This is the second year that I've used "Fatwood" Fire Starters from Menard's. They work great, but I'm really curious what kind of wood they are. They state on the package that it's a naturally highly resinous tree. It seems to me it has to be some sort of an exotic/tropical tree, because I can't think of a tree in North America that is anything like this (of course I don't know much!). Anybody know what species these puppies are made from? I'd hate to see a forest fire of those! Part of me wonders if they soak them in something before packaging, but they state that it's 100% natural. I guess if you soaked them in lard, that'd be 100% natural too, and they'd light up real nice. ;)
Does someone know what that wood is most likely to be?
Down South, we call it fat lighter. It is basically a pine stump. The resins rise and set in the wood during the decay process. Not all pines produce lighter.
Help me out guys, I know what it is, but not all the fine details. I hope this is close.
Stew
Your right Stew ................ fat lighter, fat lighterd, lighter knot. There is a little bit up north in injured pine trees. I've heard northerners call it pitch wood.
We get pitchy Douglas fir that we use,same as fat lighter but we call it nookie wood.
It's really common in an old wind shook tree.
Most of the fat lighter found down in the south comes from old growth longleaf pines. These trees grew very slow therefore having a tight ring pattern. Extremely heavy dense logs with a large amount of resin in the tree. These trees would be slashed and the resin collected to make turpentine.
In the area of Alabama where I live a generations owned timber company bought up large amounts of land in 3 or 4 counties in the late 1800's and early 1900's. They started extensively cutting these old growth trees for lumber and from what I've been told alot was shipped up north for building materials. They finished cutting all the mature timber in the 1930's and then the mill burnt down. Huummmnnn? Lot of speculation there in local folklore. Anyway they are still in business producing SYP lumber and also plywood. I sawed a couple of pines for flooring on a shed I'm building that were victims of Hurricane Ivan last year and they had alot of litered wood in them. Very heavy and hard to plane due to amount of resin. Makes beautiful floors though. My father was looking at it and we were talking about the density of this tree, between 80 to 100 rings on a 22" sixteen foot log, and he mentioned that he had spoken with a forester from this company and he told my father that in ten years they will have harvested all their mature second growth trees. They are now doing a lot of thinning on pine plantations. I'm afraid one day all you will be able to buy are plastic 2 X 4's or ones made from sawdust.
Anyway to stop rambling, these trees due to high resin content and very little sapwood when they would die due to natural causes or the trimmings left from logging would not rot, but dry i guess you could say into what we call fat litard. There are whole houses built of this stuff that is very old and all the lumber has turned into this stuff. You are right about its burning properties, It will burn fiercely and prodce heavy black smoke. If one of these old houses catch on fire they can hardly be saved. I start all my fires with it and where you have to buy it, I have collected 3 or 4 truck loads of this stuff over the years. I have a huge pile of it. It also has a wonderful smell to me. I can't help but take a sniff when I split some. I wish I had a digital camera so I could post some pics for you. Do a search on here. There have been several discussions on it. Hope I haven't rambled too much and if you have anymore questions, post back and maybe I can help answer them. Funny when I was thinking of a login name I almost used Litard Hound because of my love to collect this stuff from the woods. Who knows I may change it yet. :D :D :)
Some folks out here, Paul, us to call it "trading stock". ;D
Thanks for the info guys--I don't know those were domestic products. Glad to hear they're homegrown! And man...they work GREAT!
There's a huge lightered snag on my neighor's place, right by the road. I'll see if I can get a pic, along with some more average lightered stumps. It's pretty common stuff around here.
