Bushcraft Skills | Make your own Fat wood

Description

In this video Fozz from Forrester Bushcraft demonstrates how to make your own Fat Wood. the process is quite simple but does require you to source some pine resin before starting the process.

The fat wood makes the act of fire lighting much much easier and provides you with a Guaranteed source of dry highly flammable wood when you arrive at camp.

Tags: YouTube Editor,Fatwood,Wood (Visual Art Medium),Bushcraft,Survival,Fire lighting,How-to (Website Category),DIY,Camping

Video Transcription

alright guys won't let me show you today is how to make your own homemade fatwood okay if you don't fight one is basically just wood which is soaked in pine resin now it's naturally-occurring you can collect some origin a video on how to collect pine nuts which is fat wood and you can buy fat whereas well one of the things I've seen recently a lot of place is this tinder or rope stuff by light my fire it's actually really good stuff you can take shavings off it to get your fire going it burns really hot and really slow but this retails at about five pound ninety nine or four pounds names down something like that and probably that is it costs you money no problem with buying it but if you can make your own it's absolutely free to make all your needs a little bit of fire some tools to collect your wood which will go through the process off in a minute and some pre collected pine resin which I have in this top here which are pre collected I'm not collectible today if you want to see a video on how to find this I do actually have one I'll put a little bit the link for that for you so let's have a look at how to actually make this fat wood so the first thing I need to go and collect while I'm out in the field is I need some nice dry piece of water I'm gonna make it in this tin so they need to be this size so there is gonna be a bit of work involved in actually processing this down I'm just going to use a saw and knife process it so if you'd like to come with me I've spied a perfect tree I'm just going to took a couple of twigs on the fire just to keep that going I don't need a blazing fire fish you can do it on the coals with camp fire but I'm going to be doing it on my bush box because where we are we're not allowed a ground fire so just keep that going and if you would like to come with me I'll just grab my saw and my knife no knife work over here so around we've got a fallin March tree here the reason I've chosen this one is I can see all the way to the top that it's completely dead and it's standing its up off the ground so it's going to be dry all the way through so I need to do is cut this into sections about this much and then soak that in the pine resin I'll show you the differences between the woman so and when it's soaked in the resin some screens will fall this office with this so I'm looking for a section doesn't have many knots in it there not many brands come out just to make the actual splitting process of this I set this back over to fire and we'll process it down further over there just using a knife and saw again just put it off this is quite difficult cuz my wrist is still bad

I go in they say I'm not give them a fire roaring I just need to keep it hot because it just needs to be hot enough to burn the resin which we'll talk a little bit more in a bit you just need to be careful not to burn yeah what's the word for it the fireball substances out the resin and I think it's got like it's got something really flammable in any way so what I'm going to do first is I'm going to measure my turn I'm actually a wood slightly shortened so it's got a bit of space to move around in there so I'm gonna make a mark on the wood just here that wood is dry through a cut the last section this off fire sorry guys my wrist is still very bad and either caught our towel up day but I broke my wrist how about it's making things really awkward so that section is now slightly smaller than the tin that's going to go into and I've deliberately cut an extra piece for use with battling so I use the top of my tent to help with my buttoning of this put this all away put my tent wait to be used nice that's gonna be a bit awkward to button this because the ground is really soft I haven't you got a refirm surface to work to work on but I'll still manage it now when you're battening you want to make sure that you hit the center of the blade what I'm trying it's I'm it's pretty difficult to do but I'm trying to avoid actually breaking my blade because I want to be putting a lot of stress on this to do this as I said it's quite difficult to have a firm surface to work on

let's try site top 10 shall we the best thing to do this on it's kind of a log of something that there's no logs in this area then start to split this tell you what adapt to what you've got is there's a bit of a tree girl things aren't always perfect to start with just adapt to what you've got if something isn't working find a new way to do it leave that on to that tweet that's way better so you can see that split really nicely down the center there it's still too thick so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna split this into small pieces now so this is kind of the size of piece that I'm after so you can see just from that small section I'm actually gonna get a fair amount of fat wood for this we'll take the bark off the box no use to me most that I'll come off as it splits anyway split a bit more fat more that will come off whoops

