Making Pine Pitch Firelighters :: 100% natural and foraged
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- I spent Saturday in the woods attempting to make firelighters out of pine pitch glue and the shavings from a recent batch of spoons I've been whittling.
It was one of those days of directionless tinkering that seems like a massive waste of time when you describe it to someone else but that, at the time and looking back, was a day well spent. In the woods, a little fire, the smell of woodsmoke and pine resin. What more could you ask for?
0:00 Intro
1:42 Waffle
6:50 Trying it out
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Wonderful. The cycling anthropologist. Congrats.
That's probably stretching it a bit far but I thank you for the sentiment 😉
Great waffle as always 👍
I'm glad you enjoy it. I missed having a good waffle to camera.
Has anyone ever said … and I mean this in an endearing way … how Alan Partridge you are?! You’re brilliant and I love you to bits! So engaging and into what you do - keep it up 👍
The comparison has been made before yes. I'm a fan of the Partridge so I choose to take it as a compliment 😉
I'm glad if I'm a tenth as entertaining as he is. Thanks for watching, I'm glad you enjoy it!
@@JethroJessop it was meant as a compliment - I’m a huge fan of his too. Just finished reading Nomad.
@@christrower Ive not read it. Heard its good though. Is it worth adding to the list
@@JethroJessop it’s really funny as I found myself reading it with his voice in my mind. My only criticism would have been that I’d wished he’d spent more time talking about the walk and the characters he encountered - he spent a lot of time digressing. Still funny and worth the read though
@@christrower then it will go on the list. Though I don't read much anymore so it may stay there for some time
What a lovely video. Thanks!
Thank you for watching. I'm glad you enjoyed it 😀
some hippie on a bicycle trying to smoke a lump of hash. after he gets it smokin tells us its rabbit shite. lol
Just pine resin officer, absolutely nothing shady going on in these here woods!
That nano Ti burner is luring me in again. I have no real need for it, but it is a cracking little thing. Thanks for the vid Jethro, it was fun.
It is a really great little piece of kit. It is a luxury for sure but it gets a lot of use and will last me forever hopefully.
Thanks for watching, I'm glad you enjoyed it
Cheers
My pleasure 😀
Thanks for the video. Just what I needed to wake up to this morning, back to work after 10 days off
I'm glad I was able to ease the transition back to real life 😉
Try making some glue from silver birch bark, it's full of it, but it needs to be cooked anaerobic.
One day maybe. It requires a bit more prep and some equipment and i am lazy 😉
The bark can also be made into kolrosing powder for decorating wooden items (not sure of the exact technique).
I'd also like to try tapping a birch for the sap as that can be made into glue and also drunk.
So many projects, so little time!
Fascinating. I'd love to see another video. The 100 percent natural aspect is very interesting. Cheers.
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
I may well come back to this idea in the future. Fire lighting is a skill I would like to build up so there may be some videos in there too.
I find strapping a spare 5 litre tankard of kerosene to the front forks really helps to get the initial flames going.. Also, you’re supposed to cook kebabs over an open flame!
Of course I did this. But I'm not going to have that in shot!
That would ruin the illusion that I'm a rugged bush craft master battling the elements with only a knife and my rugged good looks 😉
It’s good to see you back on top form-who doesn’t love a waffle
It will be interesting to see. If this one gets enough views then the data will show how many people use the chapter markers and skip to the good bits 😉
Welcome back!!
In addition to pine pitch, keep your eyes peeled for fallen pines. Typically the base of a dead pine tree gathers the resins, resulting in something called fatwood. Fatwood is ideal for starting fires. You can chop it down to several small pieces around 4" long and bag it for future use. Look for branches near the base of the trunk as they are likely to contain the fatwood. What to look for: It tends to appear as a yellow amber to a deep earth orange color.
I've come across fatwood before but never found it in the wild.
We don't get a lot of pines around here and I've never mounted a proper search when I've been in piney places.
The only reason I have resin is because I cycled past some trees in Wales that had been damaged by forestry machinery and were oozing on a large scale.
@@JethroJessop Sap is definitely a good starter. The nice thing about fatwood is that if you do find it, you can gather a larger volume of it.
Usually when a tree dies, the top stays a bit wet from the weather and the center goes dry as the resins drain to the bottom of the tree. It's probably harder to spot fatwood in rainy climates as well since it's less likely to concentrate if the dead standing stays soaked. Usually that escalates the fall of the tree. The trees do need some time after they die for dry conditions and gravity to concentrate the resin.
@@peppermintpig974 its one of those things that i always keep half an eye out for but fire lighting has never been something I spent a lot of time on. If conditions are bad then i don't bother, if they are good then tinder and firelighters aren't important.
I do want to get into it a bit more though, maybe try the bow drill thing again and make a proper flint and steel.
Just need to find the time 😉
No1 Bloke
Well thank you 😀
Could you do a video of how you made these from scratch please? I’d def be interested in doing something similar 😊
I need to find a good load of pine resin first but I will film it next time.
There are lots of resources out there if you want to dig in though. Just search for pine pitch glue and you'll find different recipes and methods. It's an interesting subject.
Jethro, I wonder if instead of melting the Pine Tar directly over a flame (risky) you could crumble it into a tin and place the tin in boiling water? Pour the resulting gloop and shavings into Refrigerator ice cube trays and sell the resulting fire starters.
Give them a good commercial name... "Jethro's Flaming Bunny Cubes" perhaps...😂
I don't know what the melting point is but it could work.
