What is lighter wood?

[mtnman]

I usually keep a little pine here to split and use as kindlin for starting a fire.
I recently had some pine I was spliting up and it was full of "Lighter wood".
It is like hard sap or something and burns like a torch.
What causes "lighter wood" which may not be the right name?

Do you find it in other kinds of trees other than pine?

How can you tell if a tree has "lighter wood" in it?
mtnman

[Buck]

Around here they call it "rich lighter". It is basically just heartwood from pine. I have never seen it in any other species around here in La. 

[mtnman]

I forgot to mention, it is real heavy too.
It splits easy.
Does it lose its fuel over time?
I would hate to see what would happen if you put too much of this in a wood stove!
mtnman

[Raider Bill]

We call id lighter knot or fat wood. I use slivers to start a fire with.

[ely]

pine knots is what we call it here, and i never let any leave my house unless it is split into small slivers.

you have never seen a chimney fire until someone throws in that stick of "firewood"

[Buck]

mtnman, I strongly suggest you use that stuff in small amounts. We vacated the house one time when a pine knot got put in the stove by mistake.

Yes its heavy. And no it doesn't lose its flammable tendency over time. Very hard on chainsaw chain. Use an old one.

[Dean186]

Fat wood, pitch wood, resin wood ...   (corrected the word sap for resin via edit)

On our property and in the national forest behind our house it is everywhere.  I collect it by the wheel barrows.

The amount of resin / pitch will vary and it is predominantly found at the base and upper roots of the tree (the stump).

Good question on will it decay.  It doesn't seem to, I know that I have found stumps that were left by loggers back in 1930s and it is still good stuff. 

I will keep looking at this post to learn what creates a good resin wood stump.  Just guessing, but must be the time of year the tree was cut.  Some stumps just rot and nothing left after 10 plus years and other stumps, the heart of the stump, is all resin, heavy and remains for a very long time.

Cutting resin wood will dull a chain pretty fast.  I make short blocks and give to my brother to split and use in his inside fireplace.  They sell the stuff at one of the big box stores here and also in various magazines.  The box is labeled "Fat Wood".

The advice above about using it cautiously and in small amounts in a conventional fireplace is good advice.  However, in my OWB I can put a 10 lb  chunk in without the reaction chamber temperature getting much above a normal temperature and never above 1,300 degrees.  I found that interesting. 

It is snowing outside now, but maybe sometime I will get a photo of my stack of fat wood.  I keep a 33 gallon trash can full of the stuff beside the stove.

[Dean186]

I also wanted to add and follow-up with a question.

Many times I will find heartwood in the forest from a tree that had fallen many years ago.  The sap wood will have all rotted away and nothing left but the heart wood.  It is my hardwood if you will.   The heart wood is not filled with resin, it is just heart wood.  Only rarely do I found the resin running up the heart wood more than 3 feet.  I find less resin further up the tree.  The resin soaked wood smells very nice and is sometimes sticky.  Some stumps are so heavy it takes two to load it into the wheel barrow and push it home.

Most of the fat wood I find are from stumps loggers left some 80 years ago.  Question is: Why do some stumps just rot and others fill with rich resin/pitch?

[Buck]

Never have really questioned it Dean. I just accepted it. I find more of it in Longleaf pine stands than anywhere else around here. I like to find the whole trees standing or not and process them. Never have sold any.

[beenthere]

Dean
From your use of the term "sap" wood, that usually means the outer wood, as in sap wood versus the inner wood as heart wood.
Can get confusing if referring to the resinous (pitch) wood in the heartwood as "sap". It really is resin.

I've understood that "lighter" wood is usually meaning southern pine related. Not so much the western pines, but maybe this is now a marketing thing.

;)

[Dean186]

Beenthere, Thanks for the additional information.  I used the word "sap" interchangeable in my above post to mean the outer part of the tree and I also was referring to the pitch as sap.   This was incorrect and I edited the above posts to prevent confusion.  Thanks

Good point on the use of the word "lighter" wood.  I have never heard the term used here in the west.

[Lambee10]

I have a crowd of it around my place also.  We always called it lighter wood because it really helps get a cold stove going.

Now, I have cut it into small pieces and put a bundle together with a bow around it and sold it to city folks so they can get thier fireplaces started.  LL Bean makes a killing on that stuff and we keep it wheel barrows and barrels :D :D

[Kaltjiil]

Fat wood.
This is what I remember being told by the old folks in my family and what I picked up last year in a similar Swedish type of forum.
What it is: basically resinous wood (fur) containing increased levels of Pinosylvin and "Dehydroabietinsyra" (alas no clue to it's English name) that help protect the tree from fungal infection.
Uses: Historically in Scandinavia it was used for kindling and making durable and weather resistant logs for log cabins. There were probably more uses to which I'm today unfortunately completely ignorant.