Yep, a gen-u-ine southern product. Like said most comes from longleaf pine stumps logs. The high resin content of the longleaf collects in the stump and is highly flamible when dried out. Whole trees can turn to lighter when the tree dies the resin collects in the wood and sap will fall or collect in the lower stump making it the best part. this resin is highly rot resistand so you can still se lighter sumps/ logs / cat faces that were cut 20+ years ago. The sapwood rots leaving the good pine smell don was talking about. I to love the smell of it, a think all forester from the south do. You can get it from shortleaf,virginia and loblolly if it is in a slow grown tree, but not near as big of a quantitly
I find it interesting that there is such a high resin content in these old stumps. The fatwood starters I have honestly look like they were dipped in something, and I think it's very cool that it's all natural. What I wonder--what purpose does that resin have in a live tree? Is the resin distributed evenly throughout the living tree, or does the resin result from natural degrading of a tree after it has been cut? ??? :P I find it all pretty fascinating...
It is not resin, but pine rosin.
resin and rosin are interchangeable...you say Tomatoes, I say Tomahtoes, you say rosin, I say resin, you say goat meat, I say TATERS! ;)
Something else that burns fiercely is the dry pine cones off our pine trees especially longleaf cones. I guess they even have a small amount of resin,rosin in them too. They just lack staying power. to restate a phrase I heard from a fella once:::: They are just a flash in the pan. :D :D :D :) :)
The high resin content is a defense system of the tree as well as other things. The resing will "pitch" out beetles like southern pine beetle when they attack. A Longleaf pine is very resistant to pine beetle because of this high resin content. It also serves to protect the tree from wounds. The wound will flow heavily and cover the impacted area and harden over forming a protective coating. Longleaf evolved in a fire dependant ecosystem, and this high resin content will actually put out a fire that is burning an old wound on a trunk. The resin will burn (in the liquid state) but it will actually flow out of the tree so quick(you can see it flowing) that the fire may burn out before extensive damage is done to the tree. This high resin content is why that it was chosen as a tree of choice (along with slash pine) as a tree to run naval stores operations on. Navel sores is gum turpintine/ gum rosin/ turpintining etc. The collected the resin and then boiled it down to make turpintine and other things.
As mentioned pine cones burn well because of their resin content but not as long because they are not as dense as the heartwood or a longleaf (verydense) do not know the SG of hand if any body has their wood properties book handy. But if i dont have lighter which i dont at this time i will use several loblolly cones, they bun very intensively for about 30 sec. no longleafs around my house now, as i am back at school and do not have 50000 acres of longleaf woods at my disposal.
-nate
Hey there Nate, looks like you're gonna be useful around here. ;D
Thanks for the information...looks like you got a good education at Clemson--congrats on being in "the real world" for a year. Do you have a job as a forester currently?
i did the real worl thing for a little over a year then decided to go back to school. I'm currently getting my Masters in forestry. So no, i am a full time grad assistant though(i could make more at wal-mart than i make now!).
You may make more at Wall-Mart but you'll be worth more to us and the world doing what you are doing. :)
We need some level headed "real world" foresters. You guys need to bunch up and holler now and again so that we can keep track of you. :D
In these parts every one just calls them pine knots and pine stumps ,gotta love that smell my wife thinks it is as handy as apocket on a shirt for starting a fire ,I could proubably fill a fleet of semis w/all the stumps and snags that lay around this part of the country over the years people have picked up alot of the easy to get ones along the roads,.
Ihave even found whole complete trees that had been cut down and cut into log length ,know telling who old they were the area didnt have any roads that were drivable ,and the timber around them was old growth oak the conservation said it was second growth timber 80plus years. so I imagine that the pine was cut somwhere around the same time that the first stand of timber was.
HILLBILLY
As promised, here are some pics of a couple of lightered snags around here. This first one has some real stories to tell. I don't know how long it has been deceased, but it hasn't changed much in the 12 years I've been here, except for a few missing chunks around the bottom where the treasure hunters have taken a toll. The base is well over 24 inches across. I'm not sure how to figure the diameter of a triangle, though. :D :D
This is a shot of the whole thing.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag01.jpg)
Here's what remains of the butt. Note the ax and chainsaw marks. The 6x6 fence wire gives a bit of perspective for size. I find the twisted grain pattern interesting, too. I wonder what the wood woulda looked like, if you could get it to dry flat. ???
