Rendering Birch Oil, As taught at the PF Pioneer Class by Joe Kellam

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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

when folks take Canterbury with the Pathfinder school what I thought we'd do today is thought I'd work on one of the pioneering skills up with talk and last weekend's Pioneer class here at the Pathfinder school that is how to distill or extract a birch oil in birch oil is a very good thing to have on hand in a long term or short term scenario it's a very good as sect aside which means you can use it for your bug repellent externally it's very good fungicide early if that's even a work but it's very good fungicide it's a very good astringent and it is a very good antiseptic so anything is on the surface of your skin it's good for if you've got an abrasion or a cut you've got poison ivy or you've got ringworm or some type of a eczema problem on the external areas of your skin you can't use birch oil to take care of those things or to help medicinally for those things you can also use virtual internally but I will let you research that on your own it will claim to give you medical advice here on the Pathfinder channel but there are lots of internal uses for birch oil as well it's a very expensive oil to buy best guess I can see from looking across the internet you're looking at somewhere between the you know $12 for two ounces of it to 75 80 dollars for a pint so it's pretty expensive to buy but you can make it very easily you can make it in the wild you just need a couple containers to do that with the set up bake distilling type device I'm going to show you how to do that today what we're going to work with is we're going to work with some birch bark here and this is like a paper birch or white heart and we all know already that birch bark is very good as a fire starting Emily that's because of the vegetable oils or the volatile oils in the birch bark it's almost an accelerant which means it burns hotter and faster it makes that material burn faster it makes it burn hotter that's why it blows that black smoker gives off that black smoke and when it burns is the vegetable oil we want to harness that oil without burning its material up so that that oil is not escaping into the air being burned away by the fire consumed we want to capture that away to do that we're going to have to distill it what we're going to do is we're going to take I have to square tens here that are almost identical in size you can see one of these soap ten that I got while I was in Holland the other one is a chocolate ten from Trader Joe's and what I've done is I'm taking this chocolate 10 now I've stuffed it with birch bark has been rolled and folded stuff down inside the same height now just pack it in there about as tight as I could get it we could put a couple more pieces in here at the top probably then what we're going to do is we're going to take we're going to punch a hole in this top of this 10 almost like we were making a chart in we're going to turn that upside down so the hole is at the bottom then we're going to take the lid off of our small tin and put this on top of it in a hole and I'll show you how we're going to do that we've got a fire going down here right now prepping up some fire and this is what we're going to catch our oil in so the fire will be built around this 10 which will burn it and cause the oil to be distilled out drip down to the bottom into this lid and directed into the bottom tin here will be our collection 10 and then we'll try to pour that off into some type of a container for longevity so stay with me and we'll walk through just a load of time guys so the first thing we're doing is we're just getting ourselves a sustainable fire built so we've got something to work with and we're going to dig a hole off to the side of that and build our fire in a little bit of a different spot away from that to do our distilling and I'll show you how we're going to make that in just a second okay so I've dug another hole here right beside my fire and that hole just needs to be deep enough that our tin will go inside it we can go ahead and pack that around a little bit we don't want to get any dirt in our tin so we'll be careful about that that's just a hold it in place really more than anything else then we'll make sure we don't have any dirt in there now we're going to take this 10 that's got the hole in it and stuff with the birch bark we put a hole right here in the center and we really want that thing to be a little bit concave so that everything drips towards the center we're going to put that right on top of this and then we're going to kind of bury that in a little bit like this just to kind of seal that up just like this about a ground level and then we're going to build our fire we're going to bring our fire materials out here and build our fire back up around our 10 and I'm going to build a good fire up around this 10 and just let it continue to burn probably until it burns out for the most part

we got this bottle I found in the woods and any perfect by any means I've cleaned it out as best I can hot water but for something that was found in the woods it'll definitely work we got a piece of wood here I'm working on as a plug for that bottle and we'll carve that down a little bit more now and then I should be pretty much ready when my oil is ready to transfer I should be pretty much ready with the container transferred into you can do all of this with materials found in the woods you just need a couple of cans all you're really going to need very much like you would use if you were making char cloth you're not going to need a whole lot more than that I'm just going to carve this stopper down a little bit smaller doesn't need to be as big as it is okay I've got my bottle ready here or my extracted oils just a quick simple stopper carved out of wood looks a bit like a morel mushroom I guess but we've got burned down and ready to pour the oils off hopefully we've got you know out of that ten if I got a quarter of this bottle full at idle oil I would be happy it takes a lot of birch bark to get Tarzan oils out of in any amount it's like anything else that you do when you're extracting something very similar to maple sugar it takes a whole lot of that maple sap to render down into maple syrup it's the same thing it takes an awful lot of birch bark to get these oils which is why it's so expensive if I get a quarter of this bottle filled from that entire ten like I said I'll be more than happy

