Fatwood questions

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hung-solo

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I have read the fatwood is the center part of a pine tree that is naturally resin soaked and very flamable. now the pics i have seen of what you guys call "fatwood" doesnt look like pine to me. can i get some folks to clarify this please? sounds silly i know but i do not know much about fatwood. thanks in advance. what other wood for fire is also known as fatwood?
 
It's usually pine. It's not necessarily the center of the tree. It is any part that gets supersaturated with pitch after a catastrophic injury.

The reason it doesn't look like pine to you is probably because you aren't used to seeing pine saturated with pitch.
 
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Some people call it lightered wood. The next time you go for a walk and see some old stumps give them a kick if they are still solid as a rock, split a piece off and smell it, if it is a rich orange color and smells strongly of pine you've found it.

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From my studies most fatwood occurs when a pine tree dies in an upright position. The resin settles to the lower areas and gets really concentrated. Over time the upper and outer areas weather away leaving the area super concentrated with pitch behind because it won't absorb water and won't rot. The best fatwood I find is in old root sections under ground with barely any above ground signs of the tree that once stood there. The good stuff will smell very strongly or turpentine, be very glossy, take a spark easily and a flame even more easily, and will produce a lot of liquid pitch as it burns like the liquid fat rendered from roasting meats, hence (I think) the name "fatwood" in some places, "light-wood", "rich-pine", "lighter-pine", and probably a few other colloquial names in other places.
 
August West said:
Some people call it lightered wood. The next time you go for a walk and see some old stumps give them a kick if they are still solid as a rock, split a piece off and smell it, if it is a rich orange color and smells strongly of pine you've found it.

Picture713.jpg
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cool.. thanks guys..

where in NC you from? single shot New England ? 20 ga?
 
It doesn't have to be the center, it could be just under the bark on one side. You really have to tear a stump apart to find it. All the dead pine and pine stumps that I went through had at least a tiny amount; enough to start a camp fire.

You're right, though, it doesn't look like pine. I think it sort of looks like amber.
 
August West said:
Fayetteville. Yes and yes.

Light and shoots where I point it, what more can you ask for. :D Chris
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ahh you are surrounded by pines then. agreed on the NE single shot. my first gun was a NE .410 sill use it and i will pass it on to my kids whenever i have any



-- would cedar work as well? the pic of yours looks like cedar not pine but of course i could be wrong

and again guys thanks. this is good info
 
hung-solo said:
ahh you are surrounded by pines then. agreed on the NE single shot. my first gun was a NE .410 sill use it and i will pass it on to my kids whenever i have any



-- would cedar work as well? the pic of yours looks like cedar not pine but of course i could be wrong

and again guys thanks. this is good info
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Where are you?

Not cedar but I can see how you would think it is from the pic, the wood is that color from being so heavy with sap, almost like amber. Chris
 
my dad called it richpine. the pic above was a good photo of it for color ect. on the ground it would appear to be rotten..exterior will be lite color and crumbly dry. old cut overs in a national forest would be a good place to look..some place that was logged 30 years ago would most likely have stumps of it like MistWalker described.
 
I can find it in the woods by following my nose. It smells just like turpentine to me.
 
my sister keeps some pieces of lighter wood in the house. get a little bit of a pine smell all the time. :thumbup:
 
Went camping up in Hickory, NC a couple of weeks ago with 2 friends. Before we went, I busted up a big lightered stump and had a lot of fatwood with me, I was car camping so could bring what I want. First night was cold probably down to the 20s. After setting up camp me and one of the guys jumped in the truck to go fill up a water container. When we were driving back I saw the fire from about a mile away, seems the other guy decided to light the fire and had no experience with fatwood. He started with 4 or 5 pieces of fatwood thick as my wrist and a foot long, flames were probably going 10 feet in the air giving off thick black smoke. He had a pretty sheepish look on his face when we pulled up. Chris
 
I just found this the other day. It was my first find of quality fatwood. I have looked a few times before, but only found rotten stumps. This was a standing dead tree, with bark still on the bottom part of the tree, most of the bark gone in the upper parts. The resin was concentrated on one side only, and only an inch or so thick on that side. The other side of the tree was a little soft and decomposed.

Some types of pine are more likley to produce fatwood than others. I have not tried looking at the roots of old dead stumps.

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Even when you know exactly what to expect it can some times still catch you by surprise.I found this one earlier this year. At first it just looks like a rotten tree across the trail


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but a closer look shows that parts of it are indeed very hard.

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Look closely and you will see the wear pattern that gives fatwood away.

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It was once a large Pine tree.

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While the outer section is very soft and "punky" there is very solid interior consistently about 3 inches / 8 cm below the surface. The knife consistently bottomed out hitting a very hard interior. That is a sliver of the fatwood I got from one of the limbs that I stuck in the outer surface and lit.


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Found this stump while out hiking. First glance, nothing special, but I tend to investigate stuff like this with a quick scrape of the knife. Yielded a good amount of quality fat wood.


 
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mistwalker said:
From my studies most fatwood occurs when a pine tree dies in an upright position. The resin settles to the lower areas and gets really concentrated. Over time the upper and outer areas weather away leaving the area super concentrated with pitch behind because it won't absorb water and won't rot. The best fatwood I find is in old root sections under ground with barely any above ground signs of the tree that once stood there. The good stuff will smell very strongly or turpentine, be very glossy, take a spark easily and a flame even more easily, and will produce a lot of liquid pitch as it burns like the liquid fat rendered from roasting meats, hence (I think) the name "fatwood" in some places, "light-wood", "rich-pine", "lighter-pine", and probably a few other colloquial names in other places.
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We called fatwood pitch or pitch wood in New Mexico. I've heard greasewood as well.
 
Back home in the Philippines it is called "Salin" pronounced as sahling, with a silent emphasis on the ng. The really juicy fat wood that's so fat its dripping is chewed on by some folks, just the sap, not the wood.... I tried it and it tastes like how gum tastes after you've chewed out all the sugars and flavors but with a hint of life;p Cant wait to go back and get that sweet sweet smell of some really fat fatwood.
 
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