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag02.jpg)
There is an interesting formation on what is left of a branch up at the top. All the sap wood is long since gone, but I wonder what this branch might have looked like. It is about 45-50 feet up.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag05.jpg)
Here's another shot of the same branch. It is a little clearer, but the tree in the background makes it harder to see.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag03.jpg)
Ah yes, the vertical piece would be the outer edge of the tree. For some reason this piece didn't rot with the rest of the sap wood.
You can get an idea how big around that tree really was based on that one branch.
When you hike in the dunes you find trees like that all the time. They aren't lightered I don't think, but look the same.
Years ago I found and hauled home (it was in a neighbors woods) a hollow log about 36" in dia.
There was a couple inches of wood around the outside left, but it was really punky(didn't find that out until the log thawed out ::) ).
The cool part was looking through the center of the log at all the reamaining knots that were sticking inward.
;D
Here's a few shots of one that is standing in my front yard. We just ain't had the heart to cut it down. It was recently dead, maybe a year, before we found this place in 1993. It still had most of its bark, and the limbs were slowly falling away. Now, there are a few chunks of rotted sapwood still clinging to the heart, which is about 6" diameter.
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag04.jpg)
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag06.jpg)
The second pic shows some branches that have gone to lightered. some are no bigger around than your thumb, but are several feet long. Left undisturbed, they'll be there for many years.
You're probably right about that, Furb. Here's one of those knots from inside a lightning struck tree. This stump is also in my yard, and I was watching as the lightning hit. MAN what a shot!! :o :o There was kinda a little story about that. It was in '95 and we hadn't moved out here yet. We were having a little picnic under a small pecan tree with my parents. We heard a little rumble in the distance, and my Mom suggested we get out from under the tree. I said, "Ma, it ain't gonna hit this little squatty tree. If it hits, it will get that real tall pine over there. Just as I pointed at the tree, the lightning hit it. It scattered long, thin strips of wood fiber all around the area, and the smell of pine sap was instantly apparent, even though we were 75 yards away. It took my Ma 3 days to get her color back! :D :D :D
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/10074/fatsnag08.jpg)
This shard was from a branch that had been self-pruned early in the tree's life. It was about 2 feet from the ground, and near the pith. There are several of them visible in the rotting stump. You also find these on the side of the lightered snags.
It looks kind of like a piece of back bone.
QuoteThis high resin content is why that it was chosen as a tree of choice (along with slash pine) as a tree to run naval stores operations on. Navel sores is gum turpintine/ gum rosin/ turpintining etc. The collected the resin and then boiled it down to make turpintine and other things.
I've seen "turpentine" listed as occupation in some old family papers from eastern NC. It was a pretty large business at one time.
I was looking up something this morning and came across this article. Parts of it kind of pertain to this thread, alot of it doesn't, but its interesting reading anyway :);
http://www.wdsc.caf.wvu.edu/otherwebs/wdsc_100lec07notes.htm
Interesting link, Don. I read the whole thing, then bookmarked it for a future re-read. :)
I well remember the turpentine industry around these parts. The last vestige of it that I saw was at Woodville, just south of Tallahassee. There was a small plantation there, where an old black man had a couple of hundred trees that he was working. You could see the barrels of sap sitting out there, and he had an old, green Chevrolet pickup he would haul a few barrels in. I don't know where he was selling it, but he apparently had a market. This was in the mid-eighties, back in the last century. :o I'm thinking of making a little run down there to see if there is any evidence of it left. You can bet I'll have the camera with me. ;D
Dang,
I've seen knots like that on old rotted pines that grew up threw barbed wire. rest of the tree rotted and left pieces like that on the barbed wire.
Turpentinning, vey good book, called treasures of the longleaf forests of something to that effect, not sure about the aurthor, so mabe not any help there.
i have seen many old turpentine "cat faces" that have turned to lighter stumps still standing in the longleaf woods at my previous occupation as well as many live trees that were worked at one time. Turpentining is almost a lost art and a huge part of the deep souths forest history. Georgia was a hot bed for this practice.