more pieces best thing for battling is probably good will probably would have been a slightly larger knife but no matter last piece battling its in this way as well he's really good way getting really good firewood remember split wood always burns better then round wood and you can get quite a substantial about a firewood really quickly through using this method so that should be enough for me for now so the next thing to do is to reheat this fire get the fire going nice and hot again then put the pine resin and get that melted down and give it a soak okay so I've got a decent heat coming off this fine out it's not too hot the reason for that is if it's too hot it's going to actually ignite the burnt sorry the melted pine resin that I'm going to put pop into this too now so I've got the pine resin in this little kind of tin on its own I'm gonna pick out some of the bits that don't have many little inclusions in them there's actually going to be pretty much most of it up into the hole of pine resin here and hurt from the tree I actually find this unused garden I didn't actually find in the forest surprisingly and to melt all this down you work with what you've got so got the pine resin just in the tin here like that I pop this on the top of my bush box and then get it melted down it should melt pretty quickly I mean it's pretty it's pretty easy to melt this stuff a little bit more heat in there and that start to melt up pretty quickly and I've got all my stuff ready to go and hopefully that'll start to melt reasonably quick and I just need a little bit of a stick to kind of mess around in there with because I stick in my hands and burning hot pine resin does that would be a bad idea it started to get sticky and Melfi and the need to be really careful because it started to melt slowly we go cooking so as I said you can do this on the coals your fire or whatever but I've chosen to a lot of buffed rocks as I said we're not actually a lot of ground fire in this area so there's a lot of ash around here but I haven't burnt the ground at or anything like that and we just give that a minute to start melting you can see it it started to melt already could possibly do with just a tad more heat actually let's give this a bit of don't draw a bit more oxygen through the box let's go in hopefully you can't make out in the camera that it start to melt the that's just a case of watching them making sure you can get too hot a similar method with this pine resin can be used to actually boil this down and take all the flammable substances out of it and to turn it into like a really really decent glue actually really super glue just a bit extra the whole light and I can get more in a pine forest so yeah just face this it's really cooking I can see it start to melt off it smells really good as well well I think so anyway Dave doesn't agree smells alright just when we get big when you get a really is really strong stomach isn't it yeah smells bad pressure like air freshener yes I like a new car still pivots in there so I need to get this to pretty much entirely liquid and then once it's completely liquid I will then soak my pieces of wood in there I'm going to keep one piece of wood side just to demonstrate how well this stuff works how you can't like enjoy that small adult oh it smells really good

said some of those some inclusions or stuff in there but that's the nature of it well with what you've got over there like a Peter now almost you see it's just I thought whether you can tell by the way I'm moving it you can see it's really liquidy now yeah can you see just this is the point where you need to be really careful of igniting ignited so this is pretty much ready to go now so there's a store couple of lumps and they'll just push them off to one side and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my slithers of wood that I've got and I'm gonna let these soak in this for a little while because what will happen is we dry wood so it'll actually absorb some of this put this resin it's just very hot working although the stuff that had the really orange flames you can see they're actually the Pyro's and I just chucked in it's really hot working there's a good job I have like asbestos hands

so we just really let that soak in with it being hot as well that'll help the water to actually absorb some of this stuff it also waterproofs it as well and which is good it makes really good tinder and you can keep this in your fire kit it's really bubbling and boiling away there really carry stuff see if you don't know how to to identify and collect your pine resin for this thing I'll learn I'll put the link up again I think I've all you've done it earlier in the video as well flames there and the next thing to do is I need to just find some there's a properties upon just a couple of sticks or do me yup spider and lift these out and then let them dry and then I'll do a quick demonstration how easily they take so that should be good and soaked in now so I'm gonna do is gonna pop this little shot so I don't spill it lift the whole tin off place these two here I'm gonna lift my sticks out let those dry and sit still pulling away it's still really hot in there cool actually watch out that's really sticky when it's ER

when it's still wet so if give them about five minutes to dry and then we'll come back to you sugar okay so these license right now any stickiness that was in them as gone you see I've got a bit of stuff stuck to this one this one I dropped but it's not it's not a major issue just looks a little bit untidy so what will really quickly do now is just demonstrate how easily this takes a play so I've got a piece of the kind of untreated fat wood here the same thickness and I'm gonna leave them up like this I'll do the other way so you can see it a little better we could quickly show you how easy this takes the spot now it takes the flame now okay I'm going to use just a normal click you later okay it's going I'm gonna start by trying to light the normal piece so it should light in theory it takes a minute to get it going see that it's just not taking very well at all starting to end up a little bit but we're struggling there with that you've got a bit of a flame on that and that'll burn out really quickly say see there's not much flame there a little bit of Ember a little bit of flame on it but we move to the slightly darker one which is the one that sculpted in the residence so it's from the resin in it without the way so I don't burn myself this will burn really easily really quickly okay so as soon as that resin heats up it really burns really nicely and that'll burn for quite a while and that's a really hot really dark flame she's really nice so yeah it's an excellent this is an excellent little thing for in your kit kind of burns like a candle you can see it's really going now and then to put it out all I'm gonna do is give it a good blow and how it goes and I can still use the rest of it I want to so yeah really really useful stuff really simple to do the evening I find the stuff you've got the the the stuff they're ready for you and once they're dry as well although stickiness from them goes it just feels like toffee there's almost like it's coating glass actually it's really nice stuff so they're gonna go into my and my fire kit is just a kind of sort of thing that absolutely fantastic and they work even when they're wet and in fact though I'll just give a quick demonstration of it when it's a little bit wet so here

so the resin actually walked proofs the stuff so just pop a little water on that see the water pretty much as rooms off it actually so they don't really get that wet and then again it's a little bit more with the dampness well there you go you can see it going already and that is immediately after have to put water on it sir it's good stuff and if you can't get a fire going with that your fire lighting technique seriously need some work it's really good stuff so there you go I hope that's been useful to you guys please go out and give this a go for it cause it's completely natural the whole Lots biodegradable you can find in any pine forest or the resin it's really good so as always thank you all for watching please do subscribe any feedback or comments to be great and then thanks the guys over at black owl outdoors for giving me this idea