How to create it: My grandfather and great grandfather both used the method "randbarkning" in which you shave strands (50-60 inches) of bark of the furs perpendicular to the ground during late spring (for us that means late may). This will increase the amount of resin and the other acid which I do not now the name of. These stripes are shaved from the ground to a height of 7-8 meters (about the same in yards). The procedure is done during this time because the bark comes of most easily then. (Follow http://www.fetvedensvanner.com/randbarkning.htm link for pictures and more info on fat wood use google translate if needed.)
After the "randbarkning" you leave the trees for 3-5 years (yes most of them survives 75-80% from what I remember) before harvesting them during the winter (when they contain the least amount of water).
After completing these few steps you saw the lumber to the desired width and let it air-dry for another two or three years.

Hopefully this jumbled mess of a text was to some help for you good folks out there.

/William

[SwampDonkey]

All I use is white cedar for kindling. It's very dry stuff, but lights as quick as newspaper if you split it fine. The stuff will snap crackle and pop and burn very rapidly.  No scarcity of it in these parts.

[ely]

if you leave a pine tree in the woods until it rots the whole core will turn to fat wood. at least thats what i see around here. tougher to split up around the limbs though.

[two tired]

lighter pine, rich lighter, pitch pine, will burn very hot and will cause a lot of cresote in the stove pipes, it will start a fire very quick. the rosine [ spelling ? ] was drawn out of the wood with heat and used to seal cracks and joints in ships and boats, along with many other uses. terpentine was made from rich lighter pine stumps, i think mostly long leaf and yellow pine stumps. there was a lot of other uses also, oldtimers would also us it for med. also. you could put to much in the tin heaters and turn it cherry red along with the stovepipe all the way to the top, dont ask how i know that.

[two tired]

also where the limbs was after the sapwood rots you would have pinenots, the large pinenot was called a rose cone in this neck of the woods, i guess because it looks like  the cone of a rooster.

[WDH]

Pines have structures called resin canals.  These resin canals are essentially tubes that run from the core of the tree radially out to the bark.  These canals are filled with the sticky resin that we sawyers are all too familiar with.  The tree uses this system to defend itself against injury.  When the outer skin of the tree, the bark, is damaged exposing the cambium and the wood, the tree shunts resin along these canals to coat the injury and isolate it. 

Also, this resin system is how pine trees protect themselves against bark beetles.  When they bore into the bark to the cambium, the tree responds with copious amounts of this resin, commonly called pitch.  You can see this accumulation of pitch on the bark of a tree attacked by bark beetles.  They are called pitch tubes, and are a telltale sign of bark beetle attack.  If only a few beetles attack a tree, as is usually normal, the tree is generally successful in repelling the attack via the resin canal system.  However, when beetle populations explode cyclically, the beetles overwhelm the tree's resin defense which leads to death of the tree.

As a tree ages, it shunts excess resin to the heartwood.  In some cases, this resin "dumping" is such that heartwood becomes totally soaked with the excess resin.  Maybe these trees are "super resin producers".  In any case, some trees are more prone to store this resin in the heartwood than others.  Also, age has an important effect.  There must be heartwood before it can become resin soaked, so the tree has to have reached a ripe old age where there has been a lot of heartwood formation.  As a tree gets older and larger, the tree uses the heartwood to store extractives and resin since the cells in the heartwood (longitudinal tracheids) no longer function in transporting water to the crown.  The functioning water transporting cells are in the sapwood.  So, since this heartwood is not functional any longer, it becomes the dumping ground for resin and other stuff.

And, we get lighter wood.

[Dean186]

Very informative WDH!  Your explanation is so much more useful than anything I was able to locate.

Having seen a lot of beetle killed trees here in Colorado, you have describe that very well too.

Thanks again for taking the time to explain.

[WDH]

Not all softwoods have resin canals.  Spruce does.  Douglas fir does.  The true firs and hemlock do not.  The presence or absence of these canals on the end grain of softwoods is a wood ID feature.

[SwampDonkey]

The resin in balsam is in just under the bark (pitch blisters) and in the cones. However, they do arise in species like true firs and hemlocks as a result of injury. This is termed traumatic resin canals. Anyplace there is tissue separation becomes a site for traumatic resin canals in those softwoods and they are indistinguishable from true resin canals in their structure.

[thecfarm]

Interesting reading. I must live to far north for lighter wood. Or I don't have any on my land is what I mean.

[two tired]

this forum is filled with a wealth of knolage, thanks wdh for the explanation. the pinenots are getting harder to find around here after the plantations were thined, the loggers would take the lighter pine home with them.

[Dean186]

Kaltjiil,

I also wanted to acknowledge and thank you for the information that you provided.  I just now had the chance to check out the link you provided.  I looked at the photos of "randbarkning".  It reminded me of what the bull elk do to the trees around here, although on smaller trees.  It is natures way of "randbarking" I suppose.

Dean

[whiskers]

This stump is from the 20s when pine sap was collected for distilling gum turpentine.
Should last another century...