Fatwood Collecting Processing Igniting

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

one of guys Dave can bear at the Pathfinder school we've had a lot of questions in the last few videos about fatwood and I've shown a couple times how to process and collect fat wood but I thought maybe is worth covering again to go through the whole thing of where to collect it and how to collect it to how to process it down to use it to make fire with both open flame or ferrocerium rod so to take a quote from Morse code on skis book on bushcraft anytime you stop moving in a cold-weather environment the first thought you should have is starting a fire if you are collecting things along your way with possum mentality you should already have some of these things collected in your haversack along the way so that when you have to start fire you can do it easily what I always look for is pine trees especially red pine red pine is better than white pine for collecting fat water pitch wood it's easy to find Pines from a distance because they're evergreens so in the winter if you get on high ground you'll be able to see where the pine groves are at because they'll be green and everything else will be brown so once you've found a pine grove you just need to find a red pine that has a lot of lower branches sticking out of it like this one does that aren't broken off and to me the ones that are a sharp angle coming down into the tree generally will collect more fat or pitch or SAP in the crotch then ones that are coming straight out of the tree that just works for me so I find one that's sticking up in the air a little bit it's not bone dead I want the thing to be have a little bit of life left to it that's probably going to have a lot of pitching and it'll be right there in that crotch so the closer I can cut that off the better off I'm going to be and I'm going to get about a 12 inch stick of fat without of that then I can split down several times like we've done in other videos but I'm going to show you how to do that today so let's take this branch here and we'll cut this off with our bow saw and we'll look at it first now I can smell that as I was cutting it and if I smell the end of that wood and it smells like turpentine it's going to have a lot of fat within it I'm also looking for color the darker orange it is the more fat wood is going to have in it we've got about a three-foot branch here we're going to cut another piece of it off about right here and process this down to see how much fat when we've actually got in here okay so I know I'm looking to cut off about a foot of this from the bottom so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use what's called a plumber's vise and I'm going to put this in between my leg like this okay now I'm looking to cut about a foot off of this thing to process down so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this underneath one leg and lock it in with the other leg and that's called a farmer's vise that gives me an area out here to safe to saw that's nowhere near the triangle of death and here where my femoral artery's and the family jewels are at once I've cut that off I want to look at that in and see if there's still fat wood in there is smell still it still got some dark orange to it so we should be able to split this down and get what we need for fire starting oK we've got a pretty good natural amble here with the down pine and sometimes down Pines are places to find good fat wood - but you really need to look to the root ball for that you would have some in some of these crotch areas as well but the root ball is going to hold the most so we just need a good hardwood baton here and a good amble point let's put this down see what we got inside here see what the good fat wood content is on this thing okay I can see some real good dark orange right in here that's going to be a really good candidate for some good fat wood right there now all of this will burn well put the areas with the most spot wood are going to burn the buff all right so let's take one of these pieces that we cut off here and let's make a little feather stick here we can now the way this wood axe is going to tell you a lot about how much fat wood is in it when you cut through it it'll feel thick where the fat wood is it'll feel thin where there isn't much fat would let me separate those cuttings now if this has got good amounts of fat wood and it should take off pretty quick with just a few seconds from a cigarette lighter

I've seen better than that for sure but that's not horrible there's plenty of fat within there to start a fire beyond the shadow of a doubt using this in conjunction with 20 more feather sticks of the same size or better you would be able to get this stick to catch on fire and give you plenty of extended burn time to start a good hot fire okay let's put that guy out now let's see about process some of this down to take a spark with a fair serum rod okay so what I've done here is I've just cut a notch out of this down tree to give us a good flat anvil area here you see it's pretty rotten just to give us a place to put some shavings and I scraped the bark off of this edge of the stick because there's a good amount of fat wood right here that's really dark and orange so that's what I really want to use if I'm going to try to start a fair barrel rod fire with this and get ignition from ferrocerium Ron I'm going to want this to be shaved down very tiny and that's exactly the way they make the things like what they what you buy called Maya dust what they do is they take a machine probably and they scrape the shavings off of this just like this and what you're trying to do is you're trying to accomplish making a pile of those shavings and you'll know if you're getting the fat would you use a spiny or knife for this and you'll know if you've got good fat wood because you'll feel it it'll feel thick when you're pulling your knife through it and those curls those small shavings like that what you're going to want for a Ferro rod ignition so just keep the knife stationary pull the piece of wood towards you try to collect all of it on top of the anvil or whatever you're using has a base to collect these shavings and just continually turn the piece

so that you're getting a good sharp angle to pull up against the spine your knife and this is another reason why it's so important to have that good 90-degree spine on the back of that knife you want to continue to do that until you've got a pile of shavings probably the size of a silver dollar especially if you've got wood it doesn't have an absolute ton of resin in it this has got a couple spots in it that I've got real good resin but for the most part it's not perfect you can see that real dark area right there that's going to be real good okay so now that I've got this pile with all these fine shavings exposed and I've got a lot of surface area I want the biggest ferrocerium rod I can get my hands on this one is about a six inch by one quarter by one half inch rod the same one that we saw on our website but something like this is going to allow you once you get the oxidization off of it something like this is going to allow you to throw a massive amount of material onto that fire leg and that's what you've got to have the longer this fair serum rod is the more material you can remove in one stroke and the better 90-degree spine you've got on this knife the more mold material is going to come off here because you're going to take a thicker amount of material or a larger amount of material off this rod with every one of these poles you never want to push the knife away from the rod you always want to pull the rod toward the knife just like this okay that's going to be your action and you pull up and back you bury that knife in there really good with your hand and direct those sparks right into this pile and it should be that quick and easy now if I cut this log out and have this log at my camp I would probably start my fire right on this log okay folks well I appreciate you joining me out here today for the short video on how to collect and process pitch wood or fat wood as it's sometimes called any place that you can find a connection point to the tree or right at the base of the roots of a pine tree especially a red pine there's going to be a lot of that fat wood heavy SAP material that's going to be highly combustible simple ways to process it it takes a little bit more to process it for ignition with a ferrocerium rod than it does with a match or open flame both will work again 90% of your success almost a hundred percent of your success with fire and building fire is going to be in the processing of the material so take your time as you can see this didn't take very long to actually talk through it harvest it off the tree process it down and actually get to a point where we had flame with the ferrocerium rod so if you wait a little bit too long you get stuck look for a pine as fast you can I'm Dave camera at the Pathfinder school I've back another video soon as I can I thank you for support I thank you everything you do from me for my business and for everyone affiliated with the Pathfinder school thanks guys you