Compare fatwood to white birch bark

jimh0220

jimh0220

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Apr 15, 2008
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Anyone ever tried a comparison. I was lucky to get some firewood this year that was white birch. Holy smokes! (pun intended) I never knew the burning power in the bark! I see a lot about fatwood here. How do they compare?
 
6 one way, half a dozen the other. I think I like birch bark a little better for tinder for the dust like scrapings easily made. I like fatwood to make candles with.
 
I think fatwood works a little better when it's wet than the white birch bark does. Dry, they are both great...

JGON
 
We have a saying in Finland which roughly translates as "birch bark for wind, fatwood for rain".
 
Ive widely used both! Birchbark takes more prep work to take a spark, but at the same time you can gather lots of it very easily, it burns hot too... Fatwood is awesome if you have it..hard to find under 3-5ft of snow though....you can always scrape resin from the scars on evergreens but its not the same.

You might be in a place where you have no birch trees, or in a place with no evergreens, but if both were available to you i would gather whatever i could find the fastest..remember though, the hardest thing about fatwood is locating it... it is weatherproof...birchbark is easy to fi nd, but spoils when wet..
 
I've got lots of birch in my neck of the woods so it's pretty easy to locate a tree and scrape some bark off. In dry conditions, the papery scrapings take a spark well and the thicker pieces of bark make great small kindling when you need it. Maybe I'm just a fatwood n00b but it's much easier for me to quickly locate a birch tree and prep a fire, especially at night, than it is to root around for fatwood. I've never tried to start a fire using just birch in very wet conditions but that is also why I carry a bit of fatwood with me, just in case. I'm thinking I should conduct a rainy-day experiment. :D
I suppose what I'm trying to say is that both are extremely valuable, neither better than the other.
 
My dad swears by Silver birch bark but as it's not available where I live I tend to rely on Fatwood. Don't forget to use the resin that the trees bleed from wounds to seal them. Mix that up with any other tinder such as fluffed up bark or old mans beard etc and you greatly increase the burn time !
 
Birch bark burns better,but from my experience it needs to be dry so it can be lighted with fire steel.Fatwood burns even when wet :)
 
In the woods that i've been in when needing to make a fire, there has ALWAYS been either birch bark or those fine dead softwood branches after the needles have fallen off. Either makes great tinder.

I haven't any experience to relate to fatwood though.

White birch bark when peeled from the trunk, always burned well, whether it was dry or raining.

Peter
 
When ever I am hiking I am always on the look out for natural tinder even if I don't plan on starting a fire. Birchbark is my favorite by far. When it is raining I take the collected bark and wrap it in my dry bandana and tuck it between my undershirt and sweater. It doesn't take long at all to dry birchbark.
 
With white birch bark when you have it you pretty much have it in abundance and it is easily spotted. Back in PA I use it with my US Army canteen cup stove to do all my cooking. I just keep shoving curls in as needed.
 
HawGorn said:
We have a saying in Finland which roughly translates as "birch bark for wind, fatwood for rain".
Click to expand...

I like that quote!

Birch bark is certainly the easier of the two to spot and harvest when they are both available, but fatwood is nicer to store for later use without getting little flaky dust particles all over your pack. I'll use either if available, although both are rare for my area. So I tend to use different types of flash tinder from prairie plants instead and mix that with dried weed stalks and wood shavings. Use what ya got!
 
HawGorn said:
We have a saying in Finland which roughly translates as "birch bark for wind, fatwood for rain".
Click to expand...

This seems to be the popular opinion.

I live in northern NY and have never used fatwood. Last week, a local hardware store had 3lb. boxes of fatwood sticks on sale for $3.98, so I couldn't help but buy one. After all, it seems every other post on W&SS at least refers to fatwood. ;)

I put a couple of sticks in each of my daypacks and backpacks and a few in the sack for my Ghillie Kettle. After I finished, I thought, "Hey... I never even tried lighting some!"

I went to the kitchen sink and scraped a small pile of shavings from one of the darker, "stickier" looking sticks. I got a big mischmetal rod and hacksaw blade scraper from my daypack and got down to it. After sending several groups of molten metal blobs rolling around in the sink, I finally got ignition. Some of the shavings in the little pile burned, but some were left unburned. What did burn burned somewhat meekly; nothing noticeably different from regular wood shavings.

I took a different stick and tried again. Same results. The unburned shavings were the ones that were dampened from a small drop of water in the sink bottom.

Maybe after all the reading about fatwood, I was expecting too much. At this point, I'm much more impressed with birchbark, but which I've never experimented with in my sink; I've only used it outside in actual field conditions with nothing but success.

Is my Dura-Flame brand fatwood substandard? Am I expecting too much? Do I need to travel to the South and carefully collect my own "premium grade" fatwood?

:)

Stay sharp,
desmobob
 
Desmobob,

Just like using birchbark, you need to scrape the fatwood into a powder and ignite that. Then you carve off splinters of it and feed it to the flame. Shavings of fatwood generally don't ignite that well. But if you scrape the corner of the fatwood using your edge perpendicular to the surface, you generate a sticky yellow fluffy like powder. That stuff will ignite very readily and stay lit for a good bit of time.
 
kgd said:
Desmobob,

Just like using birchbark, you need to scrape the fatwood into a powder and ignite that. Then you carve off splinters of it and feed it to the flame. Shavings of fatwood generally don't ignite that well. But if you scrape the corner of the fatwood using your edge perpendicular to the surface, you generate a sticky yellow fluffy like powder. That stuff will ignite very readily and stay lit for a good bit of time.
Click to expand...

Thanks kgd.

I see... it WASN'T a bad batch of commercial fatwood, or too-high expectations. It was plain old operator error. I did it wrong. :rolleyes:

After all the fatwood posts on this forum, I figured the stuff would go up like a friggin' atomic bomb. I was wondering if I should be wearing welding goggles and a Nomex suit when I tried it out, and maybe pre-dial the fire department, just in case they'd need to scramble a water-bomber to fly over and drop a few tons of fire suppressent on my house....

I'll just save the rest of the fatwood for emergency use. ;)

Actually, I'm looking forward to trying it again.

Stay sharp,
desmobob
 
FATWOOD, in a 40 KM an hour wind. Nuff said.


click to play


5 minutes later, with wet wood (sticks from the ground) piled on:

click to play
 
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I'll take you up on that bushy! BUT you and I both know in the conditions of your fatwood burning demonstration the birchbark will blow away and burn out..

BTW did you see my latest score???

the post is "late fall/early winter hiking pics"
 
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