okay now that our fire is burnt down pretty well we can kind of take and scrape everything away from our container back into our fire leg or fire pit over here we want to get down to where that container to the face of that container basically so we don't get again any dirt in our oil I'm just taking a stick here and scraping everything away from the base of this container taking my time here to get everything out I've got to get everything out of the front too I've got some on the front side and you get out here scrape it around to the side and get rid of it and this is important if you're trying to avoid any contaminants in your oil dirt coal things like that you don't want in there it's important to take this time and get this right so that when you remove your container you're only left with the oil and there's nothing getting inside of it okay now when we take this container off we should be left with nothing but the oil in the bottom container you can see it in there there it is right there okay I will let this container cool because if we didn't burn everything up and this hasn't become charred material and there's nothing left in there really but creosote then we didn't burn it long enough and we could cook it longer and extract more oil out of it or we could reload the tin once it cools down with fresh bark and go at it again as long as we keep our fire kept burning now what we need to do is we need to get this container out of here and it won't be too hot because the fire was on top of it and it's in the ground so a pair of multi-tool pliers or something like that would come in real handy for pulling that container out of the ground it is you not to drain into our device we're going to store our oil in all right I've got my bottle here my cork and I'm just going to reach down in here with a pair of pliers like I said and ease that tin out and pour that oil into this bottle again like I said if I got a quarter of that bottle filled I would be happy and that's about what I have looking down inside there I've got a little bit more than a quarter of that bottle filled and put the cork in that and set that aside we've probably got a little bit more we could get out of here it might be just a little bit more we could drain out of there not much well wait till our container cools down that we're using to distill with and we'll look at that as well you can see what this looks like is a black tari substance lots and lots of uses for that to include knife handles that are made out of wood ax handles that are made out of wood very good protectant for those things as well the soil is very rot resistant so there's lots and lots of uses for that commodity in a wilderness situation long term or short term now looking at what we have left here let's remember you've got those oils inside this ten so you're probably going to have a little bit of a time getting that lid off it's going to be stuck with those oils almost glued you can see what's left and there's just like a creosote inside there that Burke is pretty much rendered down to nothing but charred material that's very crumbly and burnt and it's just a dust of creosote when you've gotten to that point you know you've gotten all of the essential oils out of that bark then you can just clean your tin out use a four star storing char whatever the case may be in there we've got a little piece stuck to it there's a little oil stuck to that to clean that off of there and then we can put our lid back on the next time but it's going to be difficult to get that lid off there a little bit every time because you've got that creosote oil built up around the edge of that tin lid so remember that as well like I said we've got a little bit of oil we could get out of there but I'd be more inclined to use that on something right away like an axe handle or something like that I would take my axe and right away you know I would just start wiping out on my axe how's it protected and just wipe that stuff out of there and use it up because that's pretty much tar at the bottom of that not so much a little bit more tar where it's gotten really thick but this works really really good as I protect it as well as a stain for your axe handle just wipe all that off there with our thumb and get it on there and we'll just work it into our axe handle and it'll give us a really good protect it it's also kind of sticky so it gives you a real good grip on your handle as well just rub it in there you can see what that looks like on my axe handle all right folks one Dave Canterbury with path fire school I appreciate you joining me out here today for this video on how to extract birch oil from birch bark again you know really good protectant for any of your wooden handle objects as well as being good medicinally and sucked asylum so it's very good for keeping the bugs off you as well and that's going to stain your skin a little bit it's going to stay in brown like that and it's going to stay that color my fair warned you to stay that way for awhile so again it's also good stain if you're trying to stain some type of tool gamble or something as well as protected at the same time you can rub that a will in there and do that keeping a small bottle of this stuff in your kit it's always going to be good for a lot of things I was supposed to leave for Missouri's afternoon for flintlock hog hunt for hunt Channel TV the weather has kind of given us a fit looks like we're talking about solid thunderstorms and rain over the next four or five days so my co-producer co-owner of three seas LLC also talking about postponing that hunt costly put it off for a few weeks that happens I'll be around then I will try to get some more videos

up to this channel this week if that happens rain or shine I also put a video up this morning on Pathfinder TV and set it to free so you can go watch it for free right now in Pathfinder TV at our Pathfinder TV YouTube channel on working through the variables to make a bow-drill fire in the rain basically a rain shower off and on throughout the day and we work through the variables to make a bow-drill fire in that ring I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for our school for our family for our business for everyone affiliated with the Pathfinder school and sup reliance Outfitters and I'll be back to another video

as soon as I can thanks guys [Music]

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