I can't imagine being able to make these in a way that they were worth selling. They would have to be so expensive to make it worthwhile that no one would buy them.
I'll probably try doing it again if I find a good resin harvest though
Lying in bed with Covid (who knew that was still a thing) and binge watching a load of your videos. Great videos, but there does seem to be a theme, re the wind. Perhaps you could do the bikepacking community a service and post which direction you are planning to ride ….. so we can all go the other way 😂 Keep up the good work
Hope the COVID is clearing. It really is still a thing and seems to be having a little resurgence at the moment.
Definitely, wind is a theme!
It is getting worse all the time and I don't think this is just me getting weaker 😉
Climate change is all about having more energy in the system so I guess it makes sense that there will be more wind which sucks for cyclists.
Time to take up kite surfing instead perhaps?
“ so Mr Jessop your telling me they’re home made fire lighters ,not grade A Moroccan red”
Absolutely officer. Firelighters, as far as the eye can see 😬
This was a beautiful video, thank you Jethro! Being a scared loser myself, please tell me how you can trust that you're not going to burn down the area when lighting a fire in the middle of all those dead dry leaves? (As you may guess I've never made a fire anywhere in nature so ...an absolute beginner in this theme!)
Very sensible questions!
In this instance, everything was pretty wet and I couldn't have started a wild fire if I'd tried 😉
In drier conditions you scrape a patch of clear soil to burn on and try to use fuel that doesn't create lots of floating embers - good, dry, decent sized wood. Make sure that everything is 100% extinguished before you leave.
If it is really dry and there is any risk at all then just don't light fires. I've never been in a situation where a fire wasn't a luxury so I'd always err on the side of caution and skip it.
Interesting little post, thanks 4that Jethro. Enjoyed this experiment, though it did make me laugh out loud when you commented that using dryer lint as a fire starter was disgusting, all the while touching and playing around with sh*t on a stick 🤣 Anyway, have you tried candlewax and wood shavings made in an ice cube tray?
Take care Jethro 😊
It was the candle wax ice cube idea that originally made me think of doing this.
The dryer lint comment was more about being environmentally unpleasant. Starting a fire with what is going to mostly plastic doesn't seem cool and would (assume) not smell great?
Dry rabbit poo isn't really unpleasant at all. It's basically powdered grass. I wouldn't eat it by the handful or anything 😉 but it is pretty inoffensive
That’s it, I’m investing my life savings in your tree goo… now make a god dam spear!
It's on my list! A nice spear thrower as well.
I will repay your wise investment with a share of every mammoth I bring down
I'm wondering where I could find a significant sum of rabbit poo 🤔
There are loads of warrens around here so that was the easy part.
Can also use deer, elk, goat, any of those grass eating, pellet pooing beasts. It's just dry, fibrous material as far as I know.
You could probably use punk wood or other plant matter as well if it was dry enough and ground up small
Fun, but I think you've overworked it. Look at th-cam.com/users/shortsza07pFtoX50?si=QJVwamdQg7JoKuFj for just how well the shavings of wood from where a pine tree has been injured, will burn. Pieces from a dead pine tree stump can be even better. Just gather some sticks of tarwood (the Americans seem to call it fatwood) and wrap them in your kit, cut some shavings when you want to make a fire and hit them with your sparker.
There aren't enough pine trees in my part of the world to make fatwood a common find sadly.
I spotted the resin from the saddle while cycling in Wales which is the only reason I had it and had to do something with it.
For simplicity I usually use birch bark. It's easier to find around here and it takes a spark even in less than perfect conditions. It's what I used to light the fire in this video.
I definitely overworked a simple idea but it was a fun experiment 😀
I understand. Seeing large clumps of resin on live trees is fairly uncommon here. As I said in my comment to the fatwood clip I linked, my father was a forester and any driver being so clumsy/careless/incompetent as to damage living trees would have received some pretty harsh words - damage like that reduces the value of the tree when harvest time does come.
@@TorstenLif Not that common here really. In pine forest you occasionally see little dribbles of resin but a quantity worth harvesting is rare.
I might do a fatwood mission video. There are some areas of pine forest within cycling distance so perhaps its time to put in the effort and see what is out there. They are all quite intensively managed though so not sure what the pickings would be like.
@@JethroJessopThe real treasure trove is an entire tree stump of fatwood. I don't know the exact details of why some stumps become so saturated with resin, because it doesn't seem to happen to all of them. What you want to look for is the stump of a pine that was cut down quite some time ago (years!) but still hasn't decayed much. The resin is resistant to rot so those stumps can last fairly long.
Or do like the guy in the "Foraging for fatwood" video and look for pine trees that have fallen (you had some storms last year, didn't you?) and try for the stumps of branches that had broken off while the tree still stood upright.
@@TorstenLif i will keep my eyes peeled!
We have had some storms recently and a lot of trees have come down so I'll see what I might stumble across while I'm out and about.
Doubt I'll try to strap an entire stump to the bike but a few sticks would be nice to find!
Disgusting says the guy wearing modern clothes but dryer lint is Disgusting? But you burn rabbit droppings?
I have nothing against modern clothing, I just assume that starting a fire with plastic fluff is going to smell a lot worse than starting one with pine resin.
Disgusting was probably a rather strong word but that's my fault for not scripting these videos 😉
Damp wood, the bane of fire making here in Finland. Thank goodness for birch bark.