when they're old enough and this confident that I approached to get this root out of there's probably about four or five years old so it been tamed for some time and I could just pull the roots out with my bare hands I didn't even need need a shovel and that's the best thing to do really because you're just burning no resources whatsoever use pop the roof site and when you saw me work on it earlier probably thought what's that rotten lump of Woody's working on well if you look at the core of this piece of wood it's infused with resin almost like stabilized scales on a knife that have been pumped full of resin exactly the same thing this has just been preserved all the rot has been cut away on the outside by my axe and it's just revealed the mass of resinous wood in the core and we'll take a ferrocerium rod and we'll scrape on it put a spark in it and I'll show you just how useful it can be as a resource so not too bad just for an old root dug out the ground not some of the best stuff I've used these stuff are more flammable than this you could call it and you put a spark in and it glows very very bright a lot like Silver Birch which is a responsible for a lot of bright flames fantastic on wet days but still a resource you wouldn't want to ignore if you were traveling somewhere and you came about it and you could put it in your pack and obviously dry it out a bit further because it's still quite damp in some areas or a lot of the moisture setting to this punk wood that's running through the grain and these conditions are incredibly damp so in the hotter months it'll probably be far more responsive in terms of the brightness of the flame but what we'll do is we'll take a walk up to the coniferous woodlands and there are lots of old trunks under the ground there we'll dig a few up and have a look at those roots and I'll show you where you can find roots just like this to use as fatwood

so I'm up in a coniferous woodland I've been walking around for a little while just keeping my eyes peeled for conifers that have been down for quite some time and I've come across this one here you can see that the lower part of the tree is kind of rotted on the ground and we still have a bit of a stump standing so this is the downed tree on the ground it's actually been dug into already you can see it's very soft and any pieces that contain fat would you wouldn't be able to compress them like that and you're really looking for the heart of the branch all the trunk I should say so you can see this PC is pretty hard so I'll put that to one side there might be some fat wood in there sometimes you just come across a real gem you can see another bit there there's the other side of the bar so we're pretty much through the whole tree it's a tiny little tree but still gonna have a little bit of fat wood in it these parts here really just joins and knots that I've dug out of the main trunk really the main majority of fatwood is going to be in the trunk itself but I'm just checking this downed tree for the time being see whether I can find anything you can see there's some fat word just there not much I just take away some of this rot you can see it just there just an area of hardened resin so we've been looking through this lower part of the tree for about ten or twelve minutes and it's been down for a very long time as you can see but almost every piece that I've pulled out that's been knotted or quite hard as contained fat word variation in quality obviously some of them pretty good some haven't but this piece here has been particularly good and when you're looking for fat word you may not be familiar with it if you're watching this video what you're actually looking for is hardened pieces of wood that almost look like they've been infused with an oil set and when you scrape them it's like you're scraping away a varnish you know a piece of wood that's been varnished and the varnish is soaked quite deep into the wood so it almost takes a white kind of tone as you scrape it but let's have a look in this trunk and see what we can dig out from that so you can see we found a little bit more fatwood in the lowest part of the trunk of the tree that's above ground I should say and it isn't really any better than the stuff we found in the actual fallen tree itself or the the main bit of the trunk that was on the ground the real gold is down in the ground in the heart root but it can be tricky to dig up if you don't have the right tools and you don't have shovels all the ground isn't very soft and broken apart and I think the longer the root is on the ground easier it is just to pull it out with this particular one it's still very hard and that heartwood is actually very flexible still then quite strong it's retained a lot of strength the sappers stopped it from rotting down too quickly but what we'll do is we'll go for a little walk and try and find one that's in a state the way we can just rip it straight out the ground and actually have the root in our hand to take away with us which will be full of fat wood hopefully you can hear me from over here I've got the camera set up behind the tree

so the winds are incredibly strong we're right on the edge of quite a steep hill face and this was an old Roman thought an observation point overlooking a valley over there but it's a bad day to be in the woods really especially a coniferous woodland on very very windy days these things are just like sails blowing around in the wind and if the winds are any stronger I really wouldn't be in here but all that aside I find this downed spruce in fact there's a couple of because they've grown on a bit of a ravine where the soil is incredibly soft as they fall in the roots have kind of them pulled out the ground with them and is exposed a lot of the roots and soil here is very soft and you can simply just lift them and dig out the roots dig out pieces apart very easy to get to the actual path roots of this tree I think what we'll do is we'll take a big piece of this root structure here we'll get the axe and split into it and see what we can find

you

so I've just broken open this piece of roots here you can see that some of this is very damp and not in particularly the best condition although it looks as if fatwood may be there this is actually just moisture buildup with some resin and it's not ideal it won't take but this bit here this is ideal you can see the resin is set and this join really where the root goes along and then suddenly branches out into another root it's it's set into a very very hard resin

so in this video we've had a look at another way in which we can find fatwood resinous wood from red Pines the kind of dyeing or dad on the ground looking in roots and around the bases of trunks I've done other videos on the channel where you can take the shoulders of branches off of fallen trees which is a another fantastic way of finding fat would you end up with quite a nice cord of it you can split down and turn into shavings or feathers and used to make a fire in whichever way you choose so it really is just about the environment you're in and really what's available to you and what's actually around you what can you visually see or identify when you're walking around I don't look for fat word when I'm 8 it's not something I am

I really kind of set out to look for when I meant making a camp I don't think I have to find that word I'm not going to get a fire game and a lot of different ways of making a fire carry a ferrocerium rod which is a fantastic versatile tool and allows me to make a file a lot of different natural materials but if I come across a resource like fat wood or I'm walking to camp and I see a downed tree or an old stump I'll go over to it and I'll have a look because it's just that helping hand in turning a spark from a Ferro rod into a naked flame and that way you can work with so many other materials like that so I hope you've enjoyed this video and thank you again for watching hopefully I'll see you again in another video take care guys

Written on 11 March 2015.

About the Author

MCQBushcraft

I'm a UK based outdoorsman who started hunting and fishing with my friends when I was young.

Educating yourself about your surroundings and having the core skills to sustain yourself using your environment is a lost curriculum in the United Kingdom. We are well provided for, so well that "why do anything if somebody else will do it for you". This lifestyle has drastically disconnected people from having the knowledge and skills required to spend even one night in the woods and not get hungry.

I love being outdoors and have never lost the desire to learn and practice skills that I get a sense of natural connection from. Hunting hangs controversy in the minds of many, but in my eyes there is nothing more natural if you choose to eat meat. I appreciate that not everybody hunts in moderation though.

Thanks for reading
Michael McQuilton

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Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Finding Fatwood Heart Root Tinder

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