fatwood....yip i have 40 lbs

langston302

langston302

Joined
Apr 25, 2007
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there is alot of talk about how good fatwood is...and after reading about how well alot of fellas said it works i went to look for it. i went to walmart and found a 1lb bag for 5 bucks..i went to rei and found a few sticks for the same price...and it got me wondering...its wood right...with sap in it...why so expensive??
so one day i am at ace harware " the helpful place":D, and i got into the barbque section just looking around and find 4 pound bags of fatwood for 5.99....needless to say i bought ten bags...i dont want to run out while practicing with it..
i may be doing this all wrong here...but i swear i have heard it will take a spark from a ferro rod...
if it does i cant get it to work.
but once i get it lit using a very small peice of pj cotton and i mean real small like a teeny pinch it can get one hell of a huge fire going...and it smells good too.
 
wow, I am envious of your large supply. Any I have never actually used fatwood with my ferro rod, but I would assume you need fine shavings of it to light. Just take a knife and scrape it along the fatwood and collect the shavings on a piece of paper or rock or something. Since the stuff is so flammable it probably does not have to be that fine, but as always, the finer the shavings the better the chance of lighting them are. When I make shavings out of birch barch, I essentially have it looking like saw dust before I put a spark to it.
 
yeah, its not the usual slicing to get curls and such as it is to scrape and get powder, which will light.
in the woods, a rock would probably function nicely as sandpaper also.
 
40#'s should last quite a while! I use fatwood all the time,and as others have said just scrape it like you would magnesium, the back of a sak saw works well, as does a sharp flake of stone or glass. I don't use my knife on magnesium, but fatwood dosen't seem to be to rough on the edge.
 
I've gotten fatwood curls to light using a fire steel. Admittedly it was not easy. I will have to give the dust method a try. Sounds like it will be much easier.
 
I have had luck lighting fatwood shavings made by using a large carpenter's pencil sharpener on a thin piece of fatwood.
 
Has anyone else confirmed 5 lb. bags of fatwood at Ace? I may check it out tomorrow at my local store.
 
I'll have to check again, but I know I saw some at OSH(Orchard Supply Hardware) for something like $3.00. Can't remember how much quantity, but I want to say it was somewhere like a couple of pounds at least. If I remember I check tomorrow, and report back. No Aces by me unfortunately.
 
I found a few old stumps around my place (results of logging a couple of years ago) and have been collect fat wood since. Even a small piece will keep a flame long enough to get any fire going.
 
Has anyone else confirmed 5 lb. bags of fatwood at Ace?
Click to expand...

I've seen 5 lb boxes of fatwood at Ace.

They also sell 2 lb. boxes for about $5.00. That's what I buy. Fatwood varries in quality. The smaller container has lighter wood that looks richer in resin to me.

I may be wrong about this. I haven't used wood from the 5 lb. bundles to contrast and compare.
 
Home Depot home improvement stores have 5lb bags for $5.95 also. I was just there this morning. 5lbs. goes a long way. Also picked up Duraflame Fat wood at the supermarket. 2lbs for $3.49. the Duraflame stuff was much better quality. Very high resin content.

Paul
 
You could google Maya Sticks or Maya Wood.

It is from a Central American pine and has a resin content of ~80%. Much more than the pine in the US.

The Swedish Fire steels used (maybe still do), to come with a chunk drilled for a key chain.

A little goes a long way as all you have to do is pretty much scrape the side to get a pile of almost pure resin that takes a spark very easily. It is also waterproof because of the high resin content.

A small piece along with your firesteel and you are GTG for many lights.

A bit more expensive, but I've been using the same package for close to 5 years.

I use the Wallyworld/Ace stuff a stick or 2 at the time for getting regular fires started.

Rob
 
I've got a big old stump of it at my shop that me and my son found last weekend. I guess I'm lucky because here in North Carolina it is very easy to find an old pine stump in the woods. We call it Lighter Knot.

Chad
 
Tried my local Ace today. No luck. They just had the log starters for fireplaces.

There's another Ace in town though. I'll give it a shot when I'm down that way.
 
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