Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Finding Fatwood Pine Shoulder 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.

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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

either guys it's Mike remember skew bushcraft here I've been out on a brisk walk today and I'm in the coniferous part of the woodlands today coniferous woodlands in general a very interesting environment and it's nice to be out of deciduous and into a slightly different environment with different species of trees and to see what the resources are actually available from a bushcraft perspective I was asked a question the other day from a gentleman on Twitter he said he was having trouble identifying fatwood when he's been out practicing fire lighting skills and because I was coming down this way I thought I would show a particularly good example of a downed spruce that can offer quite a lot of fat wood and you can take fat wood straight from this right now which we will do and produce a flame very quickly so if you're walking through a coniferous woodlands you may ask yourself what resources are actually available to me for me to make a fire and sometimes you get the old birch hanging around in conifer woodlands I've seen quite a few of them in the Forest of Dean various other woodlands that I spend time in and you know you can peel a bit of birch bark off provided it's shedding naturally or it's a downed birch you know make a fire very easily and there's also pine sap you know pine resin you can find the bleeding trees and I particularly like the dry crumbly SAP is then you can powder it finally when you put a spark on it from your ferrocerium rod it generally takes a lot better with a Ferro rod and the globulus stuff that's sort of leaking out of the tree but if you have a lighter on you it would be very easy to light either or but you can see here we have a downed spruce tree and this is particularly what I look for I'm looking for fat wood and we'll just have a closer look at it so there's a number of different ways we can tell this is a spruce tree and the branches are a dead giveaway we just take this branch here this pipe hanging around in the tree you'll see that on this branch here we've got lots of tiny little sockets that are actually left behind by the needles and that's a very common thing to see on a spruce tree on the twigs of a spruce tree and this is you know where the needle once resided on the actual branch there when you pick that off it's left find and it's a very very easy way of just telling it's a spruce tree straight away without actually seeing any needles but the needles are obviously a dead giveaway I mean this is your typical Christmas tree so I have a long sort of four sided needles that are a dark green and probably around about 1.5 centimeters long and on Norwegian spruce if there's any cones on the ground which unfortunately in this case there aren't because this is quite an old tree that's fallen down the Canes will be very long sometimes they're up to 15 centimeters long quite long cones that hang down and that's another typical sign of a spruce tree we have some needles just over here if I reach over and grab these you'll see what I mean so you can see there that we've got some spruce needles and you can see the little socket there and if I pluck the needles off the little sockets left behind you can see it's a short needle really dark green four-sided and the bark is also a good giveaway the bark is usually blistered when it's a young tree like this this isn't particularly an old tree they scab out at the bottom a bit more when they they get older and sort of continue to scab but you can see that the bark is quite blistered and quite flat and it's rough to the touch you know a Western red is a very soft barking makes an excellent nest material or cordage this is a very hard kind of scabby bark but not you know large flakes like you would see them on some of the young pine trees so this is a particularly good tree to find then it's a very common one in the British Isles that you'll find that would be downed in a coniferous woodland so you can see we have some nice thick branches here and the branches that are further up I'm as I said I'm not going to bother with because they're too close to the rot that's occurring the other end you don't really want to be going near that so you we have a reed really big thick branch here actually I think what I'll do is I'll take this one you can use an axe for this as well and you can sort of come in really steep to the crotch of the branch and take the whole thing out and that way you usually get more fat wood but in this case I'm just going to use my bucket Laplander so I'm going to take this big one here first of all I'm going to cut it just here about two foot up and then I'm going to take it there because if I take it there first the whole thing will be hard to manage and it will fall over there so I'm just going to take the weight away and then take the piece on one there we go we've taken that fall from away and there's some good signs of resin in there I'll show you momentarily when I get this piece off but you're looking for very dark patches within the Rings okay so we've got that off and you'll see those dark areas in the Rings there and that's really what you're looking for that's all the resin this kind of stagnated at the joint you know because this is where a lot of the resin will build up so if you want a tree has gone down like this and what we can do now is we're going to batten that and quarter it and then we'll scrape it down and see whether we can put a spark in it but that's really what you're looking for if it's nice and white you probably haven't got a very good one there if it's pale but that is a pretty good one you can see it runs through right to the other end so we take this piece of fat wood here I'm going to split this one down it's a bit too big to batten what you could do is take the saw and then cut it into smaller pieces and batten one batten the other if that's your intention I'm just going to use my hatchet to split this one down when splitting a piece of wood that's long like this with a hatchet you really want to be using a slightly different technique

