I'm not looking to start a debate, I'm looking to start a test. The problem is, I can't find fat wood around here.

So, I guess I'm looking for someone willing to trade what is for them locally harvested fat wood for genuine, organically grown, ethically harvested, Vermont white birch bark.

I'll take you up on it, I've been curious to try birch bark and I've got the core of a rotten pine thats brillant fatwood.

Hi Ironraven,

I am not looking to steal your thread but could someone explain to me how or where to find natural "Fatwood".

I know it is the resin rich portion of an old pine stump but I kicked apart about a dozen stumps today and only found rotten wood. What am I doing wrong?

I am like Ironraven; birch bark everywhere, pine trees too, but I cannot find natural fatwood?

Mike

swampDonkey,
Find a pine tree that has been snow damaged, top broken ,snaped in half and so forth. Last years pines are best. Then go to what is left of the stump, it may or may not be rotten, Nor dose it need to be.
Fatwood is caused by the sap trying to go up the tree with no place to go.
Now take an axe and work on that stump.
The rotten part that broke off will have none.

I've had some trouble finding fat wood further north, I think maybe the trees decay too slow or they aren't as resinous(because of colder winters maybe?). But if you find a part of a log where a good sized branch came out of the trunk, I find the knot where the two cores comes together is a good spot to find it.

Thanks Al,

I am in the bush again tomorrow and will check it out, I think the stumps I was checking were too rotten.

Mike

You've got pm

IIRC, if the tree broke down in spring time, when sap is flowing full time, then you have more chance to find "fatwood" in the stump.

If the tree broke down during winter, less chance...

Thanks for the directions Big Al,

I was in a pine harvest cut today from last winter and went looking for some sappy stumps.

White pine stumps (some almost 4 feet in dia.) were oozing a ring of pine sap all the way around the circumference under the bark. When chopped off this material seemed sticky, but wet and not as heavy or solid as Fatwood I have seen sold in stores. It did not light or burn very well.

A much older white pine stump had a ring of rotton wood around the outside, but the inner wood was dry and solid. It burned much better but was more like dry pine kindling.

I then found a black spruce stump that had broken off about 3 feet above the ground in a windstorm last year. Sap was encrusted around the wound on this stump, so I chopped off some wood pieces. These lit very easily and burned like a match with sap boiling out of the thin splinter of wood. The only trouble was that it produced a very black sooty smoke.

I need to find a suitable stump from one of the hard pines (red pine, jack pine ...) to compare with the soft pine (white pine) that did not work so well.

Learning every day,

Mike

Look instead for rotten logs. if the pines where you live are anything like those in the West, the pineknots are FULL of pitch and burn quite well (also, I haven't seen ANY mention here of fuzzsticks).

You know....

I can't remember when the last time was I heard someone mention fuzz sticks here. I used them when I can to save on better tinder/kindling, but yeah. That's odd.

I agree! I started making them when I was in the Boy Scouts. When I became an assistant Scoutmaster, I used to teach scouts to use them as they applied the kindling. Usually, beginners want to move too quickly from tinder to log. Fuzzsticks for kindling helped the transistion.

Maybe we are just so used to it, we don't think about it. Probably not a good sign.

Dr. Pavlov, your dog is ready. :P