How to Make Pine Pitch Glue

Description

A ReWild University (http://rewildu.com/) tutorial on making pine pitch glue using white pine pitch and charcoal. I'm revisiting this skill this year after many years of disuse, and certainly don't consider myself an expert. Please add your own tips, observations, or experiences in the comments to help others (and myself!) learn. We'll follow this video with a couple more videos detailing different ways to re-warm (and stickify) your glue, as well as some unconventional uses. This stuff is versatile, good for much more than just setting stone points!

Visit ReWild University (http://rewildu.com/) for more videos, articles, and classes on human rewilding.

Tags: Pine Pitch Glue,pitch glue,pine glue,survival glue,survival skills,rewild university,kenton whitman,wilderness survival,prepping skills,prepper skills,bushcraft,primitive skills,ancestral skills,best survival school,rewilding school,wisconsin wilderness school

Video Transcription

this is a short tutorial on making pine pitch glue it's really easy to make it's a very versatile substance people are often using it just to you know put up after stone point into an arrow or spear but it has a lot more uses so we'll do a second video and go over some of those you're going to need two things first of all a pine forest or at least some pine trees and second of all some kind of a container obviously I have already used this one but any sort of medical metal container will do tuna cans are ideal once we're in the pine forest we're looking for places where the sap is bleeding out of the trees this is a pretty good wound here it's just dripping down we could collect a whole bunch of those little drips and make it work

it'll be a lot faster if we can find a big glob sticking out somewhere so we'll search for a little while searching around a little is paid off here's a nice big glob of it I'm just going to scrape it off with the stick go right into the container picking out any large bits of Oh pine needle and such that I see in there wood

people will ask exactly what to look for in pitch I've used different species the other day made some that was about 60% white pine in about 40% spruce it worked wonderfully

there's also different qualities of pitch you'll often find this red sort of granular stuff and there's other that others that it's you know clear as as water and all that will work you'll get a little bit different quality product in the end but unless you're going to get you know really intense with this and you can start experimenting with only using the clear stuff or only using the granular I usually mix them up and I get a great product that works for everything I use it for next you'll need a mortar and pestle and some charcoal that you can just take out of your campfire it's a lot of recipes out there some of which use deer droppings or something else to get little fibers in there I've found that just finely powdered charcoal and the pitch gives me the best glue I'm going to do this next part on a grill so we're going to put this onto a few pieces of charcoal that are heating up I'm going to try to angle it here so you can see what happens it's just going to turn into a nice liquid for us I have a stirring stick ready just to mess with it a little bit like anything else some of the edges are going to melt first it'll start to boil a little bit I mix that back in I can pull out any big chunks of anything that doesn't look like it should be in there and some people like to not have it boil feeling that it will be too brittle afterwards I haven't noted a big difference between just heating it up and melting it and letting it boil a little bit or even letting it boil a fair amount so my old stuff on the bottom is starting to liquify and boil already you can see this is starting to get goopy too I'm using some modern conveniences but this is fairly easy to do around here used a clam shell from a freshwater clam as the container and then everything else you just find out in nature you're going to you know obviously get the charcoal from your fire and the pitch from the tree is you try this out be prepared to experiment your wherever you are in the world your pitch maybe you know they behave differently so try some from different evergreens that you have and and see what what works all right this is liquefied as this is going to get there was a lot of crap in here and so it's still gonna make a nice functional ah glue but I've been picking out a lot of pieces of bark and a little bit grainy err than I'd like it to be when you move this it's do not spill it on you you will be in a world of hurt so this is probably not the way to do it but find your way to safely move it Ned charcoal and ah start with about equal amounts and see what happens

you got it well mixed it's not going to stick to your hands anymore you can just form it right around the end of a stick and you're making a hot glue stick there you go this is ready to reheat and use and we'll see how it cures out it should dry to become almost rock-hard that of course is depending on the temperature so 90 degrees today so it'll probably still be I'll probably still be able to put a fingernail print into it but we'll give it a couple hours here and take a peek okay it's about two hours later it's also cooled down to about eighty which makes this much harder than it would have been if it was hot

and you do a fingernail test it's still warm enough that I'm getting a good like a good dent in there with my fingernail but I have to push really hard so that's pretty good and thick after it cooled off a little bit more we have a nice strong strong glue now to use it we just heat it up over the fire again and it's going to get warm and goopy and then we apply it and and use it as a pitch glue the next video I do will show some different uses of pitch glue and in the basic you know how to process of making it work right now it's ready to put in your primitive pack and keep with you as long as you don't go out in the desert where it will melt do you remember that when this is hot it's first of all extremely flammable and it also will never come out of your clothes so do not get it on your clothes when it's melting this one came out as really a poor quality glue I would say because it has so much junk in there and I got most of the big pieces out but still a lot of stuff so it's it's grainy and not a real smooth glue but do remember that this is very very forgiving so you can always heat it up again add more pitch heat it up again add more charcoal heat it up again add a different quality of pitch and mix and play with it it's not you know it's not cured in the sense that you are done working with it now we can put it right back in here heat it back up into a liquid form and not go ahead and play with it as much as you want

here's three glue sticks that I've made in the last couple days one of the left is the one that we just made pretty grainy not really high quality one in the middle I used deer droppings as a binder and I'm not going to do that again I used to do that a lot in the past but I just feel like it makes an inferior product and the one on the right is a really nice high quality one that was made of some less grainy pitch and and really fine ground charcoal