these are pieces of wood can be very very dense once you've added the axe almost through see it's a very very hard piece of wood which again is a good sign we'll keep going there we are get some of this bark off this isn't the oldest of down spruces you can tell by dance and I fresh the bark is sort of peeling it's got a lot of flexibility too unlike this one here which is the same tree and it's very very old and probably too rotted to actually use the fat wood so getting the tree that's fallen at the right age it's just as important but we are through it's just a very dense piece of wood I think I'll start this side as well yeah

it's beast

there we go through so if we have a look inside there you'll see the resin this is the resin line running through and it's clearly very heavy the crotch of the branch and it's starting to taper up and fade you can even feel it's sticky and yes smells very very strong so what I'll do is I'll probably just saw this or Corder this thing again with the axe it'd be much easier just to split the snags the grains facing me and have to cut through any of the out of wood and just get this split one more time it's very very hard it would there we are other end as well there we go - those fibers there so you can see still a bit of greenness to it it's been off the ground for very long times it's clearly going to decay what's slower than something like this but we're kind of getting there now you know close to this fat wood here I'll put the other two pieces of side back that piece that looks a little bit better so we'll take a closer look at this one here we are there's some really dark resin in there you can see it all around here so what we'll do is we'll use this corner piece I'll start scraping this and see if I can put a spark on it put these other pieces to the side so you can see I've moved away from this area here where I've been walloping the axe because it's very damp and punky and I'll just rub my hand over here just to kind of take away some of the moisture it's a curved surface so it's not ideal to work on obviously you'd be wanting to repair things a bit better if you're actually out making a fire rather than just trying to ignite some fat wood in my case but I've tidied up the edge that I'm scraping as well you can see I've just taken away some of the jagged parts so I can scrape easily with the spine of the knife you can see some beautiful shavings coming off it should be quite yellow and rich in color to indicate good resinous content to them you can see they're holding together very well the best bits on the inside as well I mean I'm just using the outer there's a lot of resin on the inside there so this piece of wood could be kept for a very long time as usable tinder it'd be excellent if you notice as well inside of the leg is tucked away so if I make a mistake with a knife I'm just going into the outer muscle no femoral artery you do want to take knife safety into consideration always anyway I think that's probably enough got a nice little pile there

I'll just take my Ferro rod and I usually hover it over the top ninety degrees but a few sparks down almost had it there we go so you want to be very careful with some fatwood obviously the resinous content isn't as high as some of the stuff you can get your hands on you want to just nurture it a little bit you know put shavings over the top like this keep that air gap in between the shavings don't compress it you'll need that oxygen and build up lots of material if you are making a fire we build a lot of material like this you would keep feeding it and nurturing it you have your smug little small fuel twigs they would go on top you keep a gap between the fuel twigs and this material here again you don't want to smother it or else it goes out a bit like birch bark so I hope that's helped on the on the fat wood front going through coniferous woodlands and looking for downed trees that are not particularly you know that like this tree here that we've been working on it looks terrible you know I wouldn't approach this for fatwood it's really sodden through with water and moisture obviously rotted to hell and the bark is very very crisp it's on the ground so it's just sucking up moisture all the time

this one we looked at over there it sits in the air its elevated the okv the broken part is facing up with so moisture it's probably getting in I'm rotting everything kind of gradually downward but it will take a long time to decompose you know it's obviously very resinous it's providing a fantastic resource of fat wood and it's always nice to you know take you know wood like this from it from a dead tree like that instead of you know chopping at the live ones because you can harvest fat wood from from live trees as I've shown in a specific video about fat word that I did not too long ago you know just took a branch off a western red and it was pretty good in fact was really good and it produced I just got lucky really and it produced quite a lot of resin there sometimes they're terrible sometimes they're not just really about you know when you're taking the branch and just eyeing up the right thing but the great thing about taking wood from you know resin from from dead trees like that fat wood from dead trees is you're not harming the tree and you can make a mistake and you can cut another branch and then you find you can see look at all this you know I've got tons of material we've got the piece that I've just used again you can see the resin this content in that really thick with resin that piece there I can leave behind it's not so good with these other two pieces look fantastic I've just got to resist the temptation of not throwing them in the log burner later on tonight and watching inferno break loose which is often what happens with fat wood and I end up with too much of it so thanks again for watching guys and I really appreciate the support and obviously for new subscribers thank you for subscribing and checking out the videos and there'll be many more to come especially in the new year so take care guys and I'll see you very soon for another video

thank you

Written on 12 December 2014.

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 Pine Shoulder Tinder

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