Bushcraft Fire Lighting: Make Fire With Fatwood 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

hi there guys I've connected a to practice some bushcraft I decided to come to a coniferous woodland so as you can see around me I'm surrounded by evergreens you're in woodlands like this you'll often find the grain sparse of resources although at the right times of year you will find things you can eat and use much like this puff ball here and if you caught this early enough it would be quite a good edible also we have a milky cap here

despite the off-putting bleeding orange sap it's actually a pretty good edible despite what resources are available to me in the environment I'm in and the weather conditions I always brings from primary items with me I've got canteen full of water that I can cook and sterilize water in I've got a knife I've got a Ferro rod or firesteel a hatchet saw and I always bring a journal with me because I quite like to record wild edibles when I'm out and do some research and writing and I have a medical kit and a tarpaulin inside my pack with good tools like that there are very few jobs you won't be able to do well outdoors provided you have the energy and the time to do it and if you're in wooden like this obviously one of the main jobs you have to do is to make a fire and fire lighting can obviously be one of those tasks that you can spend a very long time on or you can spend a very short period of time on now I live in a very damp part of the world and it's raining a lot here and it's always very very damp and material like this that's fine and dry like nest material is always really soaked and you know very very damp so it's hard to sort of take tinder fungus and things and embers from bow drills and put them into flame easily because of that lack of abundant dry material so a lot of the techniques you'll see me use on the channel and another videos a technique suited for adverse weather conditions on wet weather and that's one of the techniques we're going to have a look at today in this conifer woodland where things like birch bark isn't available I've been walking around this wooden sometime there's a few things I've been looking for one of the things you can look for in a coniferous woodlands is the resin on the tree and sometimes you can find fresh resin which you can scrape off with a stick or you can find the dry stuff which is actually better for fire lighting with a Ferro rod you know when using a spark simply because it's less messy but there is one other thing I've been looking for as well which is a method I prefer using over that technique I just described knots I've been looking for the lower branches of these conifer trees just here the specific tree here is a western red cedar tree you can tell by the soft needles that are almost kind of feather like and very very soft to touch also the bark is got quite a red a deep red to it and it's very well layered and quite long linear lines going up the tree and it can be fussed up and turned into a nest very very easily to make a nest out of and even the inner bark as well amazingly useful stuff if we trace this branch back to the trunk you can see we've got a join just there that's called the crotch or the branch or sometimes referred to as the shoulder of the branch this branch is still live but that's not really a problem we can still take this quite safely and still use it for fire lighting even though it's green because it would be loaded with resin this portion here will be full of resin up to about there and we can take that and get something from it that we call fat wood which is basically wood that's infused with resin there are a few ways we can get the branch out we can take an axe and cut the crotch out like this and take a portion out and that way we do get more resin we can also use a saw which is a bit of a cleaner method with the tree still alive you can just saw that straight off take that portion there and it does very little damage to the tree as you can see I've got my branch here mmm smells very very strong a lot of resin in there you can see the color it's quite deep this isn't a particularly good one sometimes you get them and you can see the resin is very very dark in the core bit like this smaller one I picked up in the way in that one there will be particularly good getting some fat without of and we can use that again and again be a good ignition source making a fire but we'll use this one too this area here looks pretty good for making a fire the ground is quite earthy and there's not too many needles on the floor so I don't need to do much preparation to actually have a safe fire here which is one of the main things about making a fire in a conifer woodland is you want to prepare the ground properly because if you make a fire just on the banned needles you could respond the whole place down

I've prepared this area pretty quickly and I've just removed all this top layer of kind of needles and Spagna moss there and kind of shifted all of that well out of the way I'll push it out even further as well after I've sort of put the camera side and those are just things on the surface that can obviously dry it very quickly and smolder and burn and the fire can obviously creep out and you can visibly see that and you know that's one thing you really want to worry about in a coniferous woodlands in a conifer woodland or all those needles and I've dug down to soil phantosaur bare earth they didn't need to get an too far because this is quite a thin area really some areas the needles are like this and the moss is like that but this area is quite nice and I've made a fire here before with no concerns whatsoever but there are things under the ground to watch out for as well like roots I've moved a few these roots out the way because roots can dry out very quickly and the roots of conifers obviously contain near quite a lot of resin and you know things can start to smolder and sometimes fires have burnt underground for months and months and months and people haven't known about it they've just left the campfire and gone and then a few months later an enormous forest fire burst sight and you know devastates an entire area which has happened many a time believe it or not so there are cautions to take in a colorful woodland over a deciduous one and you just want to kind of dig down to earth if you can do and remove any roots now we know we can make a fire safely we just need fuel obviously make our fire and if you're in adverse weather conditions what you're going to need is high in dry wood like this European larch here that's just off the ground they'll be dry in the core if it makes a cracking night it's perfect so we need two big bunches like this so first of all we've sticks like this don't worry too much about organizing them just yet just get some good piles together because it's all about quantity so now we've got our fuel wood all we need to do is organize it into some piles