-nate
The good Lord sure does work in strange ways now don't he. ::)
Why in da heck do yer think he made da best stuff fer light'n fires an den stuck way down south where dey don't need it anyways? ::)
Of course we needed em. Had to have a fire to cook our corn pone, and heat up our coffee and cook our catfish and hushpuppies and of course.....cook up our g r i t s .......back in the day of course......... 8) 8)
Shore do need it is right! ...................... Near bout freezed my tater off this morning it was so cold. If we didn't have a lighter knot to start up with, we couldn't get going to school and work very fast. 45 degrees ain't no fun first thing in the mornin'!
Quote from: woodbowl on December 14, 2005, 07:10:07 PM
........... 45 degrees ain't no fun first thing in the mornin'!
That's pretty cool for the bedroom temp first thing in the mornin, I agree, and "that's a fact" (famous quote there). We try to keep the bedroom temp above 60° in the winter here.
Ya Beenthere,
We have ice on the insides of the bedroom windows at night up Nort. :D 45 sounds right for sleepin. ::)
Yep, 45's good fer sleepin', but it ain't worth a hoot fer wakin' up! >:(
Tell y'all what! I'll whackity-whack a whack of lightered splinters and ship'em to youses(that's Yankee for "y'all") for 5% less than Menards sell's them for. How's that for the spirit of brotherhood and fair trade? Merry Christmas to all of youses!
Quote from: DanG on December 15, 2005, 08:04:35 PM
Yep, 45's good fer sleepin', but it ain't worth a hoot fer wakin' up! >:(
Tell y'all what! I'll whackity-whack a whack of lightered splinters and ship'em to youses(that's Yankee for "y'all") for 5% less than Menards sell's them for. How's that for the spirit of brotherhood and fair trade? Merry Christmas to all of youses!
Hey...now that sounds like a DanG good deal! ;D 8) Sign me up... ;)
Counter offer.......
How's abouts I bring a whack of Maple syrup and old Cheddar Cheese down ina spring an we trade straight up instead.
Ya jus gotta promise not ta pour da syrup, er grate da cheese over no grItz's .......... :D
Quote from: Murf on December 16, 2005, 11:36:50 AM
Counter offer.......
How's abouts I bring a whack of Maple syrup and old Cheddar Cheese down ina spring an we trade straight up instead.
Bring that whack of syrup and cheese on down with you on the way to Lakeland this April Murf. Me and DanG will be roundin' you up some lighter knots. Are you planning to go to Sun-n-fun this time?
Brang it on, Murf! 8) 8) I likes cheddar cheese, but I takes my Gritses straight, 'cept for a little salt and butter. I kin probbly trade the maple surple for somethin'. We get our syrup from sugar cane. I can probbly git ya a bottle of it. ;D
Quote from: DanG on December 16, 2005, 09:34:53 PM
I kin probbly trade the maple surple for somethin'. We get our syrup from sugar cane.
DanG, I need to swap you out of that bottle of maple syrup! I've got a pair of socks that I've only worn for 2 years I'll trade you for it. I'll let you know as soon as I find them. If I don't find but one by then, I'll settle for a half a bottle.
just picked up about 100lbs of the stuff out of the woods friday at work. Not the good longleaf stuff but was from rotted old growth shortleaf or lobblolly.
Now i have to cut it into short lengths (7 ft lengths right now) split and you have instant fire starters for free not the $30 for 10lbs catalog price. Hey i ought to supplement my grad schol stipend by selling lighter wood. Any one interested? :)
Tried it on Ebay, and couldn't give it away ???
good to know.
I have seen longleaf pine cones for sale on ebay about $10 for 2 dozen i beleive. I thought if they sold i would sell them to but seemed like no one was bidding on them.
oh well another idea shot down.
-Nate
Nate, you could probably develop a market, but selling lightered sticks is an awful slow way to get rich. Some of the country stores around here, and even the supermarkets will buy a few bundles, but you'd be hard pressed to get your gas money back that way. You might be best off to put an ad in one of the local free ad papers and sell it in bulk if you have a good supply.