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