I usually have a pile about this big of tiny little twigs the smallest ones I've got that's the first one to go on once we've got a flame and then the second pile is kind of thumb sized sticks really go on afterwards when the fire is established and then often if I'm out for a long period of time or I'm making a proper fire and I'm camping out I have a third pile and that would be bigger stuff that will go on you know through the night keep it going but let's get this organized into two piles so there's the first one this part here is pretty much made itself just by you taking the twigs an but it's good to break up a few smaller ones just so you can put them on initially knife to stand there snapping twigs so now I've collected my fuel wood and organized it you can see here I've got everything I need to make a fire I've got my ignition source which is a ferrocerium rod I've got my tinder which is the resin in the fat wood I've got my first stage bundle which are tiny twigs and my second stage bundle with your thumb sized sticks and I would have a third stage which would be about this size and then it would get even bigger than that as the fire became more established but this is going to be my raft the wraps they're really to assist you in making the fire and I use a raft in good or bad weather but it really helps you in bad weather because if it's raining it gets it off the damp ground but it also allows oxygen to get to the fire a bit better and really better your chances of getting one going after you've laid your raft what you will want to do is just place two nice thick sticks across it like that to create almost like a V but facing away from you one thing I always do is make myself a little workstation certainly I can work on that's nice and dry this is a bit spongy and damp this piece of bark here is nice and dry it will keep the moisture off whatever I'm working on and it just allows me to cut onto it not be cutting into the soil and potentially dulling my knife and hitting any stones and it just keeps things a bit neater we can start splitting this down and working with it so we can take our section there it's got some nice resin in and I'll just batten this in half it's only a small piece of wood you can see the darker patch there as well there's a lot more resin and that's the piece we're going to use so we'll quarter that just like this and we've got that nice darker piece there we'll keep that I mean that can go straight on another piece there some dark resin running down it or section that off too there we go we've got a good bit right there quite a nice bit so we've got two pieces here that we can use to get some material light off but the rest of the pieces that I've cut this one wasn't so good

I've batten that into a quarter this can be used for something just as valuable so we've got quite a bit of material there to actually play around with so we'll leave that to one side and we'll start working with this and what I'm going to do with this is feather it which will greatly increase my chances of transferring the dust of flame into the feathers to get my fire going I always avoid wasting good materials so the leftovers the answer resinous can be used to make these feathers quite easily and they can go very well with the material that we're going to be using as fat wood so if we take these two pieces of wood that this one looks like it's a bit more resinous than this one so we'll put that to one side and you can use the back of your knife and all you're doing is scraping a very fine pile of shavings with a ninety degree angle I just go up and down like this and create a huge pile always overcook it and obviously if you are in bad conditions you can have a cover-up over your head like a tarp so none of this gets wet okay so that should be enough material and some of that looks really good so we'll get that closer to our raft then we can get the fire going so we've got everything we need right here to get a fire going and all our wood source is just to the right of me and we have our small pile here which will transfer our spark into flame but one important thing to note is that you can actually do the same with a fire feather or you make the feather curls so thin up the top here that you can put a spark on those and those will ignite and then you tilt the feather up and the whole thing glows like a torch it's just slightly trickier and takes a bit more time so sometimes it's easier just to use fat wood if it's available to you and use the off cuts to make feathers out of because they're quite resinous and will burn very well but there are a number of ways in which we can approach this pile now and it goes down to the technique of the Ferro rod one technique is to hold the Stryker or the knife very still and often against the ground or against the boot or something like that and drive the ferrule up against the knife showering spots down on your tinder but one way I like to approach it and I just find it a little bit easier it's just to place the ferrule over the top of the pile just on a good bit and if your wraps stable enough you can obviously put it all on there but for me it's not stable enough for that let me just put a few sparks down you can see that bit caught unfortunately it was on its own so it didn't transfer across so that will go fairly quickly now we can bring this across just here our tea feathers can sort of hover over the top and they'll light very very fast and then our twig bundle goes over the top of that and so we don't smother it there's a little technique we can use if you do think you're going to smother the fire which is very unlikely with these materials you can pick the bundle up with the V and let a lot more oxygen in and you can see there that there is no way this fires going out and it creates a really nice fire for you and when the flames are above the bundle in smoke which they clearly are in this case because we're using larch and conifers which full of resin and you know your fire is secure and you can place that down so we have a pretty good fire going here we can start placing on top our secondary bundle but in this case it can just go on top just like that as a larch all conifers were really burn well which is why you've got to watch the surrounding area one thing I keep in the back of my pack is a piece of foam it goes on the back plate my condor 2 rucksack and it's quite a good wafter and seat and changing mat for going on the grain underneath hammock for example or a shelter you can get a fire going little bit of life back into it although it isn't really needed for these materials so guys I hope this video helped you out in making a fire and a colorful woodland in adverse or wet conditions it's a matter that I quite enjoy using because you just take a section of branch you quarter it down and you've got everything you need in that one little branch there you can make a dust pile you can feather the remainder and it's quite easy to take that spark on that dust pile to flame without too much difficulty and then transfer that flame to your feathers into your nest material and it really doesn't require too much work but you can use pine resin as well to do a similar thing you can dust the dry resin transfer the flame of c2 then wet resin which but slightly more kind of erratically but it will work and you can then transfer that to a feather or a pile of larch or something like that with a little conifer twigs so there are many ways of doing it this is just one method which I quite like using but yeah just to recap we used western red cedar you don't necessarily need to use that but it is a good tree to use if the lower branches that quite resinous so I hope this has helped out and thank you again for watching and if you want any more information on bushcraft feel free to check out my website and we've put the link in the description obviously there are other videos on the channel covering the equipment I use like the saws the knives that clothes that I wear and stuff because I do tend to get a lot of questions about that in each video and I don't always have time to answer it so I'll put some links in the description and if you do need any help just give us a shout and all I'll answer as quick as I can but thanks again guys and hopefully I'll see you in the next video take care

Written on 19 September 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: Make Fire With Fatwood Tinder

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